Please find me on ComputingEd.Wordpress.Com
10:40 AM PDT, June 15, 2009, updated at 2:39 AM PDT, June 17, 2009
Amazon is de-emphasizing their author blogs. I’ve found that my posts are no longer being picked up by Google Reader nor on my Author page. Author blogs are no longer showing up on books written by that author. Amazon is encouraging authors to link to external blogs — I’m guessing that Amazon is trying to get out of the blog business. So, I’ve set up shop at http://computinged.wordpress.com. Please join me there! I'm going to try to get Amazon's RSS feed to pick up my posts on Wordpress, so you may be able to read along here with no problems.The Public's Perception of the University
11:31 AM PDT, June 11, 2009
I gave a talk this morning with Henrik Christensen (Georgia Tech's Kuka Chair of Robotics) at the High Museum in Atlanta. (My slides and movies are available.) It was a fun event. There were nearly 200 K-12 teachers there. We were both speaking at the end of a three day workshop on Leonardo da Vinci. Henrik talked about da Vinci's influence on robotics today, and I talked about how our media computation and robotics computing education efforts are modern-day equivalents to da Vinci's use of painting as a way to understand the world. We can use computing to study and model our world by creating representations of it, and in so doing, we come to understand the world better. That all went fine.
After the talks, we had a 45 minute demo-and-meet session where I had at least three dozen teachers come talk to me. What I was struck by was what they asked of me. These folks have heard me speak as a computing education researcher, so the range of the questions was surprising to me:
I'm an employee of the state, and part of my salary is paid by taxpayers. In my mind, the job that I do is to teach and to do research on how to improve how people come to understand computation. I hope that that the teaching and research I do has positive economic impact on the state. I'm not sure that that's what these taxpayers want of me. I think they see me as an expert in "Computing," and I should be able to help them with anything related to computing. It's not quite like those t-shirts that say, "Yes, I'm a computer scientist. No, I won't fix your computer." As a professor, they see me focusing on education and on higher-level issues than dealing with re-installing their virus software. But still, they're asking for a wide range of services from me. The public's perception of the university and its faculty is increasing important. As the economy does worse, as the demand for higher-education rises, and the costs increase, the public is naturally going to ask, "Are you faculty doing your job?" A mismatch between the public's (and policymaker's) view of our job, and our own view of our job, is a concern when times get tough. Stories Teachers Tell Themselves
6:44 AM PDT, June 9, 2009
Last Saturday was our last Disciplinary Commons for Computing Educators (DCCE) meeting for this academic year (funded by NSF CPATH program, organized by PhD students Lijun Ni and Allison Tew). The Georgia DCCE is based on the successful model by Sally Fincher and Josh Tenenberg, where computing teachers are brought together to discuss their common issues, create a community, and in so doing, improve their own teaching.
The Georgia DCCE has a couple of twists. First, we combine high school and undergraduate teachers, to encourage discussion about the boundary and making them easier to cross for students. Second, we engaged teachers in action research: Coming up with small assessments to use in their own classrooms, and then compare across classrooms. A key point of a disciplinary commons is to get teachers to reflect on their practice. Sally and Josh used portfolios and journals to get this reflection. We decided to try action research. In our DCCE, we went through two cycles of coming up with questions, create instruments, evaluating data, and reflecting on the results. The first round was based on assessment questions and instruments developed by others. The second round was invented entirely by the teachers. Saturday was the our "data party" to combine results, and then a "gallery walk," where teachers posted on a wall their results and claims, and what they took as the implications for their teaching. I was really struck by some of the claims and implications that teachers drew from their stories. One mini-study involved two teachers of a year-long Advanced Placement CS (APCS) course and one teacher of a single semester introductory programming course. (In Georgia, high schools have a three course CS sequence that they teach: Computing in the Modern World, Introductory Programming, and APCS.) The two APCS classes did much better than the introductory students. The teacher of the intro course took as his implication that the new book he started using wasn't as effective as the old book he used to use. He may very well be right, but there are lots of other possible suspect variables there, like the difference in level, length of time of the course, and the socio-economic situation of the students. The intro course is in one the poorest sections of Atlanta, while the two APCS classes are in affluent sections of the suburbs. A second mini-study involved asking two college classes to tackle the calculator problem from the McCracken ITiCSE Working Group. The classes did no better than did the students in the original Working Group study. When asked why, the one teacher explained, "Most of these students don't really belong in CS." He may very well be right, but I still found it an unusual argument -- but mostly because of my own cultural and epistemological biases. I tend to believe that all kids can learn to read, write, do basic mathematics, and learn basic programming. I think of computing as a form of literacy, so it doesn't enter into my world-view that, "these kids just can't do it." I would look at these same data and try to understand what was hard for the students, what were the barriers, and how might they be reduced. I thought about these implications and rationalizations when reading a recent NPR report on the book  Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness which is supposedly influencing the Obama administration's thinking on influencing citizen's decisions. The bottomline is that we are all irrational decision makers. We see a low starting rate for a credit card or cellphone, and don't think about the overall costs over the next two years.Teachers tell themselves stories about what happens in their classrooms all the time. I know that I do. I explain to myself why students fail my classes, or why graduate students choose not to work with me, or why a paper or proposal gets rejected. We all do. I'm sure that I, like the irrational decision-makers in Nudge and the teachers in the DCCE, make assumptions and ignore possible explanations that are more likely than the ones I've chosen. A problem, though, is that the stories I tell myself about my classes influence more than just myself -- my response to those stories changes how I teach the next time, and thus influences the next group of students. I've been thinking that Nudge is a good argument for Teaching Circles and other community of teachers mechanisms. We need some way to check our rationalizations, to hear alternative explanations, and to make sure that we don't make huge changes based on erroneous assumptions. We're just individual irrational decision-makers, but maybe together, we can make better decisions. The Responsibility of APCS for the Decline of Enrollment in Undergraduate Computer Science
9:43 AM PDT, June 4, 2009, updated at 5:56 PM PDT, June 4, 2009
I had a really interesting discussion (perhaps "disagreement") at the NCWIT meeting a few weeks ago. My discussion partner claimed that "the APCS (Advanced Placement Exam in Computer Science) has to go" and "the APCS does nothing good for undergraduate computer science" and most pointedly, "the APCS exam is a factor in declining enrollments in computer science." I disagree strongly with that last point. I do think that the APCS is in need of improvement for broadening participation in computing, and I even agree that it doesn't do much good for undergraduate computer science today. However, I don't believe that it does any harm. The reality is that there is just so little computer science in high schools today, that the APCS (and just about any other CS curriculum) has almost no impact on potential computer science students in high school.
One of our major accomplishments (read "Barbara Ericson's major accomplishments") in "Georgia Computes!" is that the number of APCS high school teachers in the state has more than doubled in the last four years, and most of those new teachers took workshops from Barbara. The way we get the teacher count is by measuring the number of high schools in the state who send anyone to the APCS exam. Since there is only one high school in the state that has more than one APCS teacher, the number of high schools is essentially 1:1 with the number of teachers. It's also the case that the percentage of high schools offering APCS out of all high schools is higher in Georgia than any other school in the Southeast. Georgia's percentage of APCS-offering schools is higher than Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, etc. That sounds impressive -- until you realize that that percentage is 22%. 22% of Georgia high schools offer APCS. The inverse implication is that 78% of high schools in Georgia offer no APCS, and if a high school doesn't offer APCS, they most likely offer no computing at all. Thus, with more than 75% of high schools offering no computer science, Georgia is a leader. The CSTA has been recently crunching the numbers on APCS. The APCS has been around for 25 years now. In 26 states, the grand total of all students who have taken the APCS in all that time is less than 200. That's 4 students per year on average (over 14 years), in more than half of the United States. 4 students could be the output of a single teacher in a single high school. In 26 states, then, there could be essentially no high school computer science at all. APCS does over-emphasize programming, and it does emphasize Java which is not the best introductory programming language. However, I can't believe that APCS is swaying high school students' opinions of computer science if the vast majority of those students never see AP classes or students taking them! The argument was made to me that, by offering credit for APCS, universities are holding the APCS in some respect and thus drawing attention to it, which may be hurting us because of the APCS failings. Yes, the APCS may be overly emphasized by college CS departments. That doesn't change the fact that even if a high school student in the US wanted to take APCS, almost none of them have any opportunity to even see the course. We may be saying implicitly, "the APCS is great!" But if a student can't take APCS, that statement has no real impact. The problem with high school computer science is not that APCS is such a bad model. It's that far too few students see any model of CS at all. That's another reason why Jan Cuny's efforts at NSF to create "10,000 CS teachers for 10,000 high schools by 2015" is so important. We need more CS teachers. Yes, we need more and better curricular models. But without teachers, even the best models will get no further into high schools than APCS is today. Tales from the Workshops: High school CS, the Great Recession, and getting beyond the tool
7:53 AM PDT, June 3, 2009
Just back from a week-and-a-half of workshops -- three days of Media Computation in Claremont, California last week, and two days of MediaComp, IPRE Robotics, and Engineering Computing in MATLAB at Wayne State University in Detroit this week. You can check out the galleries of what teachers produced in the workshops. The collages from this week are particularly impressive, when you realize that they were mostly done in Python by teachers who saw Python for the first time that morning!
