WA05 - Social/Legal/Ethical Issue Blog Post

In this assignment you will write a blog post analyzing, reasoning about and taking a position on a contemporary social/legal/ethical issue in computing or technology more broadly.

Assignment

1. Identify a contemporary topic in computing or technology more broadly that is of interest to you and that has significant social, legal and/or ethical issues associated with it. Please contact the instructor if you have a question about whether a particular issue is appropriate.
2. Do enough background reading about your topic to form a well-founded opinion about it and its associated social, legal, and/or ethical issues.
3. Write a blog post for a tech literate audience that describes the issue and argues for your opinion.

Requirements

The following requirements must be met, but are not sufficient to ensure a high quality 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, including some not assigned for this course. These 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 details are drawn from a source, a contextual link should be included within the text. See the posts in the Science + Tech section of The Conversation for examples.
• 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 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 the post’s title and opening capture the reader’s attention and make them want to read more (without being clickbaity)?
• Will your computer science peers, potential employers, future co-workers and reasonably tech literate internet strangers find post accessible, interesting and engaging?
• Will an engaged reader be able to follow your reasoning with an appropriate amount of effort?
• Will an engaged reader agree that your position is well-founded even if they happen to disagree with it?

Resources

Refer to WA01 for:

• Advice on using AI for revision.
• General advice on writing Blog posts.

Submission

1. Add your post to your public facing blog.
2. Create a COMP492 folder in your Dickinson WiD Repository on GitHub.
3. Place a PDF of your post named WA05-BlogPost.pdf in your COMP492 folder.
4. If you used AI for revision, place a PDF of your “pre-AI” version named WA05-BlogPost-PreAI.pdf in your COMP492 folder.
5. Add a README.md file to your COMP492 folder.
6. Place a clickable link to your public-facing blog in the README.md file.

---

All textual materials used in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

All executable code used in this course is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later