New turns for STEM: weighing the ethical forces in technology. From the article: 

Over the past 40 years, the number of graduate students studying STEM has more than doubled to almost 700,000. Yet over that same time period, relatively little has been done to educate those students about the political, psychological, economic, social and ethical dimensions of their work.

Yesterday’s STEM curriculum produced an environment where tech platforms and products were developed in isolation from the broader effects they had on society. We need to update the syllabus so society gains a wider understanding of both the good and bad that come with massively accelerated technological development….

To help understand how we can enhance STEM education, I have been meeting academics and experts in the U.S. and abroad to think through the problem. A key point we have learned is that there exists a set of professors who are already working on enhancing STEM education. These academics cross many fields, from computer science and philosophy to social and economic fields and many branches of ethical study. Often, their work is described as adding “ethics” to computer science, but its scope is broader than that philosophical discipline of morality….

h/t David Hildreth

For other posts on humanities and STEM education, see here