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Most courses you undertake in the School of Informatics have predominantly scientific or technical content and you spend most of your time developing technical knowledge and skills. This is not the case in the Professional Issues Course. After graduation many of you will work as computing professionals in an engineering or commercial role or as a research scientist. In such settings your professional work is regulated by the organisational setting and more widely by the legal, social, cultural and ethical context you are working in. The Professional Issues course explores the constraints and obligations you will work under, the dilemmas that arise as part of professional work and professional approaches to the resolution of the competing demands placed on a computing professional.
The Professional Issues course aims to provide a general awareness of these issues and to cover some of them in depth. The course will involve directed reading, case studies and discussion.
Meetings take place in the Medical School, Teviot, Teviot Lecture Theatre (find it here) at 11:00 on Mondays and Fridays.
This course is compulsory for all students taking a single or combined Honours degree involving Computer Science or Software Engineering. Parts of the course are useful for the planning and execution of System Design Project.
Copies of material used in class will be available in PDF format on the course webpage. Printed copies will be available at the ITO after each meeting. Please buy (and read!!) the first book on the reading list and preferably also the second. The website also contains a list of other relevant documents.
The examination (that contributes 85% of the asssessment of the course) will involve a compulsory multi-part short-answer question(Q1) and an essay-style question (choose one from two Q2/Q3). The assessed coursework (15%) will also be an essay to allow practice in essay writing. You are encouraged to submit draft essays for comment on the quality of the writing. Examination questions may be based on the content of lectures given by visitors as well as on course notes and texts.
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