ALICIA PATTERSON
Interdisciplinary work
Writing
A team of philosophers, designers, and a computer scientist worked to embed ethics into an Intro to Python class. The ethics component was tied to the final project, where students practiced the skills they developed in class with open datasets.
Doing collaborative work to build new partnerships across ethics and technical fields can be hard, but is extremely rewarding. We share our experiences doing it at Georgetown and offer some practical advice.
Teaching:
embedding ethics
1 / Advanced Programming
2021 / COSC150 with Dr. Ray Essick
Read more about some of the assignments, activities we developed and shared outside of Georgetown as a result of this collaboration
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2020 / COSC150 with Dr. Ray Essick
Read more about the modules we built for Dr. Essick's class:
2 / Introduction to Python
2023 / COSC010 with Dr. Shira Wein
Browse the educational resources we developed to teach students to think critically about publicly available data
Student Engagement
The Carpe DM: Exploring Digital Intimacy Workshop
Exploring intimacy in the digital age through art
This workshop was a collaborative effort between myself and two designers, Assistant Professor Julie Sayo and Senior Designer & Assistant Research Professor Sydney Luken.
Professor Sayo and I were brainstorming ways for students to reflect on their experiences of digital intimacy with the tools of design and standpoint theory, but we didn’t want to explicitly introduce terms such as “affordances” or “manipulative design,” or “standpoint” since we only had an hour with the students and the activity was an extracurricular activity. We wanted the experience to be fun, engaging, and foster a discussion.
Professor Sayo had the idea of taking inspiration from surrealist artists to make an "Exquisite Corpse” of sorts- to make a collaborative art project, which used images drawn or assembled by students as a means of reflecting on the ways in which technology influences the ways in which they connect to others. Students were given cards with the prompts: “ ______ makes it easier/harder for me to ________”. While we didn’t introduce the term the cards were a way of getting students to analyze the affordances of a design. Moreover, we implicitly introduced the methodology of standpoint theory by asking students not to reflect generally on how technology impacted intimate relationships, but rather to start from their own experiences. At the end of the workshop, their images were assembled together to form a patchwork quilt of reactions on technology’s impact on student’s behavior.
