Course Syllabus for IRLS520 Ethics for Information Professionals
- Course Name, Number, and Prerequisites
- Course Description
- Course Objectives
- Required Course Materials
- Course Requirements
- Course Policies
- Grading
- Contacting the Instructor
Spring 2005 Instructor: Martin Frické
COURSE NAME, NUMBER, AND PREREQUISITES
Ethics for Information ProfessionalsIRLS520 Section 001
There are no course prerequisites.
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COURSE DESCRIPTION
"Blended instructional course on Information Ethics." (3 credit hours)
General overview
Ethics for information professionals is a recent and rapidly expanding field of study. Fortunately it does not require completely new techniques for the solution of problems in its domain. Ethics, in general, has been studied for thousands of years, and it has developed techniques appropriate for the study of ethical problems.
Ethics is concerned with notions like right and wrong, good and bad, duties, virtues, and rights and responsibilities. One central area of ethics, normative ethics, studies which particular actions, for example, hanging murderers or censoring dangerous or pornographic books, are right or wrong. Normative ethics is a practical study: it concerns the morally good life, how to live well.
Information ethics is a sub-category of normative ethics which addresses practical ethical problems connected with information. Several are prominent, including: free speech, censorship, access to information, intellectual property, fair use, privacy, and workplace issues.
Many organizations for Information
Professionals publish codes
of ethics. As examples, there is the American Library Association's Code of Ethics, American
Society for Information Science Professional Guidelines, and there
is the IEEE-CS/ACM Software
Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice. However,
while such codes give us a set of principles to work with, they do not
tell us how we are to go about implementing these ideals in our
everyday practice. Such codes often do not clearly define the
notoriously complex ethical concepts which they use. The ALA code, for
example, uses such terms as : equity, fairness, freedom, rights, public
interest, and yet it leaves us with a number of questions: What
constitutes an 'equitable' distribution? Under what conditions is
something someone's 'property'? How do we show respect for a 'right'?
Also such codes do not tell us what to do when (inevitably) various
rights and interests conflict. So, for example, the ALA code does not
tell us how to answer such questions as: How do we balance equity of
access with protecting intellectual property rights? What if the
intellectual freedom of one person creates a hostile atmosphere for
others? What if our personal convictions conflict with the 'interests
of the institution' which we serve? Should we have no politics no
morals? In brief, a course that simply
helped you learn how to implement a particular code of ethics, perhaps
provided by a professional body you belonged to, would have
limitations. We want to go further.
Our course will consider what ethical ideals should regulate the behavior of information professionals. Through our discussion of this question we will become better able to understand the rationale for the codes of ethics, and know how to revise them over time to keep pace with this rapidly changing field, and/or to develop specific ethical codes for our particular work environments.
How this course will be taught
This is a 'blended' course combining
3 week-end meetings in Phoenix with online course support and
management.
The class will meet Jan 22-23, Feb
5-6, and March 5-6, Saturdays and Sundays 9am-5pm. (I am not
sure, today Dec 2, where the class will meet, but I suspect it will be
at the Burton Barr Phoenix Public library (our intended hours do not
synchronize with the hours they are open, so there are issues to be
resolved).)
There will be online support provided
by a d2l (desire to learn) course on the
Web. There will be notes, readings,
discussion groups, and (of course) assignments. Enrolled students will
be given accounts early in January.
The online interactions will be asynchronous. That is, students can log on whenever they wish, and read material and post replies on timetables that suits their individual needs. A student will typically need to log on briefly about 5 times a week. (An analog here is email-- most folk check their email at least five times a week.)
During the week-end meetings, students will occasionally be placed in groups and there may be some assessed groupwork.
d2l (desire to learn) is used as the instructional and course management environment. Students who enrol in the course will be given an account. They will be able to log in to their account via the Learning Technologies Center E-Learning Portal. d2l has facilities for internal email, and this will be one way to contact the Instructor or the Graduate Assistant Teacher (GAT).
Students are expected to log on reasonably regularly, to read and study the Notes and references, to participate in the online discussions, to interact by email (and other means) with their fellow students, to write (or otherwise answer) the assignments, to download and upload files (this will be taught), and to carry out various other activities. It is hard to anticipate accurately how much time all these course related activities will take in total (and such a figure would vary from student to student and from week to week), but one hour a week is a rough order of magnitude estimate.
The course will start in earnest a few days after the start of the semester. The d2l software can detect when students log on, and when most of the students have shown that the are present by logging on, the Instructor will get the course underway.
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COURSE OBJECTIVES
By the completion of this course, you will:- know the basics of ethical theory and its application to problems in information access and dissemination
- know many of the information laws and practices both in the
United States and Internationally
- be able to apply ethical codes in concrete case
- be able to develop your own personal, professional, or
institutional code of information ethics.
- have experienced live debate and discussion on controversial
and unresolved issues in information ethics
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REQUIRED COURSE MATERIALS
Students need online access, either by way of their own computers
and Internet connection or by public access means (such as those
provided in Public Libraries or in on campus labs).
There is no set text for the course.
There are online materials available either directly on the Web or
through password protected
electronic reserves at the library (http://eres.library.arizona.edu
with password xxx)
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COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Unsure of this at present,
December 2nd
The course requirements are
• quizzes
• group coursework
• single author coursework
• final paper
There will be five very brief quizzes.
The group coursework requirement will be one small project undertaken
by you working in teams. Each project will consider an issue, say
Freedom of Information, and research or devise arguments in favor of a
position regarding that issue. Then the resulting material will be
delivered in a form that the whole class can consider and discuss (for
example, as an HTML web page).
The single author coursework requirement will be one paper of about 4
pages.
The final examination will be a take-home exam of three hours duration.
It will be distributed electronically about Wednesday May xxx has
to be returned by Wednesday May xxx
The quizzes will count for 25% of the final grade, the single author
coursework 25% of the final grade, the group author coursework 25%, and
the final paper for 25% of the grade.