Testimonial about the Berkeley AP CS Pilot

Now, the interviewer is Dan Garcia, the guy who taught the course, so the students weren’t really going to say that the class was awful.  Still, it’s a useful video for setting a goal — this is the kind of thing you’d want non-majors to say about CS after a successful first course.

Technology to Inhibit Technology

I’ve heard about this new kind of software, that prevents you from touching Facebook and Twitter, so that you can concentrate and get something done.  “Stop me before I Facebook Again,” is such an interesting idea for CS teachers.

Are we as humans really genetically wired to want information, to want to deal in information, as this article suggests?  Is the suggestion that we really are helpless to prevent ourselves from checking email and Facebook?  More to the point for us: Why is it, if we’re wired to love information, that so few people want to make it their profession?

This whole argument strikes me as McLuhan-esque.  He might have been talking about the desire to Facebook when McLuhan said, “Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.” (I also liked this one: “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”)  I think McLuhan would particularly critique the Facebook designers for not considering the implications of what they were designing (or maybe they did?  Maybe they aimed to create an addiction?)  What do we teach our CS students about the implications of their designs?  To those who talk about Facebook use as a moral question, McLuhan might remind them that he said:

Is it not obvious that there are always enough moral problems without also taking a moral stand on technological grounds? […] Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet to highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individuating power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. “But”, someone says, “we didn’t know it would happen.” Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem, but not a moral problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality.

Here’s the NPR clip:

Being surrounded by a nonstop stream of information hasn’t exactly helped us focus or concentrate on our work. But a new software application can help social media addicts kick the habit.

Sure, the Web helps us do our jobs, but it can also distract us from them.

“We get a serotonin hit from this,” says Kathy Gills, who teaches about the intersection of digital media technologies and social institutions at the University of Washington. “So those of us who are susceptible to that high keep getting these little Pavlovian dog responses. It’s new, it’s shiny…wheee! So, if that’s part of your personality or genetic makeup, then these technologies can be something that you need to consciously think about managing.”

via Stop Me Before I Facebook Again : NPR.