24.1. Pedagogical Goals and Design

24.1.1. Combining Topics

Our goals with this textbook are to combine introductory courses across several fields that normally don’t get combined. We hope that this attracts and introduces students to areas that they might not otherwise learn about, such as someone interested in social media learning about programming, or someone interested in programming learning about ethics.

As we combined these three areas, these were our strategies in doing so:

Programming Supports Social Media Topics

In combining introductory programming with the topics of social media and ethics, we wanted to incorporate these topics not additively but in a deeply integrated way. Of our three topics, we chose to organize our book around social media themes. This allows the learning and deployment of programming skills to function as a way of exploring these social media topics (by creating posting bots, scraping bots, recommendation bots, etc.). We felt it was important programming be a supporting topic rather than the main organizing theme to appeal to students more interested in social media than in programming.

Integrating Ethics

To integrate ethical considerations throughout the textbook in an inclusive and non-prescriptive way, we introduce a diverse set of ethical frameworks as analytical tools (e.g., Confucianism, Aztec Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, Ethics of Care, Ubuntu Ethics). Then in assignments and throughout the rest of the book we raise ethical considerations and ask students in discussions and assignments (including reflecting on the code they write) to practice and develop their skill in viewing situations through at least two ethical frameworks, comparing how each of those frameworks would parse the ethical dilemmas in the situation.

24.1.2. Activities and Interactivity

Design Activities

We wanted to give students opportunities to critique designs of social media and consider their own ideas for designing social media. To support this we use the CIDER method for critiquing designs and thinking of design changes. We also give students some more open ended design opportunities for conceptual design, as well as freedom in their programming assignments to make design decisions and explain and critique their design decisions.

Interactive Coding

For the programming sections of each chapter, we provide Jupyter Notebook pages in our book for demos, practice problems, and assignments. This lets students load, run and experiment on these programming pages. We also created optional fake bot libraries so students can experiment with bot code without needing an account.

24.1.3. Outline of course content and activities

Ch	Social Media Topic	Programming Topic	Programming Demo/Activity	Other Activity
2	Definitions	What is programming?	Demo bot that posts	Ethics Frameworks
3	Bots	Statements, vars, sleep	Bot posts multiple times	Find real bots
4	Data	Data types in python	Get data from posts	Design a view of posts
5	History of Social Media	Looping w/ lists and dictionaries	Loop through posts	Social media use cases
6	Authenticity	N/A	Look up info about post / poster	Analyze Facebook name rules
7	Trolling	Conditionals, String manipulation	Make reply bot and troll it	Examples of trolling
8	Data Mining	Sentiment Analysis, loop counters	Sentiment analysis on sets of posts	Categories predicted for you
9	Privacy and Security	Functions	Track use of functions	Analyze GDPR
10	Accessibility	N/A	Look through alt text of posts	Accessible design analysis
11	Recommendation Algorithms	Dictionary counters	Recommend a friend	Think of recommendation algorithms
12	Virality	N/A	None (yet)	What values do you have for virality?
13	Mental Health	N/A	Show only “positive” posts	Mental health design analysis
14	Content Moderation	Trees, Recursion, DFS	Display or hide comments/replies	Try reporting a comment
15	Content Moderators	N/A	None (yet)	Content moderation game
16	Crowdsourcing	Force-directed graphs (planned)	Visualize networks (planned)	None (yet)
17	Harassment	N/A	Group block (planned)	Features used for harassment
18	Public Criticism and Public Shaming	N/A	None (yet)	Design retract post
19	Capitalism	Programming & gender	None	Game / Imagine alternatives
20	Colonialism	Colonialism in programming	None	Imagine alternatives