SIGCSE, Birds of a Feather (BOF) Session “eTextbooks”
Posted: March 4, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: curriculum, design, education, higher education, learning, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches, universal principles of design Leave a commentMy blogging of these events is getting later and later but another BOF session from Thursday night, hosted by Professor Cliff Schaffer from Virginia Tech. As always, my words may not quite match those of noted speakers.
Overall, a really thought-provoking panel – we all want to write but we ant to get all of the new features, without necessarily really knowing what the features available are or what the cost will be. The fear of wasting time is a constant spectre over the eBooks market. If I make it, I want it to be useful and feature-rich for some time.
What does the term eText even mean? Is it a type of text, the platform, the concept – some intersection? The virtues are obvious: portability, additional features like hypertext and search – but is this it? What are the educational benefits?
Cliff’s main idea was that, for our educational purposes, eBooks support interactivity and, hence assessment. There are projects like OpenDSA, a data structures and algorithms course in the creative commons. They’ve got content, texts, visualisations and assessment. Once a student has finished, they appear to be confident that they have understood the material.
Looking at Khan Academy it’s easy to focus on the videos, when the assessment exercises and awards system is an equally important part. But this is for Maths which is (notionally) easier to generate problem variations for and assess the result, to allow exercise in variations.
When students interact correctly with this progress determination activities, they answer the question, get told of their mark and given feedback and can then go again. Why do we mean by interactivity? (NF note, I’ll blog on this some more, later.)
There are a lot of solutions in this space, including algorithm simulation environment – how can we go beyond the textbook? Do we need to abandon the idea of the textbook as a closed container – does it make any sense any more?
The Open University in the UK has split their material between paper and electronic – electronic because of all the features and paper because students feel ripped off without a paper copy! The electronic materials have three levels of response to assessment-based interaction: firstly mark and just note where errors occurred, on the second pass, mark and suggest materials, on the third pass, if still under performing, direct student to read the material again. This is a bespoke system, producing Flash, but they hope to move to HTML5 at some stage.
Other tools mentioned included CTAT (Cognitive Tutoring Authoring Tools), AlgoViz and the amazing interactive textbook system written in Python, thinkcspy.appspot.com. If we’re going to have systems like Khan Academy, we need them to decomposable and re-usable but it would be nice if their grading system (badges) could work with us.
On the thinkcspy.appspot.com site, Brad and David’s book (Luther college), customised by Christine Alvarado, contains mid-term grades, log files and then end of term survey. CodeLens, visualisation was most correlated with results. However, outside of class time, students did not use most of interactive elements. The night before a test they flipped through the book. To learn this content, they have to change behaviour. Had assessment items already built in to drive knowledge boundary forward but students chose not to engage with the book.
Mark mentioned a new NSF project in October – building CS books for HS students to allow them to learn CS. Can’t use apprenticeship model because HS students don’t have time to mentor or be mentored because of an already full curriculum. The curse of outreach is that we have to take the time to produce and try to jam this into a heavily prescribed and full curriculum, to interest students in something – we need a mechanism that people will consult outside but it’s obvious that people won’t (according to the above).
SIGCSE, Birds of a Feather (BOF) Session “CS Unplugged”
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: curriculum, design, education, higher education, principles of design, puzzles, reflection, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches, tools, universal principles of design, unplugged Leave a commentPoor Tim Bell. He must think I’m stalking him. I attended the BOF session for CS Unplugged, which quickly turned into the BOF on ‘Energising your Outreach to Schools” (my words). Once again Lynn Lambert and Tim shared their experiences with CS Unplugged to help us frame what was wrong with our outreach (or the problems that we had) in order to try and fix them.
The main issues were:
- How do we get into the curriculum?
- Bad/old equipment.
- Creating a meaningful activity in a very short time.
- Persistence – how we do we stay in their minds or their environment?
- Priming – how we prepare them for our visit?
- Time – how do we fit it all in and, more importantly, how does the teacher?
- Pick the right time to come in and interact with students, when teachers are happy to have you. Teachers don’t get a reward for dealing with students at elementary level.
- CS BIts and Bytes is a good newsletter
- cs4fn got another mention as a good website
- One amusing quote from a parent, after finding out what we did, was “I had no idea that CS had any application.” To our credit, nobody cried when this was told to the group.
- Involve people in discussing useful, relevant problems and how CS is used to help: suggestions included global warming and genomic sequencing.
