Come Watch the APPE Upper Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl!

Come join us and watch the 4th annual APPE Midwest Regional Ethics Bowl at Northwestern Illinois University on Saturday, November 21, from 10-7. Teams from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan will answer questions about ethics cases on a wide range of topicsm such as the classroom (e.g. cheating or plagiarism), personal relationships (e.g. dating or friendship), professional ethics (e.g. engineering, law, medicine), or social and political ethics (e.g. free speech, gun control, etc.). The three top-scoring teams will proceed to the final competition, held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics in March of next year.

The competition will be held in the Student Union on Northwestern Illinois University's main campus, at 5500 N. St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. You can download a copy of the cases, and also learn more about the history of the Ethics Bowl. For information about how to participate in future Ethics Bowl competitions, please visit APPE's Ethics Bowl page.

Best of luck to all of the participating teams, and we hope to see you there!

Thanksgiving Hours

The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions Library will be closed from Thursday, November 26 to Sunday, November 29th for the Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend. We will resume normal hours on Monday, November 30th.

Developed an ethics case study? Share it with us!

Have you developed a case study that you use in your ethics course?

Have you and a group of friends acted out a case study looking at ethical issues in scientific research?

Do you think you could write a case based on recent stories in the media?

We are looking to collect ethics case studies that have been developed by faculty, students, and instructors to be included in the Case Study Collection of the Ethics Education Library. This collection -which already includes over three hundred cases- is meant to be a clearinghouse for students, instructors, and researchers interested in finding ethics cases to use in workshops, presentations, or in the classroom.

We are interest in cases from all areas of professional ethic including the sciences, social sciences, medicine, arts, and the humanities.

Please email Kelly Laas, the librarian of CSEP, with any cases or questions you may have.

Ethics Bowl Reginal Cases

The regional cases for the APPE Ethics Bowl have now been posted!

The Ethics Bowl combines the excitement and fun of a competitive tournament with a valuable educational experience for undergraduate students. In the fall of 2009, ten regional ethics bowls will take place throughout the United States. In February 2010, the top scoring teams in the ten regional ethics bowls (32 total) will compete at the national championship of the IEB in Cincinnati, Ohio at the nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE).

For more information on how to participate in a regional ethics bowl competition,and information about the locations and dates of these competitions,please visit APPE's Ethics Bowl page.

Ethics Education Library

CSEP is pleased to announce a new resource for educators interested in incorperating professional ethics in their courses and grant proposals. The Ethics Education Library is a collection of resources for scholars and university administrators interested in developing ethics training and instruction programs for undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students. It includes seminal articles on how to go about teaching ethics, examples of what other educators and universities have done in the past, evaluation and assessment techniques, and an ever-expanding Case Study Collection searchable by topic, discipline, and author.

We are currently in the beginning stages of developing this resource, so please let us know of materials and cases you think should be included in the Ethics Education Library, or ways in which we can improve the site!

This project has been made possible through a generous grant from the National Science Foundation. Please also take a look at the beta version of the new and improved Online Ethics Center,that is also being developed through this grant project.

Welcome to Our New Web Site!

CSEP has a new web site! The site includes all of the resources found on our old site, with a number of new additions, including an expanded Ethics Across the Curriculum section, updated Resource Guides, and access to the full text of many publications by CSEP faculty and fellows.

We are still working on perfecting the site, so please contact us at csep@iit.edu if you run into any bugs, or have any suggestions!

Case Study Video

Asked to prepare a presentation on some of the ethical issues faced in adviser/student relationships, Dylan Erb and Hector Baez, participants in an Illinois Institute of Technology's Research Experience for Undergraduates, created the following video case study. The video elicited a lively discussion among students and faculty, and also has a great sound track (especially if you are a fan of Johnny Cash).

The Graduate Student Laborer

This NSF REU at Illinois Institute for Technology is a 10 week program for undergraduate students the multidisciplinary field of hybrid electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. The objectives of the program are to train undergraduate students in basic research through challenging HEV/PHEV-related engineering projects performed with research mentors from IIT, expose them to the broader impacts of their research with lectures from experts and tours of facilities and integrate ethics discussions and training into all aspects of the student experience. CSEP has been participating in a weekly meeting on ethical issues in research.

Thanks to Dylan and Hector for sharing their video!