In need of a Base Case
Comments about coding, research and life

So this weekend I am at a workshop at the University of Indiana on Gender equity in IT. They did a large research project on women in CS and IT fields (MIS, Library information science, various informatics majors) and hypothesized that CS could learn from the IT fields that were perceived to be less theoretical an more application based.

So many comments about all the different individual pieces of research, but perhaps the largest comment is that they are studying students who have already somehow broken through the gender stereotypes and self selected into one of the IT fields. What about the students who considered IT and selected away? What about the ones that never considered it at all?

If you are questioning why dont we have more women enrolling in computer science, how does surveying the students who DID choose IT inform us about how to increase enrollment?

Why does political correctness and sensibility apply to everything EXCEPT media and policy makers bashing of mathematics and computing?

On the US Department of Education website, In the description of the document describing how we need to strengthen our educational system by focusing on math and science skills the following is a direct quote:

Employers increasingly seek workers with “pocket protector” skills — practical problem-solvers across the world fluent in today’s technology.

How much more derogatory can you get? So fluency and skills in problem solving with technology is geeky (hence the pocket protector reference)?

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Link: http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/competitiveness/challenge.html

“To succeed in this increasingly competitive economy, all students, not just a few, must learn how to communicate, to think and reason effectively, to solve complex problems, to work with multidimensional data and sophisticated representations, to make judgments about the accuracy of masses of information, to collaborate in diverse teams and to demonstrate self motivation.” (Knowing What Students Know, National Research Council, 2001)

First of all this sounds like something from what the workforce readiness report (2006 - http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/documents/FINAL_REPORT_PDF09-29-06.pdf) written 5 years later.

The title of this post is transfer. Transfer is the ability to apply a given skill or concept in a new setting (ie. using a problem solving technique on a type of problem that you have not seen before). Computer Science does promote a large portion of the above listed skills, but how do they transfer? Some argue that the more types of problems you solve and the more logical thinking you do then the better you will be at problem solving.

My feeling is that its not just learning about computer programming in a CS class that will help you transfer this kind of critical thinking to other areas. Instead the modeled integration of problem solving throughout the curriculum should be an important focus. The idea of using “multidimensional data” and “sophisticated representations” sounds a lot like computational thinking(http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wing/publications/Wing06.pdf) to me.

What are the things we can do to scaffold for teachers of the general education subjects (history, english, math, science) activities that model these complex learning tasks? Perhaps as computer science teachers we should concern ourselves with not only the advancement of our discipline, but its integration into others as well. I always say that “writing across the curriculum” was the smartest thing that english teachers ever promoted. They included the aspects of their discipline into the others, promoting transfer of the skills that students need for all aspects of life and working to help provide assignment examples and rubrics for such assignments.

Cognitively students are not going to just up and provide transfer between subjects without either metacognitive prompts or modeling by their teachers. What would computational _____(fill in subject here - math, science, social studies) look like at the secondary level?

(and … for my own research - how would it change the disparate view of computing and computer science between genders, racial, and socioeconomic groups?)

“We had to start thinking about how computers could serve the interests of the culture, of how computers were transforming the culture! The real new wasn’t about numbers crunching, it was about word crunching. Words-how we manipulated them, reproduced them, stored them, combined them-this was all changing. This was the revolution, because now computing would involved everybody, not just scientists, engineers, and accountants. Computing was for writers, artists, musicians, for the people who created the culture. Computing had always been seen as procedure, process, method. But that was all wrong. You had to see it as a medium itself, which of course altered the terms of the expression itself.” Burn Rate - Michael Wolff

.. reflection to come later, but have to return the book and run to class.

The more reading I do, both for the psychology class and the paper for SIGCSE, the more I am drawing connections between using humanities based questioning and content connections for intrinsic motivation of students.

Let me explain. Just about all of the research indicates that intrinsic motivators for learning are not only better than extrinsic ones (like grades) but that extrinsic motivators actually hamper deep learning and understanding. Students are much more likely to try and “game” the system or just memorize what they think will be on the exam if they are extrinsically motivated.

Intrinsic motivation comes from an internal sense of self. As a young discipline we are working to find the connections to put forth to our students to make the learning of CS an intrinsically motivated activity. I believe that the “programming to write games” approach in isolation is actually incorrect in its underlying premise that because students enjoy playing games, teaching them to program games will motivate them to deep learning in CS.

Hey now, hold on, wait a minute here.. This has been a wave (well maybe a tidal wave) in CS education lately. Results of experiments testing the engagement of students in programming courses shows a much higher interest in the courses taught using games than the courses not taught using games. ::sigh:: I know. I also know that measuring the ‘interest’ and ‘likability’ factor of a course is not the same as measuring whether the course caused deep learning to occur in its students.

Games, robots, graphics, etc. are all motivators to student interest - but they are short term. If we really want students to see computer science as a field worth lifelong endeavor and dedication we need to show them an even larger picture. Students are not as shallow as we think. They do see the world through a narrow lens, but when they come to us in HS and college (thanks to the work of their humanities teachers) that lens is starting to widen. The group that we are trying to recruit and retain to CS are not the gamers (we already have them) - they are the people for whom games are a passtime because there is nothing better or more worthwhile to do. Do we really want to equate CS with that image? Something to do because there is nothing better or more worthwhile? Or something you do out of selfishness because you enjoy it although it doesnt have much of a larger impact?

Instead we can still use graphics and games to motivate individual topics and assignments, but the reasons to learn and explore CS are larger in nature. Security, privacy, information retrieval, being an important part of the research going on in just about any field (computational ____) is the reason to study computer science. Yes we find games interesting, but they are just the smallest part of the larger field that has huge impact on everyday life and quality of living for so many.

Oh, I’m sure there will be more rants to come about this topic - and also some more specific quotes and statements in the future - I just wanted to get this down. I’m using this blog almost as a research journal to help me relate my thoughts back to what I was reading at the time so that if I come back one day while writing my thesis and go “when did I read that” I can search the blog and it will give me a timeframe, which will lead me to specific readings and documents.

I think someone needs to invent personal bibliography software. A way that you can enter what you read, when you read it and keywords of meaning from the reading. That way when you want to go back to something you can search your own personal library for what those readings meant to you.

ah well - off to do homework
Happy Labor Day