HSCI 3420 -- New Course

Fri Apr 1 15:23:52 2011

Approvals Received:
Department
on 04-01-11
by Barbara Eastwold
(eastw002@umn.edu)
Approvals Pending: College/Dean  > Catalog > PeopleSoft Manual Entry
Effective Status: Active
Effective Term: 1123 - Spring 2012
Course: HSCI 3420
Institution:
Campus:		 UMNTC - Twin Cities
UMNTC - Twin Cities
Career: UGRD
College: TIOT - College of Science and Engineering
Department: 11142 - Science & Technology, Hist of
General
Course Title Short: Engineering Ethics
Course Title Long: Engineering Ethics
Max-Min Credits
for Course:		 3.0 to 3.0 credit(s)
Catalog
Description:		 This course covers engineering ethics in historical context, including the rise of professional engineering societies; ethical problems in engineering research and engineers' public responsibility; ethical implications of advanced engineering systems such as the production of nuclear weapons; and the development of codes of ethics in engineering.
Print in Catalog?: Yes
CCE Catalog
Description:		 <no text provided>
Grading Basis: Stdnt Opt
Topics Course: No
Honors Course: No
Delivery Mode(s): Classroom
Instructor
Contact Hours:		 3.0 hours per week
Years most
frequently offered:		 Every academic year
Term(s) most
frequently offered:		 Fall, Spring
Component 1: LEC (with final exam)
Auto-Enroll
Course:		 No
Graded
Component:		 LEC
Academic
Progress Units:		 Not allowed to bypass limits.
3.0 credit(s)
Financial Aid
Progress Units:		 Not allowed to bypass limits.
3.0 credit(s)
Repetition of
Course:		 Repetition not allowed.
Course
Prerequisites
for Catalog:		 <no text provided>
Course
Equivalency:		 HSci 3420/5420
Consent
Requirement:		 No required consent
Enforced
Prerequisites:
(course-based or
non-course-based)		 001186 - Exclude fr or soph 5000 level courses
Editor Comments: <no text provided>
Proposal Changes: New course to be taught concurrently with HSci 5420
History Information: <no text provided>
Faculty
Sponsor Name:		 Jennifer Alexander
Faculty
Sponsor E-mail Address:		 jalexand@me.umn.edu
Student Learning Outcomes
Student Learning Outcomes: * Student in the course:

- Can identify, define, and solve problems

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to identify, define, and solve problems by learning to look beyond immediately apparent explanations. By analyzing the history of how developments in science and technology intersected with developments in civic life and ethical perspectives you will learn that the technical features of engineering and technology are not the only explanation of ethical conflicts about them. You will learn to identify other features of a situation that may be involved, and develop criteria for deciding which features are the critical ones that require further investigation.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

We will keep track of your contributions to discussion in both the discussion sections and in lecture, and if you find it difficult to contribute we will find a way to open the conversation to you. As the term progresses, your comments should begin to use the methods of identifying, defining, and solving historical and ethical problems that have been modeled in lecture and discussion section. Questions on the essay examinations will evaluate how you make use of provided material to identify, define, and solve historical and ethical problems on your own, by asking you to make an argument about the historical past or about historians⿿ interpretations of it.

- Can locate and critically evaluate information

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to locate and critically evaluate information. By considering contradictory responses to science and technology by apparently reputable sources, concerning different views of the effect of global engineering on the environment, for example, you will learn to find different types of historical information, and to evaluate how authoritative and useful these different sources of information are.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

Questions on the examinations will ask you to evaluate the usefulness and authority of both the primary and secondary materials to which you have been introduced. We will use your term papers (or, for 5420 students, your research papers) to evaluate how you have learned to locate and critically evaluate information.

- Can communicate effectively

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to communicate effectively by required participation in classroom discussions and by writing a short paper with multiple drafts reviewed both by your student peers and by your instructors. The paper assignment asks you to analyze the communication of ethical concepts in three quite different publications, and asks how we may use our knowledge of the history of ethical approaches to science and technology to inform our opinions about ethical approaches to them in the present.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

We will keep track of your contributions to discussion in both the discussion sections and in lecture, and if you find it difficult to contribute we will find a way to open the conversation to you. As the term progresses, your comments should begin to use the methods of identifying, defining, and solving historical and ethical problems that have been modeled in lecture and discussion section.

- Understand the role of creativity, innovation, discovery, and expression across disciplines

Please explain briefly how this outcome will be addressed in the course. Give brief examples of class work related to the outcome.

You will learn to understand the role of creativity, innovation, discovery and expression across disciplines by examining the many different disciplines that have contributed to an understanding of the role of engineering and technology in civic and public life. Examples of great ethical creativity that we will discuss include the wilderness ethic of Minnesota native Sigurd Olson and the new engineering vision of the first professional civil engineers.

