The White Geek’s burden

I thought that Julian Assange’s point in this piece in the NYTimes were fascinating, but I was particularly struck by his description of “the white geek’s burden.”  My colleague, Beki Grinter, has pointed to a similar rhetoric going on with MOOCs — that the United States is offering MOOCs for “the developing world” such as “Africa.” As she points out in her blog post, even that phrasing ignores the complexity of languages and cultures in the enormous continent of “Africa.”  Are MOOCs another example of the US gadget consumerism that Assange critiques in his essay?

In the book the authors happily take up the white geek’s burden. A liberal sprinkling of convenient, hypothetical dark-skinned worthies appear: Congolese fisherwomen, graphic designers in Botswana, anticorruption activists in San Salvador and illiterate Masai cattle herders in the Serengeti are all obediently summoned to demonstrate the progressive properties of Google phones jacked into the informational supply chain of the Western empire.

via The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Julian Assange – NYTimes.com.

Coding Is Coming To Every Industry You Can Think Of, Time To Start Learning It Now

A nice piece arguing motivating computing across the curriculum and computing for everyone.  Next step: thinking about how to teach computing across the curriculum.

As British technologist, Conrad Wolfram said in a TED talk on teaching math with computers: “In the real world math isn’t necessarily done by mathematicians. It’s done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people.”

The same applies for computer science. Just ask Alex Tran, fellowship program manager at Code for America, a nonprofit “civic startup accelerator” that sees coding as a new form of public service. Each year, he works with more than 20 startups and fellows who build a variety of apps and online programs to improve how citizens engage and interact with their communities. So far, they’ve built tools for services like community disaster management, food stamps, virtual townhalls, student data interoperability, and even snazzy icons.

via Coding Is Coming To Every Industry You Can Think Of, Time To Start Learning It Now | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation.