A Faculty Development Workshop for Computer Science & Computer Engineering Undergraduate Faculty

When: February 23-27, 2005

Where: San Diego, California

What: This information assurance and security faculty institute will address the relationship among technical capabilities and sociological, ethical, linguistic, and communication issues. In this faculty institute, you will engage in the content as a learner and as a teacher. You will explore these issues in detail as a learner. As a teacher, you will leave with materials that you can use in your undergraduate and graduate computer science and computer engineering courses.

Specific advances in computing technology, e.g., data mining and the release of faulty software - and ways to protect oneself from the existing menaces and to anticipate new ones--will be examined in a unique multidisciplinary environment, focusing on such underexplored and underappreciated non-technical aspects of information security as:
  • Security and control, power relationships, and security as metacommunication
  • Language and lying, abuse of language, and language as a coding/decoding system
  • The impact of technology on social relations and personal identity, and technology and risk/risk assessment.

Come expecting an educational and productive experience. Get the unexpected. Leave with materials and plans for introducing these topics into your curriculum.

Participation is limited to 35, selected competitively. Participants will be awarded a $2,000 stipend to offset time and travel expenses.

A National Science Foundation Sponsored Project

Click here to download the application form (pdf)

Overview
This is a one year-institute. Participation will include readings before the workshop, participation in the 4-day workshop, and 4 half-day sessions facilitated at a distance. No further travel is required after the 4-day workshop. Over the course of the year, you will be engaged as both a learner and a teacher. As a learner, you will examine relationships among technical capabilities of information technology and sociology, ethics, linguistics, and communications. As a learner you will also examine different methodologies for teaching these issues in your curriculum and classrooms. As a teacher, you will engage in curriculum development, integration, and sharing. You will acquire resources to integrate these topics into your undergraduate/graduate courses in computer science and computer engineering.

Topics
  • The capacity to do great good or great harm in professional life. Mindfulness of capabilities and responsibilities.
  • Relationships among the generation, flow, use, and control of information and the essence of organizations, as well as conceptions of self and identity.
  • Applications of ontology, connotation, intention, language use and abuse, deliberate concealment and accidental disclosure, encoding and decoding, and natural language processing on information security.
  • Natural language and meaning, meaning as information, and the implications of language and meaning on information security.
  • Communication as a social act and the role and purpose of information technology in enabling this/these social act(s).
  • How affecting communication has the potential to change the essence of organizations, as well as how we think about ethics.
  • Teaching through exposition and inquiry.
  • Curriculum development and integration.

Outcomes
  • Explain meaning and ontology, connotation, and intention.
  • Explain social consequences of communication.
  • Identify adverse effects of communication misuse.
  • Identify applications of language use and abuse, encoding and decoding, and natural language processing to information security.
  • Distinguish ethics from "bad behavior".
  • Explain aspects of information assurance, systems design and engineering, and software design and engineering that are social contracts.
  • Differentiate consequentialism from rights and virtues.
  • Analyze rights and virtues as well as consequences, i.e., benefits, costs, and harms.
  • Interpret meta-communications sent in surveillance.
  • Predict/measure panoptic effects.
  • Integrate mind-meaning-language to inform information systems and software design.
  • Relate ethics to professional practice.
  • Articulate ethics as a component of systems design.
  • Compare and contrast expository teaching to inquiry teaching.
  • Explain critical aspects of curriculum development and integration.
  • Write a lesson for use in the classroom.
  • Summarize plans for integrating materials into your course(s)/curriculum.