How will you assess the students' learning related to this outcome? Give brief examples of how class work related to the outcome will be evaluated.

We will evaluate your understanding of the role of creativity, innovation, discovery and expression across disciplines by assessing your developing contributions to discussion meetings, by identifying how the types of comments you make change as you become more aware of the great variety of ways people have come to take ethical positions and to contribute to civic life.
Liberal Education
Requirement
this course fulfills:		 None
Other requirement
this course fulfills:		 None
Criteria for
Core Courses:		 Describe how the course meets the specific bullet points for the proposed core requirement. Give concrete and detailed examples for the course syllabus, detailed outline, laboratory material, student projects, or other instructional materials or method.

Core courses must meet the following requirements:

  • They explicitly help students understand what liberal education is, how the content and the substance of this course enhance a liberal education, and what this means for them as students and as citizens.
  • They employ teaching and learning strategies that engage students with doing the work of the field, not just reading about it.
  • They include small group experiences (such as discussion sections or labs) and use writing as appropriate to the discipline to help students learn and reflect on their learning.
  • They do not (except in rare and clearly justified cases) have prerequisites beyond the University's entrance requirements.
  • They are offered on a regular schedule.
  • They are taught by regular faculty or under exceptional circumstances by instructors on continuing appointments. Departments proposing instructors other than regular faculty must provide documentation of how such instructors will be trained and supervised to ensure consistency and continuity in courses.

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Criteria for
Theme Courses:		 Describe how the course meets the specific bullet points for the proposed theme requirement. Give concrete and detailed examples for the course syllabus, detailed outline, laboratory material, student projects, or other instructional materials or methods.

Theme courses have the common goal of cultivating in students a number of habits of mind:
  • thinking ethically about important challenges facing our society and world;
  • reflecting on the shared sense of responsibility required to build and maintain community;
  • connecting knowledge and practice;
  • fostering a stronger sense of our roles as historical agents.


 <no text provided>
Writing Intensive
Propose this course
as Writing Intensive
curriculum:		 No
Question 1 (see CWB Requirement 1): How do writing assignments and writing instruction further the learning objectives of this course and how is writing integrated into the course? Note that the syllabus must reflect the critical role that writing plays in the course.

 <no text provided>
Question 2 (see CWB Requirement 2): What types of writing (e.g., research papers, problem sets, presentations, technical documents, lab reports, essays, journaling etc.) will be assigned? Explain how these assignments meet the requirement that writing be a significant part of the course work, including details about multi-authored assignments, if any. Include the required length for each writing assignment and demonstrate how the minimum word count (or its equivalent) for finished writing will be met.

 <no text provided>
Question 3 (see CWB Requirement 3): How will students' final course grade depend on their writing performance? What percentage of the course grade will depend on the quality and level of the student's writing compared to the percentage of the grade that depends on the course content? Note that this information must also be on the syllabus.

 <no text provided>
Question 4 (see CWB Requirement 4): Indicate which assignment(s) students will be required to revise and resubmit after feedback from the instructor. Indicate who will be providing the feedback. Include an example of the assignment instructions you are likely to use for this assignment or assignments.

 <no text provided>
Question 5 (see CWB Requirement 5): What types of writing instruction will be experienced by students? How much class time will be devoted to explicit writing instruction and at what points in the semester? What types of writing support and resources will be provided to students?

 <no text provided>
Question 6 (see CWB Requirement 6): If teaching assistants will participate in writing assessment and writing instruction, explain how will they be trained (e.g. in how to review, grade and respond to student writing) and how will they be supervised. If the course is taught in multiple sections with multiple faculty (e.g. a capstone directed studies course), explain how every faculty mentor will ensure that their students will receive a writing intensive experience.

 <no text provided>
Course Syllabus
Course Syllabus: For new courses and courses in which changes in content and/or description and/or credits are proposed, please provide a syllabus that includes the following information: course goals and description; format;structure of the course (proposed number of instructor contact hours per week, student workload effort per week, etc.); topics to be covered; scope and nature of assigned readings (text, authors, frequency, amount per week); required course assignments; nature of any student projects; and how students will be evaluated. The University "Syllabi Policy" can be found here

The University policy on credits is found under Section 4A of "Standards for Semester Conversion" found here. Course syllabus information will be retained in this system until new syllabus information is entered with the next major course modification. This course syllabus information may not correspond to the course as offered in a particular semester.

(Please limit text to about 12 pages. Text copied and pasted from other sources will not retain formatting and special characters might not copy properly.)