Overall, another fun discussion with a lot of actively concerned people trying to make things better. Please leap in for corrections if I missed something important or got something wrong. I’m also happy to edit to add credits if required. 🙂
SIGCSE, Keynote #2, Hal Abelson, “The midwife doesn’t get to keep the baby.”
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: abelson, authenticity, DSpace, education, higher education, mit, MITx, OCW, reflection, resources, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches 6 CommentsWell, another fantastic keynote and, for the record, that’s not the real title. The title of the talk was From Computational Thinking to Computational Values. For those who don’t know who Hal Abelson is, he’s a Professor of EE/CS at MIT who has made staggering contributions to pedagogy and the teaching of Computer Science over the years. He’s been involved with the first implementations of Logo, changed the way we think about using computer languages, has been a cornerstone of the Free Software Movement (including the Foundation), led the charge of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) at MIT, published many things that other people would have been scared to publish and, basically, has spent a long time trying to make the world a better place.
It went without saying that, today, we were in for some inspiration and, no doubt, some sort of call to arms. We weren’t disappointed. What follows is as accurate a record as I could make, typing furiously. I took a vast quantity of notes over what was a really interesting talk and I’ll try to get the main points down here. Any mistakes are mine and I have tried to represent the talk without editorialising, although I have adjusted some of the phrasing slightly in places, so the words are, pretty much, Professor Abelsons’s.
Professor Abelson started from a basic introduction of Computational Thinking (CT) but quickly moved on to how he thought that we’d not quite captured it properly in modern practice: it’s how we look in this digital world and see it as a source of empowerment for everybody, as a life changing view. Not just CT, but computational values.
What do we mean? We’re not only talking about cool ideas but that these ideas should be empowering and people should be able to exercise great things and have an impact on the world.
He then went on to talk about Google’s Ngram viewer, which allows you to search all of the books that Google has scanned in and find patterns. You can use this to see how certain terms, ideas and names come and go over time. What’s interesting here is that (1) ascent to and descent from fame appears to be getting faster and (2) you can visualise all of this and get an idea of the half-life of fame (which was nearly the title of this post).
Abelson describes this as a generative platform, one which can be used for things that were not thought of it when it was built, one we can build upon ourselves and change over time. Generating new things for an unseen future. (Paper reference here was Nature, with a covering article from another magazine entitled “Researchers Aim to chart intellectual trends in Arxiv”)
Then the talk took a turn. Professor Abelson took us back, 8 years ago, when Duke’s “Give everyone an iPod” project had every student (eventually) with a free iPod and encouraged them to record, share and mix-up what they were working with.
Enter the Intellectual Property Lawyer. Do the students have permission to share the lecturer-created creative elements of the lectures?
Professor Abelson’s point is that we are booming more concerned with locking up our content into proprietary Content Management Systems (CMS) and this risks turning the academy into a marketplace for packaged ideas and content, rather than a place of open enquiry and academic freedom. This was the main theme of the talk and we’ve got a lot of ground left to cover here! This talk was for those who loved computational values, rather than property creation.
We visited the early, ham-fisted attempts to grant limited licences for simple activities like recording lectures and the immediately farcical notion that I could take notes of a lecture and be in breach of copyright if I then discussed it with a classmate who didn’t attend. Ngrams shows what happens when you have a system where you can do what you like with the data – what if the person holding that data for you, which you created, starts telling you what to do? Where does this leave our Universities?
Are we producing education or property? Professor Abelson sees this as a battle for the soul of the Universities. We should be generative.
We can take computational actions, actions that we will take to reinforce the sense that we have that people ought to be able to relish the power that they get from our computational thinking and computational ideas. This includes providing open courseware (like MIT’s OCW and Stanford’s AI) and open access to research, especially (but not only) when funded by the public purse.
As a teaser, at this point, Abelson introduced MITx, an online intensive learning system that opens up on MONDAY. No other real details – put it in your calendar to check out on Monday! MIT want their material and their content engines to be open source and generative – that word again! Put it into your own context or framework and do great things!
The companion visions to all of this are this:
- Great learning institutions provide universal access to course content. (OpenCourseWare)
- Great research institutions provide universal access to their collective intellectual resources.(DSpace)
What are the two reasons that we should all support these open initiatives? Why should we fill in the moat and open the drawbridge?
- Without initiatives to maintain them, we risk marginalising our academic values and stressing our university communities.
- To keep a seat at the table in decisions about the disposition of knowledge in the information age.
Abelson introduced an interesting report, “Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property”, which discusses the conflation of property and academic rights.
