The university's faculty has designated this course as a writing-intensive course. The assigned writing project must include:

- library/learning resource center research of print and electronic resources, 

- periodic submission of drafts for faculty review and feedback throughout the quarter, and 

- a final paper of 2500+ words written in APA style.

Research Writing Guide, APA style tutorial and APA Example Paper Web links are available for students at the NAU Online Library.  You may also choose the additional links on APA citations and The Writing Process. Student research papers produced in this and other NAU courses may be eligible for the campus research scholarship competition.

Research Paper Timeline

You will work on the research paper all term, submitting pieces of it each week. Listed below are the Research Paper assignments due throughout the course.  

Research Paper Topic

The topic of your paper should be directly related to computer ethics. Browsing the table of contents of your textbook may give you some ideas for your topic. You may wish to perform a Web search on any potential topics to ensure there is enough information available on the subject. Ask your instructor any questions that you have in regards to choosing an appropriate topic.

Begin the process of choosing the topic for your research paper.  Refer to Understanding the Assignment hosted by theUNC College of Arts and Sciences and Choosing a Topic documents as you begin the process, as well as reviewing the Choosing a Topic Tutorial from the NAU Online Library. The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the ethical dilemma people face when using a particular technology.  The paper is argumentative, meaning persuasive. The research paper must investigate more than one point of use/use/ethical perspective.   Based on your research and the ethical approaches and decision process learned in the course, come to a conclusion and persuade the reader that one particular perspective is the ethical way to use the technology. 


Here's a list of topics to consider for your research paper:

- Electronic health records

- Telemedicine 

- Mobile and wireless technologies 

- File sharing - music 

- Privacy 

- Intellectual property 

- Plagiarism 

- Hackers 

- Identity theft 

- Workplace monitoring 

- Spamming 

- Surveillance technology 

- Patents 

- Trade secrets 

- Open source code 

- Cybersquatting 

- Computer crime 

- Software quality issues 

- Outsourcing 

- Digital divide 

- Online education 

- Freedom of expression 

- Copyrights 

- Social Networks