SENG4921: Professional Issues and Ethics
Student Seminars
Student seminars will take place in week 11, 12 & 13.
Activity description
Students form groups of 4 or 5 members. Each group will conduct a 50 minute seminar. For each student run seminar the student group is responsible for:
| - | Recommended preparatory reading material |
| - | Presentation of the topic to the seminar class |
| - | Guided discussion of the material with the class |
Reading material
Seminars should have prescribed preparatory reading material. The reading material should not take more than an hour to study. The seminar topic and reading material should be displayed on the class forum. Groups can follow some of the recommended readings from the course web-site, or locate it via other sources.
Material not available online, can be distributed in class the week before, distributed via email or may be sent to the course admin for posting in our papers database.
Presentation
The presentation may take a variety of formats. Students are encouraged to be creative. In previous years students have used:
| - | videos |
| - | multimedia presentations |
| - | panel shows |
| - | current affairs programs with a panel |
| - | courtroom scenes |
Data projection facilities will be provided. Any other special equipment, such as video equipment, will have to be organised prior to the seminar. Please contact your facilitator/LIC if you need assistance.
Discussion
Following the presentation, the presenting team should facilitate a discussion of the issues raised in the reading material and presentation. The discussion should involve all members of the audience; deal with the theoretical aspects of the issues and; should be run in an academic manner.
Where the presentations are in a highly interactive format, the presentation and discussion components may be combined.
It is important that the discussion fills out the entire allotted time.
*
The primary purpose of the student run seminars is to address ethical and professional issues that are of particular concern to students. Topics are chosen by students. The only restriction is that the issue must potentially impact all software engineers.
The following is a set of example pointers for sources of seminar topics:
| - | Software disasters | (e.g. software failure, professional liability, software project management, software in the media) |
| - | IT Media | (e.g. open source software, outsourcing, security) |
| - | Personal experience | (e.g. university IT courses, chatrooms) |
| - | General interest | (e.g. spam, viruses, games) |
| - | Social issues with ethical implications | (e.g. censorship, pornography, DNA and human genome issues) |
| - | Legal/political issues | (e.g. anti-terrorism laws, asylum) |
| - | IP | (copyright, patents, DRM) |
Assessment
Both the presenting team and audience members will be assessed. The following table shows how marks are distributed between presenting team components and audience components.
Component | Assessed | Mode | Assessed by | Mark |
Material | Presenters | Team | Class/Facilitator | 3% |
Presentation | Presenters | Team | Class/Facilitator | 5% |
Discussion | Presenters | Team | Class/Facilitator | 5% |
Discussion | Presenters | Individual | Class/Facilitator | 3% |
Attendance | Audience | Individual | Facilitator | 2% |
Participation | Audience | Individual | Facilitator | 2% |
Total |
|
|
| 20% |
A marking guide can be found here. This will be updated.