Teaching workshops (9-5, multiple days in a row) is exhausting. Professional teachers are particularly good students, in that they are active and engaged, ask questions (even during breaks, lunches, etc.), and make sure that they get everything they can out of the workshop (and the workshop leader :-). I really enjoy these workshops and learn a lot from them. Here's a couple of the interesting things I heard about in the last week-and-a-half. I met Baker Franke from the University of Chicago Laboratory School (where Obama's girls went when he was a senator). Their's is the second selective private school in the U.S. (after Philips Exeter Academy) to require computer science for high school graduation. Students start out their freshman year with Scratch and Alice, and later start Python with the IPRE Scribbler robots and then move to Media Computation to work with the IPRE fluke's camera. They're working with Chicago's new high-quality, magnet high schools to improve computer science in the public schools curriculum, too. An interested side-effect of the Great Recession is that some CS departments at some schools are reporting pushback on creating computing courses for non-majors. The other major departments are saying to them, "You're just trying to steal some of our students' credit hours to boost your enrollment dollars!" When we offered non-major computing courses at Georgia Tech, the other faculty appreciated that we were teaching their students and that their faculty could concentrate on other courses and research. But when budgets are tight, resources are held dear, and departments want every last credit hour. Trying to offer more computing is seen as a grab for dollars. My Detroit workshop had a great discussion about what was the point of teaching a MATLAB class in a CS department. Are we just teaching a more high-level kind of "application literacy" to the engineers, i.e., teaching them to use MATLAB they way that high school teachers might teach Microsoft Office? We came to the conclusion that it doesn't have to be that way. David Smith's book  Engineering Computation with MATLAB (2nd Edition) tries really hard to leverage the Engineering student's interest in learning MATLAB as a tool, to lead them to an appreciation of computer science and how that can inform the way that they think and how they use their tools. Really, this problem could come up for the Media Computation class, too, if there were programmable tools already in common use in Liberal Arts classes. We might be asking, "How can you teach Media Computation so that they see the beauty and power of computing, and not just how to write a script to remove red eye?" Since that's not common practice in Liberal Arts, MediaComp has a different challenge -- we both have to introduce a useful tool, and convince students to abstract beyond the tool. Maybe it's even harder with the Engineering students, who want the tool. We have to show them that the tool is just a shadow on the Platonic cave, and the real thing is much better.
Attacks on the NSF: How Education Research Works
6:07 AM PDT, May 22, 2009
A colleague sent me links to two blog posts yesterday attacking the National Science Foundation's Education and Human Resources Directorate, where I get much of my research funding. The first one argues that NSF "sends money down the drain" for funding studies that are qualitative and not of highest quality, and that schools are being sold curricula that doesn't have high-quality research backing it. The second argues that it's unethical to do education research that doesn't have the highest quality, and that NSF has been funding such research. These authors don't understand how research works.