 HSci 3420/5420:  ENGINEERING ETHICS
Course Proposal: Spring Semester 2012

3 credit hours       

Jennifer K. Alexander        Assoc. Professor Mechanical Engineering
Office:  325D Mech. Engr.        626-7309
Office Hours        TBA
Email address        jalexand@me.umn.edu

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES  

The history of engineering offers significant episodes for ethical analysis.  This course presents topics such as the historical differentiation between scientific and engineering knowledge as exemplified in the works of Benjamin Franklin and the British engineer John Smeaton, and the relationship between technicians, engineers, and scientists in the early scientific academies.  It examines ethical aspects of preindustrial technological societies, and surveys a variety of ethical systems based on engineering ideologies such as utilitarianism.  It covers the development of engineering ethics and the rise of engineering societies; ethical problems in engineering research such as the role of public responsibility; ethical implications of advanced engineering systems, as experienced by the engineers involved in the production of nuclear weapons; and the development or codes of ethics in engineering.  Students will take part in weekly small group discussions, and students from diverse backgrounds are welcome.  

Engineering and technology are enormous forces in our society, and have become so important that in many ways they seem to have lives of their own.  This course uses historical case studies to help students realize that engineering is not autonomous, but that it is a human activity, and that people and societies made choices about the types of engineering and technologies they developed and used.  The course asks how technological developments influenced people⿿s ethical ideas, and how peoples⿿ ethical ideas influenced their choices of which technologies to invest in and develop.  We ask how engineering choices often brought about consequences greater than people expected, and how we might use this knowledge in making our own technological choices.  The overall objective of this course is to help students consider technology and engineering as human and historical forces, rather than technical and deterministic ones.  The goal is to help students see that technological development results from human actions and human ethical choices, and that they themselves are in a position to make ethical choices that can influence the future course of technology.  

COURSE FORMAT

This course uses lectures and in-class discussions, and weekly small-group meetings to discuss primary source materials.  Students are assigned to standing small groups and are expected to attend all lectures and discussion group meetings, and to do assigned weekly readings.  


DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HSci 3420 AND HSci 5420

Students registered in both levels are required to attend all lectures and discussion section meetings.   The difference lies in the examinations and in the papers.  HSci 3420 students must take all examinations and write an eight-page term paper; HSci 5420 students do not take the examinations and must write an 18-20 page research paper in conference with the instructor, on the historical background of a currently important issue in the ethics of science and technology.  More details on assignments for both 3420 and 5420 students appear later in the syllabus.

LIBERAL EDUCATION CORE AND THEME REQUIREMENTS

Liberal Education
This course fulfills requirements for Historical Perspectives (Core) and Civic Life and Ethics (Theme).  It is important that members of a democratic society be liberally educated and well-informed, because they are often called upon to make decisions about things beyond their own personal areas of expertise.  Members of a democratic society must learn to form opinions, and to express those opinions and thus help others form their own opinions in turn.  A liberal education gives people the tools to look beyond their own personal interests and personal knowledge to larger issues affecting the world in which we all live.  Engineering has had an important role in shaping societies⿿ fundamental institutions and peoples⿿ differing beliefs about the world.  A fundamental understanding of the historical relationships between engineering, technology and human civil society will help you develop an appreciation of the complexities of human society.

In your education and future career, you will become increasingly specialized -- you will develop particular skills and knowledge within a specialized field.  One of the goals of liberal education is to help teach you how to learn, by giving you skills that you can use as you become increasingly specialized in your studies and in your working career.  But such skills are not limited to single fields, because they will apply to many different areas -- not only in your studies but in your future decision making.  Liberal education helps you learn how to learn.  This ⿿learning to learn⿝ is critically important, but liberal education has another even larger goal:  to enable you to understand and evaluate the roles you and others play within society, and thus to understand how you might act for society⿿s benefit.  Historical study provides you with a vast laboratory of the past, in which you can consider how people and engineering and technology interacted in different contexts, toward different goals and with different results.  Historical study introduces you to the complex interactions of society and technology.  It helps you think about where you might find your own place in a complex world.

