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Last revised 5/31/05 being revised now

Course Syllabus for IRLS520 Ethics for Information Professionals

Link to Course Outline

Summer 2005 Instructor: Martin Frické

Image of Martin Frické


COURSE NAME, NUMBER, AND PREREQUISITES

Ethics for Information Professionals

IRLS520 Section 001

There are no course prerequisites.
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COURSE DESCRIPTION

"Online 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 an online course taught virtually at a distance using a d2l (desire to learn) course on the Web. Enrolled students will be given accounts early in June.

The course is conceived of as discussions on 20 (or so) topics. A lecture course in the University of Arizona amounts to 37 1/2 hours of instruction spread through a semester (or, in this case, the summer). Our 'discussions' will be the virtual counterpart of 30 (or so) one and a quarter hour lectures, delivered at a rate of three a week. There will be notes, readings, discussion groups, chat, and (of course) assignments.

The course has a start date and an end date, and the class as a whole will move through the course together The primary means of introducing the scholarly material will be Notes. These are going to be posted one at a time steadily through the session, keeping the whole class moving forward through the material. There are 20 plus sets of Notes, and these normally will be delivered at a rate of 3 a week (usually put up on Monday, Wednesday, and a Friday). There will be assignments, with due dates, and formal discussions, and these will serve to check progress. There also will be readings or references to be followed up on the Web.

Almost all 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 about 5 times a week. (An analog here is email-- most folk check their email at least five times a week.)

The students will also be placed in groups of about 4 students and there will be some 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 seven hours a week is a rough order of magnitude estimate.

The course will start in earnest a few days after the start of the first summer session. 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:
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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

The course requirements are

There will be five brief quizzes.

The group coursework requirement will be one small task undertaken by you working in teams.

The single author coursework requirement will be two papers of about 4 pages.

The final examination will be a take-home exam of two hours duration. It will be distributed electronically about the beginning of August and has to be returned by Sunday August 7th

The quizzes will count for 20% of the final grade, the groupwork 20%, the single author coursework 40% of the final grade (20% for each paper), and the final paper for 20% of the grade.

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COURSE POLICIES

Academic Code of Integrity

Students are expected to abide by The University of Arizona Code of Academic Integrity. 'The guiding principle of academic integrity is that a student's submitted work must be the student's own.' If you have any questions regarding what is acceptable practice under this Code, please ask an instructor.

Accommodating Disabilities

Any person in this course with disabilities should contact the Instructor who will discuss with them what needs to be done to open the way to a full and successful educational experience.

Assignment Policies

Incompletes

The 1997-8 University of Arizona General Academic Manual, p.23 reads

The grade of I may be awarded only at the end of a semester, when all but a minor portion of the course work has been satisfactorily completed. The grade of I is not to be awarded when the student is expected to repeat the course; in such a case the grade of E must be assigned. Students should make arrangements with the instructor to receive an incompete grade before the end of the semester ...

If the incomplete is not removed by the instructor within one year the I grade will revert to a failing grade.

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GRADING

The following scales will be used

Internal

For Graduate School

90-100%

A

70-90%

B

below 70%

C

General grading criteria: For ordinary papers, and unless specified otherwise, you should write about the equivalent of four pages of ordinary text. Grammar, style, or spelling are not central-- provided the paper is understandable and the faults are not so severe as to be a distraction. Then, important grading criteria include:-

How to find out your grades: d2l has the means to display grades.

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CONTACTING ME

Please raise queries by email. When the course is up and running, and you are a registered student, use the course's internal email (this is best for me as it keeps material related to this course in one place). Failing that, use ordinary email to mfricke(AT)u.arizona.edu . 

There will be an online office hour, during which I will be available in a Chat room. This will be at a time to suit you students, but it may well be an evening at 7pm MST.

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