It is the NSF's job to generate ideas and get them tested. The nature of the business is that you want to generate many ideas that fail, because that's how you find the best ideas. You only know that the ideas are failing by testing them. No, you don't do high-quality, high-cost double-blind clinical studies on every idea. That's a waste of money. If you can't get reasonable results from small scale, formative evaluations, it's not worth trying to do the highest-quality research. I think of the comparison as being like the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. The NIH funds research into medicines. I'll bet that the majority of the NIH budget goes into drugs that are never tested on humans and if tested on humans, never put into clinical studies. That is how it should be. It's the FDA's job to figure out what's safe enough to put in front of people. There is no federal equivalent to the FDA for education, nor can there be. The US Education system is designed to give curricular decisions to the states. There are efforts to establish national standards, and if that ever happens, only the best work should be included in the standards recommendations. It will never be the case that everything that goes into schools will be rigorously tested. Education is to psychology and sociology, as engineering is to science. Engineers know how to do things that science still can't explain: rules of thumb, ways of making things work. These are necessary because science is slower than our need to progress. Everyday, millions of kids need to be taught, whether or not every piece of curriculum has been thoroughly evaluated. The NSF system works. Let's take Media Computation as an example. I had a good idea (as vetted by a panel of reviewers) and was given $75,000 to try it out for a year. In the parlance of NSF's Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) Program, that's a "Phase 1" project. By research standards (NSF or NIH), that wasn't a lot of money. The results were good, so I applied for Phase 2, where you do good research and go beyond the boundaries of your school. I was rejected -- my plan for exploring Media Computation nationally wasn't good enough. I tried again, and won the Phase 2 that I'm finishing this summer. We have studies in multiple schools, and I travel the country giving workshops and explaining our research findings. Phase 3 is the educational equivalent to a double-blind, clinical study. I won't go for a Phase 3 with Media Computation, not now. One reason is that I don't think our Phase 2 results are strong enough. I could go back for another Phase 2 and try to develop better results. A second reason is that we don't have the instruments yet to do careful enough studies of computing curricula. To the best of my knowledge, no CS project has ever won Phase 3 funding. Does that mean that no one teaches anything in CS, because nothing has strong enough evaluative results yet? Of course not! We have to teach in CS, even if the science of computing education research and evaluation hasn't caught up yet. NSF is an excellent steward of the high-stakes projects that they fund. I was recently on a site visit to one of these high-end projects. They sent me two inches of papers to read, then I (and the team of researchers with me) grilled the funded project leaders for two days (solid, with team discussions during every meal, working from 7:30 am to 10:30 pm) on who is in the studies, and how the studies are being conducted, and what studies are being done. Then we prepared an 11 page report on what we found. And this was a regular, annual site review, not a "critical" review where they REALLY check the results. I take these blog posts personally. I have not done double-blind clinical studies of my education interventions, because that's expensive and I frankly don't have the evidence yet to warrant that expense. I do not think I am unethical for developing the best curricula I can and testing it best I can. The unethical path is not to try, not to teach anything that lacks rigorous evaluation, and to sit back and moan about why no one in Washington has made things better. Workshop season starts: Southern California and Detroit, then Kansas City and Atlanta
5:02 AM PDT, May 21, 2009
It's summer, and that means that workshop season is here again.
Reductio Ad Absurdum: Literature Unbound
7:14 AM PDT, May 19, 2009, updated at 12:14 PM PDT, May 19, 2009
Ian Bogost did a humorous and insightful critique of "CS Unplugged" with his "Literature Unbound." Recommended reading, both for the giggles and for the thought-provoking framing of the problem. http://www.bogost.com/blog/teaching_computing_with _comput.shtml
Using computing to teach computing (Hint: Don't use the "P" word)
8:18 AM PDT, May 18, 2009
A couple weeks ago, I got the chance to meet and have lunch with Jeanette Wing, Director of the NSF CISE and main proponent of Computational Thinking. I did pose her the question that I've been pushing: how can you get to computational thinking for everyone if we don't teach programming?