Basically, scientific literature has become property. We, academia, produce it and then give away our rights to journal publishers, who give us limited rights in exchange on a personal level and then hold onto it forever. Neither our institution nor the public has any right to this material anymore. We looked at some examples of rights. Sign up to certain publishers and, from that point on, you can use only up to 250 words of any of the transferred publications in a new work. The number of publishers is shrinking and the cost of subscription is rising.
Professor Abelson asked how it is that, in this sphere alone, the midwife gets to keep the baby? We all have to publish if we act individually, as promotions and tenure depend upon publication in prominent journals – but that there was hope (and here he referred to the Mathematical boycott of the Elsevier publishing group). HR 3699 (the Research Works Act) could have challenged any federal law that mandated open access on federally funded research. Lobbied for by the journal publishing group, it lost support, firstly from Elsevier, and then from the two members of Congress who proposed it
Even those institutions that have instituted an open access policy are finding it hard – some publishers have made specific amendments to the clause that allows pre-print drafts to be display locally to say “except where someone has an institutionally mandated open access policy”.
BUT. HR3699 has gone away for now. Abelson’s message is that there is hope!
We have allowed a lot of walled gardens to spring up. Places where data is curated and applications made available, but only under the permission of the gardener. Despite our libraries paying up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for access to the on-line journal stores, we are severely limited in what we can do with them. Your library cannot search it, index it, scrape it, or many other things. You can, of course, buy a service that provides some of these possibilities from the publisher. A walled garden is not a generative environment.
Jonathan Zittrain, 2008, listed two important generative technologies: the internet and the PC, because you didn’t need anyone’s permission to link or to run software. In Technology Review, now, Zittrain thinks that the PC is dead because of the number of walled gardens that have sprung up.
In Professor Abelson’s words:
“Network Effectslead toMonopoly Positionslead toConcentration of Channelslead toDecline of Generativity.“
“We have the spark of inspiration about how one should relate to their information environment and the belief that that kind of inspiration, power and generativity should be available to everybody.These beliefs are powerful and have powerful enemies. Draw on your own inspiration and power to make sure that what inspired us is going to be available to our students.“
SIGCSE Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic!
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: design, education, educational problem, fiero, higher education, magic, puzzles, reflection, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches, tools Leave a commentIf you’re at SIGCSE, then you’re probably one of the 1,000,000 people who jammed into the pretty amazing Wednesday session, Demystifying Computing with Magic, with Dan Garcia and David Ginat. Dan and David coped very well with a room that seemed to hold more and more people – in keeping with a magic show, we were all apparently trapped in a magic box.
The key ideas behind this session was that Dan and David would show us five tricks that would teach or introduce important computing notions, such as discrete maths, problem representation, algorithmic patterns and, the catch-all, general notions. Drawing on Silver’s 1997 paper, Fostering Creativity Through Instruction Rich In Mathematical Problem Solving and Problem Posing (It’s better in German, trust me), they focused on the notions of fluence (diverse directions for exploration), flexibility (adaptation to the task at hand – synonymous with cognitive flexibility), originality (unfamiliar utilisation of familiar notation), and awareness (being aware of the possible fixations[?] – to be honest, I didn’t quite get this and am still looking at this concept).
The tricks themselves were all fun and had a strong basis in the classical conceit of the stage magician that everything is as it seems, while being underpinned by a rigorous computational framework that explained the trick but in a way that inspired the Gardernesque a-ha! One trick guaranteed that three people could, without knowing the colour of their own hats, be able to guess their own hat colour, based on observing the two other hats, and it would be guaranteed that at least one person would get it right. There were card tricks – showing the important of encoding and the importance of preparation – modular arithmetic, algorithms, correctness proofs and, amusingly, error handling.
Overall, a great session, as evidenced by the level of participation and the number of people stacked three-high by the door. I had so many people sitting near my feet I began to wonder if I’d started a cult.
The final trick, Fitch Cheney’s Five Card Trick was very well done and my only minor irritation is that we were planning to use it in our Puzzle Based Learning workshop on Saturday – but if it’s going to be done by someone else, then all you can ask is that they do it well and it was performed well and explained very clearly. It even had 8 A-Ha’s! That’s enough to produce 2.66 Norwegian pop bands! If you have a chance to see this session anywhere else, I strongly recommend it.
(A useful website, http://www.cs4fn.org/magic, was mentioned at the end, with lots of resources and explanation for those of you looking to insert a little mathemagic into your teaching.)
SIGCSE Need A Teaching Framework: Hire a Science Fiction Author?