Historical Perspectives Core

The study of history offers a vast laboratory of the past in which we can analyze and reflect on the wide variety of ways people have developed and responded to science and technology.  It also considers the different ways people have explained science and technological development, how science was linked to magic in some contexts, or how building and working with technology was given low social status in others.  The study of history allows us to see how explanations about science and technology, how they work and what their social, cultural, and political role should be, have changed over time. This means that the study of history is not just the study of the past, but also the awareness of how explanations of the past have themselves changed.  To be useful, knowledge of the past must do three things.  First, it must take into account the different contexts within which historical people acted; it must recognize the elements that made historical cases different from or similar to each other and the present. Second, historical knowledge must take into account the methods by which we ourselves arrive at it; in other words, it must be methodologically self-aware.  Third, it must take into account its own history; historical knowledge, in other words, must take into account the way historical explanations have themselves been developed over time.  How people have used history to understand and explain their worlds has itself changed over time, just as technological knowledge has changed.  In this course, we use historical documents to examine how people, over time, developed ethical perspectives on technology and developing engineering practice.  Some of these documents are valuable and rare, or exist in places we cannot visit, so we encounter them on-line; specific examples are described immediately below.   Documents such as these, which were created during the time periods under study, are primary sources; they are evidence of what people were doing and thinking in their own times.  Primary sources are things from the past; each offers a ⿿window into the past⿿.  We also use a variety of secondary sources, which examine the technologies of the past but which were written more recently and thus do not offer direct evidence of what people were thinking and doing.  Instead, secondary sources offer reflection, analysis, and assessments of the past.  Secondary sources offer historical knowledge about the past; they do not show us the past.  We will read a variety of secondary studies describing how people viewed the ethical principles of their work with technology; specific examples, again, appear immediately below.  With all of these sources, both primary and secondary, we will discuss the contexts in which they were created and the contexts that they reflect, how it is that they have come to our attention and into our hands and before our eyes, how people have developed their own interpretations of historical events and episodes, and how those interpretations have themselves changed.  

The course examines the human past, studying the beliefs, practices, and relationships that shaped human experience over time.  We analyze and reflect on the wide variety of ways people have developed and responded to engineering and technology, from great wonder at the power of steam engines through the terrors of mutually assured destruction by atomic weapons.

We examine the human past, by studying peoples⿿ scientific and technological beliefs and practices as they have shaped human experience over time.  We will also considers the different ways people have explained science and technological development, how early technologies were linked to magic in some contexts, or how building and working with technology was given low social status in others.  The study of history allows us to see how explanations about engineering and technology, how they work and what their social, cultural, and political roles should be, have changed over time. This means that the study of history is not just the study of the past, but also the awareness of how explanations of the past have themselves changed.  To be useful, knowledge of the past must do three things.  First, it must take into account the different contexts within which historical people acted; it must recognize the elements that made historical cases different from or similar to each other and the present.  This course gives attention to specific historical context:  the industrial revolution in England, for example, and the engineering of modern biotechnology. Second, historical knowledge must take into account the methods by which we ourselves arrive at it; in other words, it must be methodologically self-aware.  Third, it must take into account its own history; historical knowledge, in other words, must take into account the way historical explanations have themselves been developed over time.  How people have used history to understand and explain their worlds has itself changed over time, just as engineering and technological knowledge has changed.  

Students will themselves work with primary sources, i.e. materials produced in the time period under investigation, whether written, oral, visual, or material, and either in the original language or in translation.  In this course, we examine historical documents to see how people, over time, developed ethical practices concerning science and technology.  Some of these documents are valuable and rare, or exist in places we cannot visit, so we encounter them on-line.  We examine the famous engravings of Hogarth depicting industry and idleness, showing ethical ideas of what it meant to be a good employee in the developing age of factories (at the Art of the Print on-line gallery).  We encounter documents that had real political importance but have only recently become available outside the archives:  Lord Byron⿿s speech in the British House of Lords in opposition to a bill mandating the death penalty for machine breakers during the Luddite uprisings (recently uncovered by labor historian David F. Noble), and the report of the Advisory Committee on the development of the Hydrogen Bomb, which became influential when Oppenheimer, prominent physicist and leader of the Los Alamos project, was stripped of his security clearance for un-American activities (available on-line as part of WGBN⿿s project making reporters⿿ sources available).  Documents such as these, which were created during the time periods under study, are primary sources; they are evidence of what people were doing and thinking in their own times.  Primary sources are things from the past; each offers a ⿿window into the past⿝.  As often as possible, we will encounter primary sources in their original form as made available on the World Wide Web or in other digital formats.  By working with primary sources themselves, students will learn how to do the interpretive work that makes meaning out of historical material.  They will learn to evaluate the uses and the limitations of certain primary sources.

An explicit and significant focus of this course is on the methods and conceptual frameworks with which scholars interpret primary sources.  We examine methodological and conceptual frameworks used to interpret primary sources by comparing them with secondary ones.  Thus we also use a variety of secondary sources, which examine the technologies of the past but which were written more recently and thus do not offer direct evidence of what people were thinking and doing.  Instead, secondary sources offer reflection, analysis, and assessments of the past.  Secondary sources offer historical knowledge about the past; they do not show us the past.  By comparing how historians use primary and secondary sources, the course introduces and critically assesses methods and concepts employed in producing historical knowledge.  We will read a variety of secondary studies describing how people viewed the ethical principles of their work with science and technology, for instance in the chemical engineering development of the gas Zyklon B, used in German extermination chambers during the Second World War, or how changes in technology changed how people viewed their obligations to care for their environments.  With all of these sources, both primary and secondary, we will discuss the contexts in which they were created and the contexts that they reflect, how it is that they have come to our attention and into our hands and before our eyes, how people have developed their own interpretations of historical events and episodes, and how those interpretations have themselves changed.  

