Speculative Ethics Classroom Exercises
This page contains information and resources about the Black Mirror Writers Room and teaching exercises for ethical speculation in computing. For more teaching exercises and resources on ethics education in computing, see our Responsible Computing page.
Black Mirror Writers Room
Let your imagination run wild in this creative speculation activity that helps computing students think through possible consequences of technology.
Ethics & Cybersecurity for AI
Facilitate discussions on computer vision and threat modeling, attack vectors for machine learning, and cybersecurity/ethics of machine learning applied to spatial data described in this blog post.
Issue Spotting and Future News
This assignment focuses on issue spotting in the news, creative ethical speculation, and thinking through solutions and better futures.
Related Publications
Samantha Dalal, Julie Jarzemsky, Michelle Tran, and Casey Fiesler. Cyber + AI in the Classroom: A Case Study. 2023.
Shamika Klassen and Casey Fiesler. “‘Run a little wild with your imagination’: Ethical Speculation in Computing with Black Mirror. In Proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2022), 2022.
Casey Fiesler. The Black Mirror Writers Room: The Case (and Caution) for Ethical Speculation in CS Education. 2022.
Casey Fiesler. Black Mirror, Light Mirror: Teaching Technology Ethics Through Speculation. Originally published in How We Get to Next, 2018.
Casey Fiesler. "Innovating like an optimist, preparing like a pessimist: Ethical speculation and the legal imagination." Colo. Tech. LJ 19 (2021): 1.
This work (and ongoing research on ethical speculation and computer science education) is funded by the Responsible Computer Science Challenge, and the CISE and SaTC directorates of the National Science Foundation.