How Not to Require Computer Science for All Students – The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 10, 2012 at 9:07 am 1 comment
Robert Talbert has blogged twice recently in the theme of requiring computer science for all students in The Chronicle‘s blog. His points, and the discussion in response, are fascinating, since they reflect the perspectives of a wide audience. There are lots of calls in the comments for just teaching computing applications, not programming, and it’s useful to read those perspectives.
The reason I bring this up is that I’m hearing some say, in response to the articles about the CS requirement, that we should require a course in office applications and basic digital literacy for those who come in with lesser technological skill, and that can be their CS course. I think that’s looking at the problem from the wrong end. It seems that we might want a global CS requirement because in this era, the quantity and quality of digital skills that we should expect from students has changed. Office suite proficiency is necessary but no longer sufficient: We want students to be able to program (where “programming” is broadly defined), to articulate how computers and the internet work, and so on. The question ought to be, where do we want students to end up with respect to CS, not where are they now. If we want all students to program — which I think is the true gist of the push to require CS — then let’s aim high, set the goal, and help students get there. (Which involves asking “where are they now”, I know.) But let’s not say that students with low tech proficiencies can’t get there or shouldn’t be expected to get there.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: computing for everyone, higher education, perception of university, research university.
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Daniel Green | April 11, 2012 at 8:38 am
Quoting directly Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, ‘Changing Education Paradigms,’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html) “… Before the middle of the 19th century, there were no forms of public education … public education, paid for by taxation, compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery, that was a revolutionary idea. And many people objected to it, they said it’s not possible for many street kids, working class children, to benefit from public education, they’re incapable of learning to read and write and why would we be spending time on this?” If you swap “read and write” for “programming” or “computational thinking,” I believe that pulls us up to modern day. All “street kids, working class children” need to learn to create a spreadsheet, a word document, a powerpoint file and then they’ve done as much as they can do because the just can’t benefit from any of the rest of it given where they are. It sounds silly when put this way, but this seems to be the crux of the discussion.