The course considers how the questions we ask and the sources available to us shape our knowledge of the past and our understanding of its significance.  It asks how the built environment in which we spend our lives originated, and how we can interpret the history of that environment when we have only limited sources available to us.  This is a particularly important issue in the history of engineering, because much of its history resides not in documents but in artifacts.  How we can make historical sense of artifacts is a primary question raised in the course.

Civic Life and Ethics Theme

The course presents and defines ethics and the role of ethics in civic life, in the important areas of science and technology.  We examine historically important definitions of ethics such as those of Francis Bacon, who discriminated between the ethics of natural and moral philosophy, and of Jeremy Bentham, who developed utilitarian ethics in an engineering attempt to emulate the scientific work of Isaac Newton.  We examine how these ethical systems have been applied in civic life, as reflected in the impact of technology on the way we live, work, and participate in civil society, and in political action to control engineering innovation, for example in controversies over recombinant DNA.  In this course, students are encouraged to think ethically about important challenges facing our society and world, for example in considering the conflict between the energy needs of the advanced nations and the needs of the world⿿s poor, and between those energy needs and the needs of the environment.  Students are asked to reflect on the shared sense of responsibility required to build and maintain community, by considering the history of the founding of engineering institutions and the development of professional engineering standards, steps which were controversial at the time they were taken but which have done much to advance an atmosphere of confidence in science and technology (confidence which has recently been shaken ⿿ and students are asked to consider this, also).  Students are asked to connect knowledge and practice by considering two events from the Second World War:  how the engineers and physicists on the Manhattan Project reacted to the use of the atomic bomb, and whether the chemical engineers who developed the murderous gas Zyklon B share ethical responsibility for how it was used.  The course fosters a stronger sense of peoples⿿ roles as historical agents by repeatedly asking students to consider historical situations in which engineering ethics were in dispute, and in which one particular view prevailed, such as battles over how factory labor should be organized early in the industrial revolution.  Students are also offered historical examples that illustrate how questions of civic life and ethics are not only political but also reflect peoples⿿ everyday actions, for instance in the variety of personal ethical stories told in the James Chiles⿿s compelling study of human decisions and human error in technological failure (Inviting Disaster:  Lessons from the Edge of Technology).  

The course explores how the ethical principles of a society or societies have been derived and developed through group processes, and debated in various arenas.  The course begins with Francis Bacon, who gave an elaborate description of the ideal engineered society, which was embodied in the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences, and emulated in later engineering societies such as the American Society of Civil Engineers.   We consider debates about how such societies should be constituted, and what should be the public role of people who are specialists in engineering.  We also consider the founding of the great engineering societies of the nineteenth century, the Royal Institute of Engineers (London) and the American Society of Civil Engineers, and continuing debates about the public roles of their members.  These debates were carried out in closed society meetings, in publications, in public meetings, and in the public press.  

The course encourages students to develop, defend, or challenge their personal values and beliefs as they relate to their lives as residents of the United States and members of a global society.  Students will be asked to develop and defend their personal values and beliefs in the context of the course, and prepare a personal code of ethics appropriate to their intended vocations.  The final third of the course explicitly takes up the global impact that they will have, as people living and working in the United States, in particular relation to international questions of engineering and technology, including labor practices, environmental costs, and global human rights.  

Students have concrete opportunities to identify and apply their knowledge of ethics, both in solving short-term problems and in creating long-term forecasts.  Weekly small group discussions will give students concrete opportunities to voice, defend, and challenge their own values, beliefs and knowledge of ethics, and that of their peers.  

LEARNING OUTCOMES
The University has offered specific learning outcome goals for undergraduate education, which have guided my expectations for student learning in this course.  My learning expectations have also been influenced by the goals of the historical perspectives core and the civic life and ethics theme.  

General Liberal Education Requirements Learning Outcomes
Communication skills will be modeled in discussion meetings, and by the instructor in lecture/seminar, and you will be required to participate in discussion in both venues.  Lectures will model examples of how to identify, define, and solve historical problems, and teaching assistants will also provide such models involving the assigned texts and artifacts.  Lectures in particular will model how to locate and critically evaluate information, by using a variety of sources and illustrating how a historian makes use of them, and which ones s/he decides are useful and which not.  In lectures and discussion meetings we will also offer you examples of the wide scope of human ethical behavior, and give you the opportunity to consider ethical decisions yourself.  You will find that even ethical concepts we now for granted were the objects of considerable disagreement at first.
Specific examples of how these outcomes will be taught follow.

