Abstract
Since their inception some 25 years ago, computers have become an all pervasive influence in society. Their impact has been felt not only in the sciences and social sciences, but in almost all fields of endeavor where there is a significant amount of information to be taken, stored and manipulated. Their use in the many spheres of business activity has contributed to the creation of a huge computer industry. In recognition of the immense social influences of computers and the concurrent influence of the technocrats who “control” the machines, computer science departments have recently tried to respond to the challenge by giving their students an awareness of these forces. Their response has taken basically 2 forms. The first approach has been to incorporate within existing courses a measure of social awareness and responsibility. This has been accomplished by examining, where appropriate case situations of computer related developments and trying to assess their implications in the social context. Experiments of this type have been reported by [NEI72]. The second approach has been to create a new course, often called Computers and Society, whose main goal is to expose the student to at least a subset of the relevant issues connected with computers. Though called by the same name, these courses often vary widely, and several proposals which describe various formats have appeared in the literature e.g. see [HOR72] and [LEE71]. This paper deals with a variation on this second approach.
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- 2 Nielsen, Norman R., "Social Responsibility and Computer Education", SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol.4, No. 1, March, 1972, pp. 90-96. Google Scholar
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- 5 Mosmann, C., "Computer Science for the Anti-Computer Non-Scientist", EDUCOM Bulletin, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall 1972, Princeton, N.J., pp. 24-26.Google Scholar
Index Terms
Computers and society: An interdisciplinary approach
Recommendations
Computers and society: An interdisciplinary approach
SIGCSE '73: Proceedings of the third SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science educationSince their inception some 25 years ago, computers have become an all pervasive influence in society. Their impact has been felt not only in the sciences and social sciences, but in almost all fields of endeavor where there is a significant amount of ...
Computers in society—a course description, purpose and rationale
SIGCSE '72: Proceedings of the second SIGCSE technical symposium on Education in computer scienceIrrespective of one's personal position on the role of computers in society, it is indeed desirable that all college graduates in the coming years have a realistic even though minimal understanding of how computers work and how they may be directed to ...
Computers and society: a proposed course for computer scientists
The purpose of this paper is to describe a course concerned with both the effects of computers on society and the responsibilities of computer scientists to society. The impact of computers is divided into five components: political, economic, cultural, ...






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