| Topic area | Intellectual Property |
| Target audience | Undergraduate students in general |
| Activity type | Questionnaire for CIS students to administer to the general college student population |
| Time required | One week before the unit for the students to administer the survey (3 to 6 hours). One to two weeks for the unit's presentation (3 to 6 hours). One out-of-class hour for a team of two to complete the on-line quiz. |
| Attachments | Survey |
| Additional materials | None. |
| Background needed to complete the assignment | Students will be given at least ten or more copies of the attached questionnaire to begin the exercise. Beyond this, no particular knowledge or skills about software piracy, intellectual property rights, or copyright laws are needed prerequisite to the unit. |
| References | Social Issues in Computing: putting computing in its Place by Chuck Huff and Thomas Finholt, McGraw-Hill, 1994 pp.491-521. |
| Last modified | August 1998 |
Goals for the activity:
The first goal is for undergraduate computer students to discover the use and misuse of computer
software among their fellow college students. The second goal is to examine personal utility
through tradeoff analysis. The third goal is to measure cognition, attitudes, and intentions of
students using software. The fourth goal is to have students to begin critical thinking about
software piracy prior to the study of a unit on ethics in computers. The fifth goal is to have
students interpret an educational software license.
Knowledge / skills / attitudes to be developed (behavioral objectives):
Students will discover the attitudes of fellow non-CIS students about their use and misuse of
computers and software. The students will complete an essay on software piracy. The student will
complete an on-line quiz on ethics in computing including intellectual property rights.
Procedure:
Prior to the reading assignment (at least one week) on intellectual property rights and the
computer ethics unit in an undergraduate computer course, the student is asked to have ten or more
peer students who are not computer-related majors to complete the anonymous questionnaire about
software usage and misuse. The student is asked to compile the results before the first day of the
unit, while they are reading the chapter or handout of general computer ethics. After a brief
introduction of copyright laws and fair use educational policy, the instructor will lead a
discussion about the software piracy by having student report their general findings. This is
followed by one or more videos on the subject. Then the student should write a short formal paper
(two or three pages at most with references) presenting an argument (pro or con) to the
intellectual property issue , the fairness of the United States copyright laws, and conclude with a
personal comment as to whether their attitude toward intellectual property rights has changed by
completing this activity and the unit studied. At least one student will be asked to research the
contrast of the copyright laws of the eastern versus the western culture and lead a discussion of
the difference discovered as a follow-up to the unit. At least one student group will be asked to
compile the results of the students individual work into one large report of the student's
findings. All students will complete an on-line open book cooperative quiz to complete the unit
(http://www.intro.net/jtaylor/ethics/quiz.html).
Assessing outcomes:
The assessment is in three parts. The instructor will grade the student data collection and summary
of the data from the questionnaire as the first part of the grade in the normal fashion of grading
a laboratory report. The instructor will grade the student's position paper according to essay
standards. The instructor will assign quiz grades as to the number of correct short answers plus
subjective grades for the short essay questions.
Additional remarks:
None.
Author contact information:
Professor John T. Taylor
Computer Information Science
Brandon Campus
Hillsborough Community College
Tampa, FL 33619
Work phone: (813) 253-7808
Home phone: (813) 253-6584
E-mail: jtaylor@intro.net
Home page: http://www/intro.net/jtaylor