You will learn to identify, define, and solve problems by learning to look beyond immediately apparent explanations.  By analyzing the history of how developments in science and technology intersected with developments in civic life and ethical perspectives you will learn that the technical features of engineering and technology are not the only explanation of ethical conflicts about them.  You will learn to identify other features of a situation that may be involved, and develop criteria for deciding which features are the critical ones that require further investigation.

You will learn to locate and critically evaluate information.  By considering contradictory responses to science and technology by apparently reputable sources, concerning different views of the effect of global engineering on the environment, for example, you will learn to find different types of historical information, and to evaluate how authoritative and useful these different sources of information are.  

You will learn to communicate effectively by required participation in classroom discussions and by writing a short paper with multiple drafts reviewed both by your student peers and by your instructors.  The paper assignment asks you to analyze the communication of ethical concepts in three quite different publications, and asks how we may use our knowledge of the history of ethical approaches to science and technology to inform our opinions about ethical approaches to them in the present.

You will learn to understand the role of creativity, innovation, discovery and expression across disciplines by examining the many different disciplines that have contributed to an understanding of the role of engineering and technology in civic and public life.   Examples of great ethical creativity that we will discuss include the wilderness ethic of Minnesota native Sigurd Olson and the new engineering vision of the first professional civil engineers.  

Evaluation of student⿿s general liberal education learning outcomes
We will keep track of your contributions to discussion in both the discussion sections and in lecture, and if you find it difficult to contribute we will find a way to open the conversation to you.  As the term progresses, your comments should begin to use the methods of identifying, defining, and solving historical and ethical problems that have been modeled in lecture and discussion section.  Questions on the essay examinations will evaluate how you make use of provided material to identify, define, and solve historical and ethical problems on your own, by asking you to make an argument about the historical past or about historians⿿ interpretations of it.  Other questions on the examinations will ask you to evaluate the usefulness and authority of both the primary and secondary materials to which you have been introduced.  We will use your term papers (or, for 5420 students, your research papers) to evaluate how you have learned to locate and critically evaluate information.  

Textbooks (required):

        Ian Barbour, Ethics in an Age of Technology:  The Gifford Lectures (Harper San
        Francisco, 1993)

        James R. Chiles, Inviting Disaster:  Lessons from the Edge of Technology (Harper
        Business, 2002)

        The Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York:  Riverhead, 1999)

        National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of         Medicine, On Being A Scientist:  A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research         (Washington, DC:  National Academies Press, 2009)

        Ron Howard and Clint Corver, Ethics for the Real World:  Creating a Personal         Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard Business         Press, 2008).  

Primary source course readings (required):

All but two of these readings are from primary sources.  They are available on the course website, either as scans or via links posted there.  You are required to carry a copy of the reading with you to discussion meetings.
        1)        Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620, 1902 edition edited by Joseph Devey,        (New York: P.F. Collier).  Linked on WebVista to the OnLine Library of         Liberty, Liberty Fund.

        2)        Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation         (1781), selections.  Linked on WebVista to www.utilitarianism.com

3)        William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness (1747) engraved plates.  Linked on
        WebVista to Art of the Print.

4)        Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Pilot:  London, 1893), selections.          Linked on WebVista to Gutenberg Project.

5)        Lynn White, ⿿The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,⿝ Science 155 (1967):          1203-1207.   Scanned and posted on WebVista.  Please note that this is a         secondary source, not a primary one.

6)        George Gordon Byron, ⿿Lord Byron⿿s Speech in Parliament in Opposition to the         Death Penalty         for Machine Breakers⿝ (1812), reprinted in David F. Noble,         Progress Without People (Between the Lines:  Toronto, 1995), scanned and         posted on WebVista.

7)        Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (London:  1859, Harvard Press Facsimile
        Edition), Chapter one, ⿿On Variation ⿦⿝  Scanned on WebVista.

8)        George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution:  A Study of the History of         Life and its Significance for Man (Yale University Press, 1967), Chapter 17, ⿿The         Search         for an Ethic⿝.  Scanned and posted on WebVista.

9)        Paul Weindling, ⿿The  Uses and Abuses of Zyklon B,⿝ History of Technology 11         (1994):  219-298.  Scanned and posted on WebVista.  Please note that this is a
        secondary source, not a primary one.