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: design, education, higher education, sigcse, teaching approaches, tools 1 CommentJust following up on the Science Fiction panel that I mention earlier, I had the opportunity to listen to, and later share excellent Japanese food with, Mike Richards from the Open University, UK. One of the things he mentioned at the SF panel was that they had used an SF writer, Cory Doctorow, to write a story that incorporated exactly the kind of elements that they wanted into a story. This was used for, correct me if I’m wrong, Mike, “TU100: MY Digital Life”, with a paper that you can find on Mike’s webpage.
I think this is both novel and exciting. We can all see the value of having an engaging framework, but how many of us would think about retaining a creator from this particular discipline in order to produce exactly the right material from the start? (Of course, we’ve already seen examples of customised musical work and video with support materials from the CS Unplugged people, so what I’m really saying is that I hadn’t mapped this in this way. Wake up, Brain!)
Another way of thinking and another tool to add to the box – this is proving to be a great conference
SIGCSE: I, Robot? Using Science Fiction in Computer Science Education
Posted: March 3, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: design, education, higher education, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches 1 CommentOne of Thursday’s panel discussions was “Using Science Fiction in Computer Science Education”, with 5 panellists who, rather fittingly, had 3 physical panellists and 2 virtual – Rebecca Bates, Judy Goldsmith, Nanette Veilleux, Valerie Summet and Rosalyn Berge.
How do we engage our students? How can we get them to understand the vitality and important of current directions in CS, as well as giving students a context for the future directions- well, form this panel: why not Science Fiction? We’re all familiar with the idea of using familiar story frames to provide a context for information but, in this case, the stories we use are well-know Science Fiction stories. But this raises an important question – what is well-known? Does membership in our community implicitly include an understanding of the number 42, the fact that Han Shot First (don’t test me here) or the mutual incomprehension of the stultifying beauty of 2001?
Discussions across this panel covered a range of different areas, from using robotic stories to discuss the nature if intelligence and whether algorithms were emotions, to the teaching of ethics with a level of visibility into the problem that we’d normally never have – stories are a free source of ideas and what-ifs that we can use, and Science Fiction is the logical choice for our community, given the basis.
Did HAL die? Did HAL commit murder? Was Deckard a garbageman, an assassin, an executioner or a traitor? What does this mean to us as Computer Scientists? How can we use these ideas in our teaching? What do we think our students should learn from the aspects of SF that we enjoy, and which stories would we also like them to know? Movies provide an excellent way to expose people to ideas, in a way that most people are receptive to. It was raised in the panel that 2001 was often a big ask for the students – I proposed the excellent Moon as an alternative, which worked slightly better in the contemporary framework. Apparently, students find it easier to handle old books than old films or television – the special effects can get in the way. Fortunately, there is no shortage of old written material – I, Robot is a rich source by itself.
This is certainly an idea that I want to try out in my own teaching and look forward to think about – once I get back home. 🙂
SIGCSE, Curriculum 2013 – the Strawman Cometh
Posted: March 2, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: curriculum, design, education, higher education, reflection, sigcse, teaching 4 CommentsIt may come as a surprise to some, but the curriculum for Computer Science is regularly revised and, in recent times, we have see a new curriculum in 2001 and 2008. You can find all of this information at the CS2013 website. The 2013 revision has recently been published for the first time as a Strawman – something that you can attack and, traditionally, how we expose new things in CS to wider comment. Once everyone has hacked away at the Strawman, we examine the cuts and the weak points, patch it up, produce a new draft (the Ironman) and see how this stronger version fares against the slings and arrows of our peers.
This year, I had the chance to sit in on the steering committee panel from the ACM and IEEE-CS who had started the ball rolling. In order to produce a curriculum that is deemed (informally) to be a CS degree that meets the standards of the professional bodies, you have to have Core elements and a selection of Elective elements. Well, that was until now. Today’s big reveal, which was already known to anybody who read the earlier document released in February, was that Core was now Core Tier 1 and Core Tier 2. Instead of having 290 hours of ‘essential’ core material, we now had 163 hours of Tier 1 and up to 142 hours of Tier 2. On top of this, there’s a heap of ‘optional’ Elective elements.
So what makes up a CS degree? Well, if you use all of Tier 1 and at least 80% of Tier 2 and then fill in the cracks with Electives – that’s meeting the curriculum requirements and you have a CS degree. You’ll note however that the number of hours required for all of core has crept up by 15 hours since 2008 – this reflects the addition of new hours to reflect areas being introduced such as Information Assurance and Security, and Parallel and Distributed Computing. The curriculum does change over time but things tend to move rather than disappear. Adding things, however, requires more hours and this is always a problem – what do we take out? (A humorous suggestion was made that we ignore all other courses and ONLY teach CS. Not going to happen anytime soon.)
