WA02 - Ethical Case Study Blog Post

In this assignment write a blog post taking and justifying a position on the moral decision you identified in the case study that you analyzed in WA01 - Ethical Case Analysis.

AI Use

The initial draft of your blog post must be written entirely by you. This builds the mental muscles you need to organize, connect and communicate information. It also, reinforces the knowledge and concepts in you mind that will give you greater facility with that information, enabling you to do bigger and better thinking in the future.

You must save and submit your initial draft. See Submitting the Assignment below.

After you have written your initial draft you may elect to use AI tools to revise your writing. The following sources provide useful suggestions on how to use AI for revision that are compatible with the policy for this assignment and this course:

Assignment

Review your analysis of the decision you selected in WA01 and any feedback received from the instructor.
Place yourself in the position of the decision maker that you selected and:
- Decide how you think you should handle the decision if it was yours to make.
- Justify why based on your ethical analysis that is the right decision.
- Identify any confounding factors that you think would make it difficult to do the right thing.
Write a initial draft of a blog post describing the case study, the decision that is being made, what you think is the right decision, why based on your ethical analysis you think it is the right decision, and what might make doing the right thing difficult in practice.
Revise your draft, optionally with the use of AI tools.
Submit your assignment. See Submitting the Assignment below.

Expected Writing Style

The expected writing style for your blog post is exemplified by the blog posts in the Science + Tech section of The Conversation. You should familiarize yourself with the expected style of writing by reading a few of these posts and then try to emulate their style in your writing.

You can also go meta and read some blog posts about writing blog posts. Here are a few that are pretty good:

Tips on How to Write Your First Successful Technical Blog by Hannah Prate contains some good advice.
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Technical Blog Posts by Rizèl Scarlett is much more detailed. She provides a number of “Outlines” for blogs with different purposes and gives some advice on using AIs such as ChatGPT. The “Outline for thought leadership/opinion blog posts” is probably most appropriate for this assignment.

If those don’t work for you there is no shortage of other advice, just google “How to write a blog post” or “How to write a technical blog post” and find something that resonates with you and matches the goals of this assignment.

Requirements

The following requirements must be met, but are not sufficient to ensure a high quality blog post. The post must:

be of an appropriate length. You should target 1000 words (~2 single spaced pages). There will be some leeway for slightly longer posts if the writing is concise and compelling.
be written in the style of the Science + Tech section of The Conversation.
draw support from multiple sources.
- You must explicitly use the most relevant ethical lens(es) from your analysis and the ACM Code of Ethics.
- Other sources must be reputable and may include news articles, opinion pieces, other blogs, videos, formal academic sources, etc. They may include sources assigned in other courses.
- When referring to an ethical lens, the ACM Code of Ethics or details from another source, use a contextual link within your post to direct the interested reader to the source. See the posts in the Science + Tech section of The Conversation for examples of this style of writing.
be grammatically correct.
include embedded multimedia (e.g. images, audio, video, etc.) only as it is directly related to the topic and enhances the reader’s experience. Any embedded content must be used in a way that is compliant with its copyright and/or license.
be compliant with the AI Use policy for this assignment as stated above and the AI Use policy in the Syllabus.

In addition, you should consider explicitly licensing your content using a Creative Commons License so that others know how they may and may not use your work.

Quality Criteria

Affirmative answers to the following questions will be indicative of high quality posts.

Will your computer science peers, potential employers, future co-workers and reasonably tech literate internet strangers:
- find the title and opening engaging, without being clickbaity?
- find the writing in your post to be accessible, interesting and engaging?
- understand the important aspects of the case study you are using?
- understand the decision that is being made and who is making it?
- agree that the reasoning you used to arrive at the right decision is thorough, even if they happen to disagree with that decision?

Submitting the Assignment

Ensure that the link to your public-facing blog on your course page is working.
Add your post to your public facing blog.
Place a PDF of your initial draft (the no-AI version) named WA02-BlogPost-PreAI.pdf in your COMP491` folder.
Create a PDF named WA02-BlogPost.pdf of your post directly from your blog so that the formatting and links are included.
Place the WA02-BlogPost.pdf in the COMP491 folder in your Dickinson WiD Repository on GitHub.