10)        ⿿General Advisory Committee⿿s Majority and Minority Reports on Building the         H-Bomb,⿝ (1951).  Extracts linked on WebVista to WGBH primary reporting
        sources.

11)        Edward Tufte, ⿿Analysis of the visual evidence in the Space Shuttle Challenger         Disaster⿝.  Scanned online.

12)        ⿿Report on the Failure of I-35 in Minneaopolis,⿝ Federal Highway
        Administration.  Scanned on-line.


GRADING

All of the following assignments must be satisfactorily completed in order to pass the course.  Missing an assignment is a major problem, so if you anticipate any difficulties with scheduling, etc., please see me as early in the semester as possible.  You must meet each deadline and do each assignment if you want to pass the course.  Please note that attendance at discussions is required.

3420 students

        Discussion        25%
        Midterm        25%
        Code of ethics        25%
        Final        25%

5420 students

        Discussion        25%
Midterm Examination        25%
Issue paper        25%
Final        25%

Late papers will receive a deduction of one letter grade on the final paper grade for each day late. The clock will begin at the beginning of class the day they are due.  As a general rule, you cannot make up missed examinations without providing official documents attesting to a university-recognized excuse (usually personal medical emergencies or family medical emergencies, or university-sponsored extra-curricular activities).  This is because I have to write another exam, and usually I have already used the best questions.  If you will miss examinations due to university-sponsored extra-curricular activities (athletics, speech competitions, etc.) you must make arrangements before the date of the exam, and should be prepared to take it earlier than scheduled.  University-sponsored activities do not justify missing proposal, draft, or paper deadlines.

Discussion:  Fridays will generally be devoted to discussion.  Students will be grouped into standing (permanent) small groups, which will meet together each Friday.  Discussion topics will generally revolve around one of the assigned readings.  The discussion grade is worth 25 percent of the overall course grade, and will be assigned by fellow discussion group members during the last discussion meeting.  

Note on requirements for passing course:  You are required to attend lectures and discussions.  I expect you to complete readings assigned for discussion before class meets, and to complete reading assignments from the textbooks during the week assigned.   In order to pass the course you must complete both examinations, and you must complete the paper by April 30.  Students cannot pass the course if they do not complete all assignments.  Completing all assignments, however, does not guarantee that a student will pass the course.

We will assign grades on a scale from A to F, including plus and minus signs, according to the policy adopted by the University Senate.  If you have registered for satisfactory/unsatisfactory credit for this class, please be aware that an S requires achievement that is equivalent to a C- or better, and requires that your achievement meet course requirements in every respect.  I will award an incomplete (I) only if you can officially document an emergency and have already completed 50% of the course requirements.

EXAMINATIONS

Exams will be a combination of short identification questions and longer essays.  You will have a choice of both from a list of items and essay questions.  There will be a midterm examination on March 18 and the Final Examination will be as scheduled by the University.  Examinations will be distributed with blue books in class, and no notes, books, electronic recordings or other materials besides pen or pencils will be permitted.  Cheating in any form will result in failure of the course.

CODE OF ETHICS PAPER (3420 students)

You will prepare a 10-page paper defining a set of values, critiquing it in the light of course materials, and formulating a code of ethics.  The values used should be drawn from your own personal value system. Your critique should be based upon the historical analysis of ethics presented in the course. The code of ethics should address issues in your own field of study. In your paper you should either locate or formulate such an issue and explain how your code of ethics may be applied in resolving it. Students are encouraged to discuss their problems with others, but each student should write their own essay, based upon their ethical values, as interpreted with the help of course materials. Sources of specific concepts, ideas or information should be cited and all quotes of more than four words must be cited. The paper will be due Friday, April 29.       

Format:  The term paper must be typed, double-spaced, on letter-sized paper (8.5⿝ x 11⿝), with one-inch margins on all sides, using ten or twelve point type in Times New Roman or Ariel font.  The pages should be numbered in the upper right-hand corner, and should be stapled together.  You should not need to use footnotes, but if you do, please talk to me about how you want to format them.  Please pay strict attention to the page limits, because longer and shorter papers are not acceptable.  Please do use illustrations, which must be numbered and placed at the end of the paper.  They do not count as part of the required number of pages.  

5420 STUDENTS:  RESEARCH PAPER

If you are taking the course for graduate credit, you should be registered in HSci 5420.  You will be required complete an 18-20 page issue paper on the historical background of a currently important issue in the ethics of engineering and technology.  You must choose the issue and develop a reading list in conference with the instructor.  Your paper should be double-spaced, on letter-sized paper (8.5⿝ x 11⿝), with one-inch margins on all sides, using ten- or twelve-point type.  Proposals, drafts, and papers longer or shorter than the specified lengths are not acceptable.  Footnotes should appear at the bottom of the page.  

