A Vision of Students Today
I highly recommend you watch the video “A Vision of K12 Students Today”.
So much of what the students are expressing in the video is related to technology and its presence in their lives. In what ways does computer science education foster or reinforce skills that students need to have to be productive members of the society expressed in the video?
I read an entry on 2 Cents Worth asking Whats your story?
One of the things that struck me (and I commented on it) is that facts are now cheap and understanding is expensive. Prior to the internet and the Information Superhighway, we needed to expend real time to find a fact we did not already know. Travel to a library and read through reference material until we found the exact piece of information we needed and then try to assimilate it with our current knowledge in some way. Instead now facts are cheap. Google, wikipedia, the world wide web all provide us with sources to obtain facts easily and quickly either by computer or internet capable cell phone.
I can understand “fact frustration” expressed by so many students. Why do I have to memorize this when it will always be at my fingertips? Perhaps our standards need to emphasize not the repetition of information, but instead its structure and how to assimilate new information into that structure.
Back to Computer Science. Many of the topics we talk about are how to organize information, how to retrieve it and process it - especially when its size becomes too big for humans to handle, how to categorize things and store them away efficiently, and also how to evaluate what the technology is telling you and its ethical use. (Look at the K12 model curriculum put out by ACM and CSTA) Arent these core foundations for all students to have? Regardless of their “programming” ability.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008