2.2 Toysmart case exercises - student module

Toysmart, a dot-com that sold educational toys for children, went bankrupt June 2000. The ethical issues surrounding e-business come into sharp focus as one reviews the creation, operation, and dissolution of this corporation. Student exercises in business and computer ethics form the content of this module which links to the Toysmart case narrative displayed at the Computing Cases Website (http://computingcases.com). Computing Cases is an NSF-funded project devoted to developing and displaying cases studies in computer ethics in an online format. Toysmart along with nine other cases will be published by Jones&Bartlett as Good Computing: A Virtue Approach to Computer Ethics, a textbook in computer ethics. Exercises in this module will provide students with frameworks that allow them to identify key facts, separate relevant from irrelevant materials, and draw from comprehensive historical case descriptions matters to inform decision-making and problem solving. Making use of an analogy between ethics and design in problem-solving, students will (1) specify problems using socio-technical analysis, (2) design solutions to these problems, (3) employ ethics tests to compare, rank, and evaluate solutions, and (4) use a feasibility test to anticipate obstacles to solution implementation. This module is being developed as a part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation, "Collaborative Development of Ethics Across the Curriculum Resources and Sharing of Best Practices," NSF-SES-0551779.