ADDITIONAL NOTES FOR ALL STUDENTS

Accommodations:  If you have a disability or condition which interferes with your learning, please let me know as soon as possible.  Any student with a documented disability condition (e.g., physical, learning, psychiatric, vision, hearing, etc.) who needs to arrange reasonable accommodations must contact me and Disability Services at the beginning of the semester.

Scholastic conduct:  This class is subject to the University policy on student scholastic conduct.  You may find the Regents' Council Student Conduct policy on the web at <http://www1.umn.edu/regents/policies/academic/>.  In general, academic dishonesty includes submission of false records of academic achievements; cheating on assignments or examinations; plagiarizing; altering, forging, or misusing a University academic record; taking, acquiring, or using test materials without faculty permission; acting alone or in cooperation with another to falsify records or to obtain dishonestly grades, honors, awards, or professional endorsements.  

Plagiarism and citation of other authors:  All work that students submit must be their own original work, in their own words, or it must cite completely and correctly from whom the ideas or words came.   Students who submit plagiarized work will receive a failing grade for the course.  You are expected to express your ideas and to sustain an argument in your own words.  You should not submit written work that does not properly acknowledge the use of the words of others or that includes excessive quotation of the work of others.  If you want to quote from a published work, you must put the passage in quotation marks and cite the reference.  When you state another author's viewpoint, theory or hypothesis -- especially when it is original or not generally accepted -- you must include a reference to the published work.  Failure to cite the work of an author that you used is plagiarism and unethical (it is also often illegal).  Citations should also be given so that the reader can further pursue or check the references and your use of them.  Beware of internet sources, which can change without notice and which may no longer exist when a reader checks your citations.  For this reason, internet sources and citations are not acceptable unless approved in advance by the instructor.  

Simply changing a few words from the writings of other authors does not alter the fact that you are essentially quoting from them.  Paraphrasing of this sort, where you use the words of another almost verbatim without acknowledging your source, is the most common form of plagiarism among undergraduates.  Another common problem may arise from working with another student in studying and carrying out assignments.  Such collaboration is encouraged, but the work that you submit must be in your own words, and not jointly written or copied.

If you are unclear about collaborating, paraphrasing, quoting, and the need to indicate sources please ask us for guidance.  By putting the results of your reading in your own words you are compelled to think about what you read.  In this way these new ideas and facts will become part of your own thinking, which is the aim of your education.

Incompletes:  I will assign a grade of incomplete (I) only in emergencies, usually personal or family medical emergencies, and only when a student has already satisfactorily completed fifty percent (50%) of the course requirements.  To get a grade of incomplete, students must sign a contract with the instructor specifying when the work will be made up, usually within three to six months of the end of the course.
Strategic Objectives & Consultation
Name of Department Chair
Approver:		 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
Strategic Objectives -
Curricular Objectives:		 How does adding this course improve the overall curricular objectives ofthe unit?

 This course has been designed to teach engineering ethics to a likely constituency of undergraduates in engineering, business, and related fields.  It is designed to reveal the ways in which ethics has been and will continue to be fluid and relative to changing context while probing the elements that have persisted through historical time.  Through reading, projects, discussion and debate, students will see how ethics derive from both philosophical understandings as well as very practical problems that require individuals and groups to derive common outlooks and policies.
Strategic Objectives - Core
Curriculum:		 Does the unit consider this course to be part of its core curriculum?

 Many of the students will come from the College of Science and Engineering (as well as from the Carlson School and the College of Biological Sciences) and thus the content and the approach will complement courses in student majors that concentrate on the theory and practice of particular disciplines but may not consider the ethical dimensions in a direct way.  While the content is complementary to that of science and engineering majors, classroom practice and assignments will encourage students to articulate the meaning of their work and its impact through research and writing projects that focus on ethics.
Strategic Objectives -
Consultation with Other
Units:		 In order to prevent course overlap and to inform other departments of new curriculum, circulate proposal to chairs in relevant units and follow-up with direct consultation. Please summarize response from units consulted and include correspondence. By consultation with other units, the information about a new course is more widely disseminated and can have a positive impact on enrollments. The consultation can be as simple as an email to the department chair informing them of the course and asking for any feedback from the faculty.

 Over the past year, the instructor has been talking with the Directors of Undergraduate Study in the College of Science and Engineering to determine what they think would be useful as students meet the basic requirements of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology Association as well as the less formal concerns about the implications of their current and future work.  While HSCI 3401 (Ethics in Science and Technology) has met some of this need, the instructor wants to build on the expanding scholarly base of historical research on engineering ethics to teach a course that will be even more appropriate for those who will go into technology-related fields.