UNSW Engineering
CSE Computer Science and Engineering

SENG4921 Professional Issues and Ethics


Activity description

Students form groups of 3 or 4 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.

*

Seminar topics

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.