HCI and Computational Thinking are Ideological Foes

A colleague of mine sent me a link to the iConference 2011 website, suggesting that I should consider attending and submitting papers to future instantiations. It looks like an interesting conference, with lots of research in human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaborative work. There was very little about learning. There was a session on Scratch, focused on “end-user programming,” not on learning about computing.

I started to wonder: Have human-computer interaction research and computational thinking become ideological opposites? By “computational thinking” I mean “that knowledge about computing that goes beyond application use and that is useful in any discipline.” Or as Jeanette Wing described it, “Computational thinking builds on the power and limits of computing processes, whether they are executed by a human or by a machine.” Notice that she points out the limits. Limits suggest things that the computer can’t do, and if you’re going to think about them, you have to be aware of them. They must be visible to you. If Computational Thinking involves, for example, understanding the power and limits of digital representations, and how those serve as metaphors in thinking about other problems, then those representations have to be visible.

Let’s contrast that with Don Norman’s call for the Invisible Computer. Or Mark Weiser’s call for the “highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it.” Or any number of user-interface design books that tell us that the goal of user-centered design is for the user to focus on the task and make the computer become “invisible.”

Michael Mateas has talked about this in his discussion of a published dialog between Alan Perlis and Peter Elias. Elias claims, like Norman and Weiser, that one day “undergraduates will face the console with such a natural keyboard and such a natural language that there will be very little left, if anything, to the teaching of programming.” Michael responds, “The problem with this vision is that programming is really about describing processes, describing complex flows of cause and effect, and given that it takes work to describe processes, programming will always involve work, never achieving this frictionless ideal.”

The invisible-computer goal (that not all in HCI share, but I think it’s the predominant goal) aims to create a task-oriented interface for anything that a human will want to do with a computer. No matter what the task, the ad promises: “There’s an app for that!” Is that even possible? Can we really make invisible all the seams between tasks and digital representations of those tasks? Computational thinking is about engaging with what the computer can and cannot do, and explicitly thinking about it.

Computing education may be even more an ideological foe of this HCI design goal. Computing education is explicitly assuming that we can’t create an app for everything that we want to do, that some people (all professionals, in the extreme version that I subscribe to) need to know how to think about the computer in its own terms, in order to use it in new, innovative ways and (at least) to create those apps for others. It’s not clear who builds the apps in the invisible-computer world (because they would certainly need computing education), but whoever they are, they’re invisible, too.

I used to think that computing education was the far end of a continuum that started with HCI design. At some point, you can’t design away the computer, it has to become visible, and then you have to learn about it. After reviewing the iConference program, I suspect that HCI designers who believe in the invisible-computer have a goal for that never to happen. All possible tasks are covered by apps. Computing education should never be necessary except for an invisible few. Computational thinking is unnecessary, because we can make invisible all limitations.

Here’s a prediction: We won’t see a panel on “Computational Thinking” at CHI, CSCW, or iConference any time soon.

What’s the right format for CS Ebooks?

This Chronicle piece about a new MIT Press book released using an ebook tool called “Scalar” interested me and got me spending time exploring EBook formats, seeking an answer to the question, “If we were going to do a good CS Ebook, one in which programming experimentation could be done from within the book, what format is most promising?” Scalar is not so interesting because you can only link to fixed digital media. I found Monocle much more interesting, because the content of pages can be defined with JavaScript, and so could include simulations and even a programming environment (a Lively Kernel?). I was disappointed and intrigued by the below comment — Sophie is considered a failure, but there’s a new Sophie in development?

The fate of Scalar, which has not yet been released to the public, also remains to be seen. Mellon had backed an earlier attempt to build multimedia-authoring software, called Sophie. The first version failed, says Bob Stein, a director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, who left the Sophie project after blowing through more than $2.5-million working on it. A second version is not usable now but may end up being the “holy grail,” he says.

“The easier you try to make an authoring environment, the harder it is to build it,” says Mr. Stein. “It’s easy to build an authoring environment that requires experts to use. It’s very hard to build an authoring environment that somebody can use after reading two pages of instructions.”

via Free ‘Video Book’ From Academic Press Challenges Limits of Scholarship – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.