My dream unit plan, which explores networking and the bigger pictures involved in cybersecurity and the ethics of technology, challenges students to do much more than just learn about HTTP and ARP spoofing. Instead, I've intentionally built in open-ended, challenging questions about ethics and the future of technology, with the goal of using them to broaden students' perspectives about technology and their agency in its development. For example, I plan to ask my students this question while they're in this unit:
How do we reconcile the insecurities of complex technology with technology’s tendency (and need?) to become increasingly complex?
This, I think, is a fairly straightforward question without a straightforward answer. I like it because it challenges students to think about technology's path to where it is today, that is, the past, but it also requires them to think about the future and how they will participate in it. All my students in all my classes use chromebooks, and they've grown to be pretty reliant on chromebooks as learning tools. And it's not just the chromebooks: now, students use Google Classroom, DeltaMath, and a host of other new technologies to broaden their learning. When presented with this question, students will have to consider not only the general implications of this question but also the personal ones, that impact the way that they interact individually with technology. What does technology's trend toward complexity mean for everyone else, sure, but what does it mean for you? Is it good that students are reliant on chromebooks now? What will the next generation of students use to learn?
These types of questions necessitates conversation, and students will have to use their language skills to communicate explicitly with their peers about it. No technical knowledge will be helpful here (at least in the actual answering of the question). Instead, students will have to take what they know about technology and formulate convincing opinions about it that they can use to discuss this question with their peers. There is no correct answer, giving this question a very creative and open-ended cognitive demand, and some great news is that it ties directly in to Colorado's standards for computer science: 3.8.5.d: Identify influential computing innovations, and identify the beneficial and harmful effects they have had, or could have, on society, economy and culture.
I'm excited to assess learning like this. It's not always that I get to assess student learning through something like a debate in a math or computer science class, and something that really excites me about computer science is its relative novelty, meaning that these types of debates are not only still up in the air, but also really new - there's not a lot of historical opinion students can default on, so instead they'll have to come up with their own. I'll assess their learning, then, by their communication skills, the thoroughness of their opinions, and also how well they actually participate in the discussion. Sure, I want students to have strong opinions, but I also want them to be malleable and able to be convinced by their peers. Are they actively developing their own perspectives, or did they settle on one and decide never to change it?
So, why's all this important? What do these considerations have to do with unit and lesson planning? Seriously, if a lesson objective is for students to come out on the other side knowing about the TCP handshake, what on earth does ethics have to do with that?
The key understanding, as I see it, is that much in the same way instruction needs cohesion within a lesson, lessons need cohesion throughout units. A learning objective helps a lesson stay on track, and big ideas help units stay on track. Without big ideas, lessons feel disconnected and pointless, especially in a unit like this! One day I might talk about the TCP handshake, and another day I might talk about encryption. Without a larger picture, a big idea, tying everything together, those two topics are only vaguely related. Each lesson would be a skill to learn, and either apply or forget about. With a big picture, each lesson instead acts like a tool for chipping away at some more important idea. I know encryption and the TCP handshake don't usually come up at the same time. By incorporating a big idea (ethics, complexity, etc.), they can! Knowledge stops just being a thing to learn and instead becomes something to apply. That's, to me, when learning is really good. If students can tie together marginally related ideas under one roof created by the big idea, then I'll know they've really hit the mark.