Higher Ed and the Role of a Computing Culture: Interview on No Such Thing Podcast

When I visited the To Code and Beyond workshop last month (as mentioned in this podcast), I was interviewed by Marc Lesser for the No Such Thing podcast, which he just released.  (My keynote is also in his podcast series here.) It’s a wide ranging interview, from woodworking to the work I’ve started with History professors Bob Bain and Tamara Shreiner, from how I began teaching computing in 1980 to how I’ve been inspired by (to name a few) Alan Kay, Yasmin Kafai, E. Paul Goldenberg, Brian Harvey, and Bob Kozma.  Marc’s framing for the podcast is interesting (pasted below): How do we “bottle” me? In other words: How do we create more computing educators who care about CS for All, especially at the higher education level? The episode can be found here.

At the top of the last episode you learned about Mark Guzdial. Mark is a Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. After his talk at Cornell Tech’s “To Code and Beyond” I had a chance to sit down with Mark and ask what questions had bubbled up while I listened to his talk live. Probably my most pressing question: what you’re saying is great, but we’ve all seen professors like you on youtube – Mark is a brilliant, animated, ukulele playing Computer Science professor, who, from my time with him, seems as passionate about you learning about his passion topic, as he is about the topic itself. He’s a rare mix, and what I’m sure many in the audience wondered – what the country is wondering right now – is how do we bottle some of that, and help thousands of teachers in every state offer young people the experience that surely the students in Mark’s class have each semester. For what it’s worth, out-of-state tuition at his school is $43,476 with a 26% acceptance rate. A wicked problem, indeed.