The depth of knowledge that is required is now described in a degenerate Bloom-derived taxonomy: knowledge (need to know what a concept means), application (can apply the concept) and evaluation (can compare/contrast/select appropriate method/strategy for different situations). My first thought, which needs review, is “Where is synthesis?” but I need to think about this – this would be the Creating step in Bloom’s revised taxonomy and it’s missing here. If it really bothers me, I’ll have to raise it as a consultative point.
We’re at an early stage of the process here, the Strawman consultation goes on for several months and then we get to attack Ironman. When I get back, I’m going to need to look across all my areas of curriculum responsibility and work out what to do – especially as my area “Net-Centric Computing” has now been changed in name and time, and split across two areas! Looks like it will be a busy few months.
Some audience members seemed to get caught up with how they could validate their curricula, which is missing the point in some respects. A country’s professional accreditation body, such as the ACS in Australia, will be a vital part of stating whether you have a CS degree or not. As one of the panelists said “To quote Pirates of the Caribbean, these are more along the lines of guidelines” and, thinking about this, it makes sense because it leaves the academic authority in the hands of the institutions while still allowing a discussion of internationally consistent framing for what it means to graduate in Computer Science.
SIGCSE, Keynote #1, Fred Brooks. (Yes, THAT Fred Brooks.)
Posted: March 2, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, curriculum, design, education, higher education, reflection, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches 5 CommentsFrederick P. Brooks, Jr is a pretty well-know figure in Computer Science. Even if you only vaguely heard of one of his most famous books “The Mythical Man Month“, you’ll know that his impact on how we think about projects, and software engineering projects in general, is significant and he’s been having this impact for several decades. He’s spent a lot of time trying to get student Software Engineering projects into a useful and effective teaching form – but don’t turn off because you think this is only about ICT. There’s a lot for everyone in what follows.
His keynote on Thursday morning was on “The Teacher’s Job is to Design Learning Experiences; not Primarily to Impart Information” and he covered a range of topics, including some general principles and a lot of exemplars. He raised the old question: why do we still lecture? He started from a discussion of teaching before printing, following the development of the printed word and into the modern big availability, teleprocessed world of today.
His main thesis is that it’s up to the teacher to design a learning experience, not just deliver information – and as this is one my maxims, I’m not going to disagree with him here!
Professor Brooks things that we should consider:
- Learning not teaching
- The student not the teacher
- Experience not just the written word
- developing skills in preference to inserting or providing information
- designing a learning experience, rather than just delivering a lecture
His follow-up to this, which I wish I’d thought of, is that Computer Science professionals all have to be designers, at least to a degree, so linking this with an educational design pathway is a good fit. CS people should be good at designing good CS education materials!
He argues that CS Educational content falls into four basic categories: the background information (like number systems), theory (like complexity mathematics), description of practice (How people HAVE done it) and skills for practice (how YOU WILL do it). In CS we develop a number of these skills through critiqued practice – do it, it gets critiqued and then we do it again.
He then spent some time discussing exemplars, including innovative assignments, the flipped classroom, projects and a large number of examples, which I hope to commit to another post.
Looking at this critically, it’s hard to disagree with any of the points presented except that we stayed at a fairly abstract level and, as the man himself said, he’s a radical over-simplifier. But there was a lot of very useful information that would encourage good behaviour in CS education – it’s more than just picking up a book and it’s also more than just handing out a programming assignment. Often, when people disagree with ‘ivory tower’ approaches, they don’t design the alternative any better. A poorly-designed industry-focused, project-heavy course is just as bad as a boring death0by-lecture theoretical course.
Bad design is bad design. “No design” is almost guaranteed to be bad design.
I’ll post a follow-up going in to more detail over what he said about projects some time soon because I think it’s pretty interesting.
It was a great pleasure to hear such an influential figure and, as always, it wasn’t surprising to see why he’s had so much impact – he can express himself well and, overall, it’s a good message.
SIGCSE First night, Workshop: CS Unplugged!
Posted: March 2, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: design, education, games, higher education, sigcse, teaching, teaching approaches, tools 1 CommentGot back from the first workshop a couple of hours ago, Workshop 9: Computer Science Unplugged, Robotics and Research Activities, Tim Bell, Daniela Marghitu and Lynn Lambert. Daniela couldn’t make it this evening so her place was expertly filled by another pair from Auburn. I’ve talked about CS Unplugged before but it was fascinating to see the experts talking about their experiences and giving us all the experience of what it’s like to be in an Unplugged classroom. I took some photos which will probably capture the immersive and enjoyable sense of this hands-on experience.
