Jose A. Cruz-Cruz

Value integration: From educational computer games to academic communities

How do ethics apply to computer programming, or to software development? Another question is “How can software design-specifically values-based design-advance the discipline of ethics?” The answer is that techniques used in realizing values in educational computer games can help faculty communities develop statements of values. This article explains how, and recounts the experience of the University of Puerto Ricos College of Business Administration in crafting, translating, implementing, and challenging a declaration of their common values.

Work in progress — The ethics across the curriculum toolkit: An online environment for ethics resources

Ethics across the curriculum (EAC) is an approach to ethics education that relies on ethics modules integrated directly into the mainstream curriculum. It empowers engineering instructors, to serve as ethics mentors to their students by providing them a supportive infrastructure of tools and resources that can be customized for specific classroom needs. Because of this, EAC must be built on an interdisciplinary community of collaborators; ethicists team up with engineers, university faculty with ethics officers from businesses. The authors of this work in progress have received a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 0551779) to develop a prototype toolkit using an open courseware tool, Connexionsreg. In FIE 2005, they outlined the toolkit in its preliminary stages. This work in progress will update that earlier work.

Work in Progress - 15/85 a Toolkit Concepts: Ethics Across the Curriculum at UPRM

A series of workshops to introduce faculty to EAC (ethics across the curriculum) have been carried out at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. These workshops constitute the first stage of a comprehensive strategy, the 15/85 EAC model program. The past two years have provided time to examine the challenges facing the implementation of 15/85. The principle challenges arise from the need to build and sustain a core EAC community. In response, a virtual workshop format has been developed that links real world workshops and activities. The ethics toolkit concept delivers this virtual workshop by providing an online environment that will use the networking and open sourcing capabilities of the Internet to generate, improve, and disseminate EAC best practices, including cases, modules, and instructor support materials. This paper will summarize 15/85, report on its challenges, and outline a novel approach to dealing with these challenges, the online ethics toolkit concept

Professional staff coordination: support for staffing at professional service organizations

Staffing is an important, but complex and time consuming function within most service providing organizations, from store outlets to professional services organizations to government agencies. The dedication to, and hence the quality of, staffing will probably determine whether a service provider is efficient, effective and competitive. We present a prelude of an ongoing research effort studying the professional staff coordination (PSC) decision-making process, aimed at developing an appropriate model and intelligent computational system to support this increasingly important function.

Work in Progress: The EAC Matrix - Keeping and Assessing Ethics Momentum Between ABET Visits

This work in progress describes ongoing initiatives at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez to sustain and assess ethics integration momentum between ABET visits. The EAC Matrix is a three-dimensional correlation between ethics across the curriculum objectives, individual engineering courses and activities, and their sequential development throughout the undergraduate curriculum. This presentation describes the matrix and outline its preliminary results