INLS 776
Ethics
This is a new class, and I taught it for the first time in Spring 2022.
I’m starting from two basic propositions: 1) as information professionals, we hold power over the ways in which people think about the world; and 2) if we accept that we have this power, we have an ethical responsibility to recognize, to the extent possible, our own blind spots, as well as the shapes that power takes in our work.
This brings up a lot of questions! What are our blindspots, as individuals and as members of institutions? How might we develop a formal method to uncover those blindspots during the development process? Would that be useful? What values and beliefs are we expressing through our systems and services? What impact does our work have on different communities? What are some ways in which power is expressed in different socio-technical systems? Can we develop a method to deconstruct systems to more clearly see the values built into them? Would that be useful? How does our place within the system (as individuals and members of an institution) impact what we’re able to envision for future system development? What is our responsibility to our users, community, or society; and how will we know we’re building “good,” or “fair” systems? What are the limitations of thinking within the frameworks of “goodness” or “fairness,” “justice” and “ethics?”
In discussion with students at the end of the Spring 2024 semester, I realized that I was making assumptions about students’ readiness to conduct research that was not borne out by their actual ability to conduct research. Specifically, I was told by the students that they were unclear on “how to be interested” in a topic. This realization, that graduate students aren’t confident in identifying “interesting” topics to write about, was upsetting to me. So, for the Spring 2025 semester, I’ve decided to organize the class around what it looks like when you’re interested in something. The students may or may not actually be “interested” in the topic they choose from the list, but by the end of the semester, they will definitely have a good idea of what behaviors go along with being interested. The process looks like:
Group formation: Students will choose from a list of foundational ethics articles and I’ll form student groups around those choices.
Summarize: Each group will then read their chosen article numerous times with different goals in mind for each reading (what are the arguments and what conclusions does the author make / what methodologies does the author use in this paper, what’s the lineage of that methodology / what are some related questions or fields implicated in this research).
Citation Chasing: Each group member will identify three papers that “seem interesting” in the bibliography of their paper (I’m developing a metric so I can describe what I mean that a paper in a bibliography might “seem interesting”) and present those papers / ideas to their group.
Reverse Citation Chasing: Each group member will do a Google Scholar search on their chosen reading - and create a bibliography of “interesting” articles that cite their original article. This will be useful because there’s an “annotated bibliography” assignment in this class. This will give students a chance to find those articles relatively early in the process.
Identify Cases: Each group member will be asked to identify at least two cases where the theoretical issues identified by their paper (or any of the papers they’ve found through this process) are evident, and present those cases to the group. I’m hoping here that this process will help groups identify the cases they want to address in their symposium project.
Identifying strong arguments: By this point in the process, students should have a very good idea of what their paper is about, its strengths and weaknesses, where it stands in terms of utility for other researchers in our field and in other fields, and real-world cases that speak to this issue. Students will have chosen their topic for the symposium. I want each group to collaborate on strong arguments pro/con each of their cases. I’m thinking maybe debates?
Workshopping: Part of writing this kind of paper is getting feedback. In the past, I’ve let students take their own route to getting feedback on their work. As a result, I’m not sure how useful the workshopping sessions have been. This semester, I’m going to be much more prescriptive about what the workshopping sessions should include. Specifically, each workshop session will last 40 minutes and should include a presentation by each group member in pecha kucha style (20 slides / 20 seconds per slide) that presents the context of the case, the problem, the stakeholders, and between 3-5 actions for addressing the problem with pro/con on each action. Discussion should center on the consequences of each action.
I wish this were an in-person class in Spring 2025, but it is an online synchronous class. We will be going through this process during class time, but the workload will be significant - reading between 3-5 articles every week, thinking about those articles, and preparing presentations for the group. There will be weekly “meeting minutes” assessments where students will submit reports on what they’ve accomplished each week (I have specific questions for each week’s activities). Students will also be assessed on their end-of-semester panel presentation as well as some supporting assessments (annotated bibliography / abstract / workshopping / etc.)
I don’t know if the students will love it or hate it, but they’ll definitely know a lot about their topic, and they’ll have exhaustively worked through the process of being interested in a topic. Wish me luck!