Sherry Jones

Current code of ethics and professional conduct in programming, as recommended by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), includes such ethical principles as avoid causing harm to users, respect users’ privacy, and fulfilling one’s social responsibilities. Although ACM’s code of ethics encourages programmers to operate in good faith and consider their responsibilities to a society or nation, the code does not address how programmers, bound by a company’s code of ethics while acting at the behest of the company’s corporate interests, should respond to ethical challenges that arise as companies expand across national borders, such as surveillance capitalism, cultural and moral relativism, or globalization and nationalism. This presentation will examine current ethical problems in the technology and the gaming industries and proposes a re-examination of ethics in programming by revisiting the moral philosophies of Foote, Nietzsche, Rachels, and other thinkers.

Biography:

Sherry Jones holds an advanced graduate certification in teaching writing from Johns Hopkins University and MH in philosophy from the University of Colorado Denver. She is a philosophy and game design subject matter expert and instructor at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. She also serves as the editor-in-chief of The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education and as a steering committee board member of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Learning, Games, and Education. The U.S. Dept. of Education invited Ms. Jones to attend June 20, 2019 Summit on Education Blockchains to discuss policies on using blockchains to create digital identities and render educational data secure, accessible, and portable with zero-knowledge proofs.

Ms. Jones has published book chapters including exploring Nietzschean virtue ethics with the digital game, Life is Strange (upcoming 2019, ETC Press), and articles including “A Solution to OER Publication Resistance: Using Blockchain Technology to Protect Scholar Copyright” (2018, IJOER). Ms. Jones is the co-founder of Social Good Engine, LLC., an educational company that designs digital apps and games based on philosophical theories. Her current game-in-development is Elocutio, a 3D space-themed MMORPG that promotes evidence-based argumentation via Hegelian dialectic