Throughout history, the educational environments have been subject to many transformations due to the changes in technology, pedagogical strategies, and social mass media. This affirmation is not only valid, but it is also influencing in a vertiginously way the education structure. Technology enters the educational system very timidly, in particular in the American system of “higher education.”   This formal educational system is altering the essence of the traditional formation processes.   In view of this shift of paradigm, the New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT) play a fundamental role in higher education to confront the new and demanding challenges of globalization and internationalization.   Education, as a whole, and each one of its Institutions of Higher Education (IES), assume a series of challenges of institutional nature, for which it is indispensable to take measures such as the ones mentioned New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT), that allow   a competitiveness framework to offer better results.

Therefore, the IES must provide a favorable context in which the NICT contribute to generate and to produce knowledge, with an integral sense based on procedures, practices, models, and pedagogical methods to reach high quality standards. If we consider all of this and relate it to our discipline, which is namely ethics and the deontology of all these technologies of   communication, or Computer Ethics, we will have the presentation of what will come later when we discuss of the ACM, SIGs and SIGCSE, which are especial interest groups of Computer Science education, and have a curriculum promoted by for specifically by ACM. Such curriculum cannot lack a core and mandatory subject, Computer Ethics, for all and each one of the students.

The ACM (Association for Computer Machinery), is an educational and scientific international organization dedicates to progress in fine arts, sciences and information and communication technologies. The ACM since 1947 is one of the important guidelines all over the world, for its work and publication about universities and high schools curricula. This association is organized in 170 chapters and 34 groups called SIGs (Special Interest Group). The SIGs regularly hold congresses and conferences in which innovations in several fields appear. One of them, as we will see shortly, is the preoccupation of teaching Computer Ethics.

The objective of this article is to analyze the treatment of Computer Ethics in teaching Computer Science and Information and Communication Technologies. We want to study the ethics issues that most frequently appear, and if the use of the new computer technologies brings about new ethical dilemmas in making ethical decisions. We studied these topics of computer ethics in the articles discussed in the last five ACM conferences in order to compare the similarities and differences. The contents and comparative analyses of all these topics confirmed our hypothesis that we have started with: ACM has had a dynamic evolution during the last years in order to fulfill the professional code ethics. The most important goal of ACM is the formation of all of its members to be good professionals who have a strong sense of ethics and   the ethical and legal responsibilities that are due to occur while exercising their professions.

In the different congresses held by ACM and ACM SIGCSE, Computer Ethics is treated in   a very generic and conceptual way. Six ethical principles organized according to the table of the 40 fundamental ethical principles, subjects or lessons of computer science ethics that appear in the book   Deontología de la Informática (Deontology of Informatics)  of the computer science professor Jesus Maria Vázquez. In this study we detail the most discussed articles and the percentage of articles out of the total, so that we learn the which subjects are of greatest interest as well as those that may be treated in the future. It is a work centered exclusively in these studied articles.

Another objective that we attempt to achieve in this study, in addition to the above previously mentioned objective, is a more generic one which is to analyze and classify the fundamental principles,   the subjects or the lessons of Computer   Ethics within the thematic treated in the congresses of ACM and ACM SIGCSE, in such a way that we are able to   determine how the professionals in field of computer must apply them, as well as to indicate those that have not been dealt in a specific way. Within the more specific objectives of computer ethics, we point out these: to analyze the content of ethics   in the teaching of computer science in the   ACM SIGCSE from 2000 to 2005; to analyze and to classify the subjects and the keywords so that it is   possible to associate a a subject to one of   40 main ethical principles; to emphasize the most named ethical principles (ACM and ACM SIGCE); and to study which of these fundamental principles are genetic, for they also belong to other ethical professionals and which ones are specific of the computer science Ethics.

The methodology used for this study is the revision, the content, and comparative analyses of the different ethical issues discussed in all articles throughout all of the editions of ACM and   ACM SIGSCE in the last five years.

The articles have been classified and fitted according to the 40 ethical principles that are in the book of computer science, Deontología de la Informática (Deontology of Informatics). We have chosen these 40 principles to categorize the articles because they represent a perfect compendium of the analysis of the subjects that have had a greater presence in several deontological codes. Within this series of codes, the authors of the book observed the principles that most appeared and they included them in a list of 40 subjects. For this reason it is very interesting and important to include a wide range of concepts that appear with greater profusion in the fundamental principles of computer ethics.

Once we finished categorizing all articles of the editions of ACM SIGCSE (1983 until 2005) the resulting data was compiled in a database to work with it more easily and use the data to get a series of percentages to quantify those articles that had appeared more frequently,   49 articles altogether. In the same way 78 articles of ACM were analyzed (2000-2005) and were classified according to the 40 fundamental ethical principles or lessons of Computer Ethics. They were added to a database and we calculated the percentages of the number of times of occurrence of the ethical code.

The last step was to get the final total (ACM and ACM SIGCSE) of the number of times that a principle had been named and which ones of these principles had   not been dealt with in the 127 studied articles, with the goal   of analyzing the interest of conducting a study for the next congresses of ACM.

Out completing our analysis,   we   obtained some results that allow us to formulate conclusions and a Code of Computer Ethics.