Here are some of the double-sided cards that can be used to show the 2D parity trick, where students are drawn into constructing the use and checking of parity with a simple 5×5 (or 9×9) grid of cards. Basically, once drawn up the student can flip any of the cards and the instructor can walk in from outside and legitimately pick the flipped card.
These are Tim’s, from the University of Canterbury, and they are both a handy tool for CS Unplugged and a cool way to give people a calling card of who gave you the talk.
Tim and Lynn were very honest about the degree of knowledge that could be conveyed to elementary school students – we’re not talking about getting all of the CS completely accurate but, in a setting where we can get lost in the cracks, the students would remember that CS people came to their school and it was interesting and engaging. (And, for me, the CS is pretty close. 🙂 )
The next picture is of a Pirate’s Treasure puzzle, where students have to pick A or B and, depending on what they choose, they hop to different islands. This introduces several key computing concepts: Finite State Automata, 
Complexity but, for me, it also makes students think about exploring a space in order to be able to improve their decision and thinking processes.
The next picture is slightly curious and, rather than being an activity, it’s a diagram showing all the states that a VCR could end up in when you’re setting the clock – and the number of different pathways between them. Is it any wonder that these devices give us trouble? Building on what students had learned about the different islands (states) that you could catch a ship to (transition to) – it suddenly explains why human interface design is so incredibly important.
Overall, this was a great workshop. We had many participatory activities – I was the bit representing ‘4’ for a very happy 10 minutes – and an excellent display of robotics and how they could be used with students in camp activities. Also, somewhat counterintuitively, how robots could be used to teach CS Unplugged.
From a theoretical perspective, CS Unplugged is heavily constructivist. In informal terms, constructivists assert that the generation of knowledge and meaning in humans comes from an interaction between what they experience and the frameworks that they have in their head. In this case, CS Unplugged, the basic goal is to present something with which a student can interact, but in its affordance and its goals, it drives them towards forming the correct knowledge of an area of CS, even without us explaining anything. To give an example, the student in the picture had learned quick sort enough to demonstrate it, despite never being explicitly told what quick sort was. She’s 12. The numbers in the pictures show the number of steps for a student using a simple sorting technique, and the one that she used. Yes, she’s shaved over half the steps off.
We had many examples like this – students who learned to count in binary from observation and interaction, without anyone having to formally discuss powers of two or underlying mathematics.
To be honest, I can’t do a three-hour workshop justice in 700 words, and I’d like to get some sleep before tomorrow’s keynote. However, if you haven’t checked out the CS Unplugged website yet, then I strongly recommend it. If you get the chance to see these presenters at work, then I strongly suggest that, too.
Tomorrow is the start of SIGCSE
Posted: February 28, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: education, higher education, sigcse, teaching approaches Leave a comment(Edit: When I posted this, I misjudged the timezone adjustment. The first activity of SIGCSE is Wednesday night, which would have been tomorrow had I posted this on US time. My apologies for anyone who panicked when they read this.)
SIGCSE is the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education and the group has an annual conference that is one of the best you can get to, in terms of the talks that you’ll hear and the people that you’ll be able to talk to. (Assuming they’re not all trying to talk to someone else!) Katrina and I have had a paper accepted for the SIGCSE conference and Raja, Zbyszek and I have had a workshop accepted as well. It’s fantastic to have been accepted here, especially for two activities, but, at the same time, it’s a little nerve-wracking. Tomorrow night, the first workshops start and that marks the beginning of the conference.
The posts for the next few days are going to be much more ‘live’ than they have been. Quite often I write up a blog post in advance because I get some time and like to put enough posts into the queue that a busy day doesn’t have to fit a 30-60 minute writing session into the evening! For the next few days, I’m going to try and turn my notes from the conference into something approaching useful blog posts.
Watch here for (what I hope is) some interesting and very current information on good practice, novel approaches and carefully edited accounts of my somewhat inept conversations with the luminaries in our field. 🙂
(In the spirit of true confession, this post was written on the 19th, because I wasn’t sure what internet access was going to be like leading up to attendance at SIGCSE. In fact, everything from the 21st on has been pre-written and coming out of the can because of pre-travel business and travel uncertainty. Seriously, blogging like this does focus the mind!)
Nick Falkner 