Abstract:

Computing and information systems give rise to social issues and ethical dilemmas. These ethical issues include legal, privacy and intellectual property rights and their applications to IT (Information Technology). Educating ethics for computer science students aimed at raising their awareness about ethics in IT and in research. Moreover, it targets specific IT subfields such as ethics in business and in the workplace. In the current information age, Information Technology ethics is important for community members as important as for IT specialist.

"Community Service is one way of putting your mark on the world and experiencing diversity to enhance your mind and spirit.", Caitlin Lutsch. According to this quote, many courses can be inspired to motivate their students to be remarkable members in their society through community services. By adopting this concept, a very tedious course can be converted to an interesting and exciting course. The Computer Ethics is one of the important courses that need to implement this concept to increase the society awareness.

This vision inspires us to draw innovative objectives of education practices that would benefit both students and society; summarized as the following:
• Participate in the community by discovering the current computing issues and studying the community’s opinion in the international issues.
• Contribute in the society awareness about current professional, ethical, legal and social issues.
• Apply critical thinking and produce explanations that might be persuasive to a skeptical, yet open-minded audience.
• Prepare both students and audience to become responsible, ethical users of future technologies.

Formulating these objectives leads to satisfy them by a set of various educational activities. One of these activities is conducting local studies in Saudi Arabia. These studies require surveying the local community about any social, legal, or ethical aspect of IT. Afterward, results were presented as Infographics along with ethical recommendations to spread the awareness. Consequently, these Infographics shared with local community as posters and online media.

Another activity aimed to challenge students to think critically by identifying and criticizing different situations in which there may be ethical or legal issues. This have been achieved by investigating for the current hot ethical or legal IT cases, then debates these cases to reach ethical decision that supports persuasive and logical arguments.

Additionally, to overcome the lack of local knowledge and resources about legal laws in Saudi Arabia, expert local speakers have been invited to help in closing this gap. That would help also in transfer this knowledge to the local community through students. Furthermore, due to active role of the social networks in the current age raise the benefit of adding another activity of sharing, spreading the awareness and discussing various issues regarding IT Ethics through dedicated networks (e.g. Twitter/Youtube). Students were encouraged for additional activity of writing articles to summarize their ethical global and local ethical knowledge and share it.

At the end, the variety of activities helped and encouraged the students to be ethically and socially responsible and communicated effectively with their peers, as members of multidisciplinary teams or as leaders. Moreover, the effect of these activities has a remarkable impact on both the course material and community.

Keywords:

Ethics, Information Technology, Best Practices, InfoGraphics, Community Service.