I actually asked this question explicitly during her talk. If computing is "automation of abstractions" (as she defines it), how can we get to the automation part without teaching programming? She pushed back. We shouldn't start computational thinking with programming. We should start with things like Tim Bell's "CS Unplugged" (http://www.csunplugged.org). She asked, you wouldn't start a 4 year old with programming, would you? After her talk, I pushed her harder: how would we get to "automation" and understanding the ability of computation to deal with complexity without ever touching the computer? She eventually agreed -- it would be hard to get to where she wants to get without programming. Then I realized that the "p" word was getting in our way. If we want to get students to understand "automation" and complexity, we need computing. We need computing to help people to understand computing. We know that the specification of automation is programming. But the word "programming" for many people (even computer scientists) means "Java" and "C++" and complex syntax and awful error messages. The "p" word is getting in the way of agreeing that the computer is necessary for us to help students to really understand computational thinking. The interesting question, then, is how do we use computing to teach computing (whether or not we call it "programming"). Lack of Women in CS: Only in the Developed World
4:20 PM PDT, May 14, 2009, updated at 4:28 PM PDT, May 14, 2009
The NCWITmeeting this week at the Googleplex was probably my favorite of their meetings yet. The Academic Alliance meetings were really focused and productive, but what really knocked it out of the park for me were the great talks on cross-national studies of women in IT. I knew that most of the Western world had the problem of too few women in CS, and I knew that there wasn't a problem in some Eastern nations. Yesterday, I got a much broader and clearer view.
Vivian Lagfesen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology presented her study of Malaysia, where the 52% of all CS undergraduate majors are female. Vivian interviewed students, department chairs (mostly female), and a Dean (female). She found that Malaysians can't understand why anyone would think computing is particularly male -- if anything, they consider it more female, since it's safe, mostly inside work "like cooking." Vivian found that the three primary influences on students going into CS were their personal enthusiasm, parental interests and wishes, and job prospects, where the last two were much more important than the first one. The Malaysian government actively encourages students to go into IT, because they see it as the core of the successful strategy by their neighbor, Singapore. Vivian concluded that the gendering of computing is constructed by the West, not at all inherent to the field. Maria Charles of U. California at Santa Barbara presented her take on the problem from multi-national studies. She says that the problem of gender inequality is due to a belief that genders are "different but equal," and that members of different genders are so different that they might as well be from different planets (like Mars and Venus). She thinks that making claims that "CS has characteristics X and Y that will attract women" only serves to highlight essentially false differences between genders. Differences in attitudes about math and sciences between men and women are greater in the developed world than in the developing world, where women and men see math and science pretty similarly. In the developing world, computing (and math and sciences) is a great career choice, and that's what drives interest. (Roli Varma later echoed this point in explaining why CS is so much more popular in India than in the US among women -- it's more important that it's a lucrative job than any perceptions of masculinity.) In the developed world, women and men seek to affirm their feminity or masculinity by making gender-appropriate career choices. "Girls like X, and I'm a girl, so I'll do X." And the still-aggravating, "Boys do math." In the developed world, women make education and career choices as a form of self-expression, so they opt out of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields early. She suggests that forcing all students to take more STEM classes would give them the opportunity to discover their interest and aptitude for those fields. There were more talks that were really good (particular a great one from Dr. Joi Spencer on how math education is much less about hard problem-solving in the US than it is in other countries that do better than us on the TIMS studies). Those two talks alone really highlight for me a new way of thinking about why there are so few women going into CS, and why it's different in the developed world from the developing world. My approach to getting more diversity in our computing classrooms is to make the curriculum more relevant to the students. An argument I get is that, "We're teaching essentially the same topics in the same way today as we did when there were lots of women in computing. How could the introductory curriculum matter? And if all introductory classes meet the same ACM/IEEE standards, how could the curriculum lead to differences in one part of the world than another?" I think these studies point out that our students today are different, they have different goals, and US (and other developed world) students are looking for something different than students in Malaysia or India. It then makes sense to do something different, if we want a different result.
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Bio
I started teaching computing in February 1980. I was 17 in my senior year of high school, and I taught "Bits, Bytes, and Basic" in a community education class. I taught through my undergrad years--community education, afterschool classes, GED classes, and even community college in 1984. I read "Personal Dynamic Media" by Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay while on an internship at Bell Labs in 1982. I'd never before thought about computing FOR learning (as opposed to learning ABOUT computing). Adele and Alan's thoughts and words set me on the road to my PhD in Education and Computer Science at the University of Michigan in 1993. Nowadays, I focus on using lessons from learning sciences and educational technology for teaching about computing.
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