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Understanding Ill-Structured Engineering Ethics Problems Through a Collaborative Learning and Argument Visualization Approach

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Abstract

As a committee of the National Academy of Engineering recognized, ethics education should foster the ability of students to analyze complex decision situations and ill-structured problems. Building on the NAE’s insights, we report about an innovative teaching approach that has two main features: first, it places the emphasis on deliberation and on self-directed, problem-based learning in small groups of students; and second, it focuses on understanding ill-structured problems. The first innovation is motivated by an abundance of scholarly research that supports the value of deliberative learning practices. The second results from a critique of the traditional case-study approach in engineering ethics. A key problem with standard cases is that they are usually described in such a fashion that renders the ethical problem as being too obvious and simplistic. The practitioner, by contrast, may face problems that are ill-structured. In the collaborative learning environment described here, groups of students use interactive and web-based argument visualization software called “AGORA-net: Participate – Deliberate!”. The function of the software is to structure communication and problem solving in small groups. Students are confronted with the task of identifying possible stakeholder positions and reconstructing their legitimacy by constructing justifications for these positions in the form of graphically represented argument maps. The argument maps are then presented in class so that these stakeholder positions and their respective justifications become visible and can be brought into a reasoned dialogue. Argument mapping provides an opportunity for students to collaborate in teams and to develop critical thinking and argumentation skills.

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Notes

  1. See also National Research Council (2004).

  2. See http://agora.gatech.edu/. By clicking on “Enter the AGORA-net,” a Flash application opens in the user’s browser. Every entry is saved on a central server so that synchronous and asynchronous online collaboration on argument maps from all over the world is possible. According to http://www.statowl.com/flash.php (accessed Oct 1, 2012), the Adobe Flash Player runs worldwide on approximately 95 % of all computer systems, across browsers and platforms without installation. AGORA-net should not to be confused with the software “Agora” which is available at http://www.ethicsandtechnology.com and described by van der Burg and van de Poel (2005). Whereas AGORA-net is a tool for the presentation of arguments in graphical form for all sorts of purposes, Agora focuses on the integration of ethical theories and codes of ethics in case-based engineering education. It provides theories, codes, cases, and exercises, and it offers templates and hints that structure user input in the form of texts.

  3. Hoffmann (2007, 2008). See also Carr (2003) and Bell (2004). With regard to the function of CSAV to enable students to cope with ill-structured problems, see Andriessen et al. (2003), Conklin (2003), Kirschner et al. (2003), Okada et al. (2008), and van Gelder et al. (2004).

  4. Tasks for training with comments for instructors are available in Hoffmann (2011). Instructors are invited to contact the first author of this article to become a member of the AGORA-project “AGORA instructors” where exemplary solutions can be found.

  5. Before that, Dr. Hoffmann taught approximately ten courses in which students used the freely available concept mapping software Cmap (http://cmap.ihmc.us/) to perform “Logical Argument Mapping (LAM)” in similar, project-based settings. LAM presupposes that students learn the basics of propositional logic. This is no longer necessary since the rules on which LAM is based are implemented in the AGORA software. A first AGORA-based version of an Engineering Ethics class was taught simultaneously at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at Bauman Moscow State Technical University in the fall of 2011.

  6. The Neanderthal problem was created by the research team for a recently concluded grant project. Dr. Roberta M. Berry, Georgia Institute of Technology, served as the principal investigator and the project title was “Ethically Contentious Research and Innovation: An Interdisciplinary and Inter-institutional Experiment in Ethics Education and Assessment,” NSF EESE Program, Award ID SES-0832912. The Neanderthal problem and four other “fractious problems” created for the project are available at the University of Illinois Ethics CORE (Collaborative Online Resource Environment) http://nationalethicscenter.org/resources/808.

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Acknowledgments

The research and software development described in this article has been supported by a Grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education, Grant P116S100006. We want to thank Erik Robbins, Romeo Cabanban, Darren Samuel Harris, Sallie Lu, Rajitha Siyasena, Kim-Quyen Thi Tran, Robert DePietro, and Thomas Pilliod for allowing us to reproduce excerpts from the argument maps they produced for their class projects.

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Hoffmann, M., Borenstein, J. Understanding Ill-Structured Engineering Ethics Problems Through a Collaborative Learning and Argument Visualization Approach. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 261–276 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9430-y

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