What are the fundamental education issues for next 10 years? Computing education issues?

NSF’s Division of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences is seeking white papers on the grand challenges in these areas over the next 10 years.  Reading through the questions they want answered, I’m wondering if some of the important grand challenges are computing education grand challenges.  I think it’s increasingly important that we understand how to improve how students come to understand computing, because that understanding can drive creative and innovative use of an incredibly powerful set of technologies.  Due date for white papers is September 30.

NSF/SBE invites individuals and groups to contribute white papers outlining grand challenge questions that are both foundational and transformative.  They are foundational in the sense that they reflect deep issues that engage fundamental assumptions behind disciplinary research traditions and are transformative because they seek to leverage current findings to unlock a new cycle of research. We expect these white papers to advance SBE’s mission to study human characteristics and human behaviors in its Social and Economic Sciences and Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences divisions, as well as to be the nation’s resource for understanding the structure and development of science through its Science Resources Statistics division.

via US NSF – SBE – SBE 2020.

Chalmers University launches ComputingEd-ish Program

I visited Chalmers University in Goteburg, Sweden several years ago.  I learned that Chalmers is sort of the MIT and CalTech combined of Sweden — Sweden has a strong engineering tradition, and Chalmers trains 40% of all of Sweden’s engineers.  It’s an important and well-respected engineering school.

So it’s pretty exciting when Chalmers launches a new graduate program in engineering education research, and the position described below as part of this new program sits in the “Department of Applied Information Technology.”  This suggests that their new program has a strong Computing Education component.  Cool!  This announcement, plus the research center for CS Ed at Durham that I mentioned last week, has me wondering — why are the Europeans investing so much more in computing education research than the Americans?

Research into learning and communication is one specific strand of research at the department and the main areas of investigation are: Learning with IT, language and communication for academic and professional purposes, public learning and understanding of science, learning and sustainability, and higher education. This variation in research areas related to learning and communication is one of the department’s main strengths. The department also offers training in these areas to students and teachers at both Chalmers and the University of Gothenburg.

via Chalmers: Applied Information Technology: Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Engineering Education Research.