A New Zealand Perspective on the Challenges of Computing Education: What I did on my sabbatical

During our sabbatical, Barb and I spent a week in Auckland. We gave talks at the Auckland University of Technology and University of Auckland. Alison Clear (past Chair of the SIGCSE Board) and Tony Clear hosted us in their home, which was made even more delightful by Cary Laxer and his wife visiting. Alison organized a picnic with Paul Denny and Andrew Luxton-Reilly and their families. Tony hosted us at AUT, and Paul hosted us at the University of Auckland. It was a wonderful experience. If you ever get the chance to try Alison’s cooking, you have to take it. She’s amazing.

We got the chance to talk to Tony about some of his recent columns in Inroads magazine. I admit that when I get a new issue of Inroads or Communications of the ACM, I skim the table of contents for new feature articles. I usually skip the columns. After talking with Tony about his recent columns, I realized that I was missing out.

Tony writes from his perspective as a New Zealand scholar. It’s different than the average American perspective. The experiences and values lead to different questions and concerns.

We talked with him a good bit about his piece: “Large Language Models, the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and ‘Terra Nullius’ Declared Again?”. I didn’t know that the European colonists who came to Australia and New Zealand had papal permission. Australia was declared terra nullius — nobody owned the place, so go ahead and take it over. New Zealand was recognized as being run by the Māori, so colonizing there had to be negotiated. Tony asks, “So which of these models gives LLMs the right to consume the Internet?” Do we assume that nobody owns all the content on the Internet (like Australia)? Or should we be negotiating rights? The idea of LLM providers as a colonizing force was a fascinating perspective.

We also talked about his column that was published after we left: Project Carbon Budgeting. People in New Zealand were much more critical than in the US about data centers relying on nuclear power. New Zealand is a nuclear-free zone. They decided that the benefits are not worth the risks. Tony’s position is less critical about the LLMs themselves than he is about our job as educators. LLMs are having a huge impact on CS education, but we are not talking enough about the ethics of their use — from energy demands to ecological impacts. It’s our job to raise these issues in our classes. In New Zealand, the fact that GenAI providers are nuclear-powered is a critical issue. CS educators should be talking about that.

I’ve been fortunate to know Tony for a long time. We have had lots of research discussions. We have served as mentors at the same Doctoral Consortia. It wasn’t until I was talking with Tony about his columns, after I’d already been living in New Zealand for several weeks, that I became attuned to the New Zealand perspectives that he was bringing to his columns. That’s entirely on me — I wasn’t paying enough attention.

But that’s made me think about where else we make assumptions about a shared perspective when there’s actually an important difference that helps to see situations in a new light. Alan Kay famously said, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” A quote (often attributed to McLuhan and his students, but is actually older), “I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish.” If you don’t see a problem from other perspectives, you may not be seeing the problem at all.

Last month, my daughter was married in Indore, India. It was beautiful — an amazing set of ceremonies over several days. This trip was the most time I have spent in India, and the most I have traveled there. It was such a radically different context than my life as an American professor in a college town. When I came back to the new term, I was immersed in the on-going discussions about GenAI in our classes, about how AI is going to take everyone’s jobs, and on how we should start planning for a “post-labor” society. I understand why the people in my daily context are worried about AI. I’m not sure that it’s the same for people I met and interacted with in India. Will GenAI be changing the real estate business all that much? Construction? Being a travel guide for foreigners? Tailoring clothes? Driving an auto-rickshaw? Or even driving at all? I’d never trust an autonomous vehicle trained in the US on the streets in the Indian cities I visited. I know that I saw only a small slice of India, but even that small slice gave me a different perspective than my daily life. GenAI is going to change a lot, but maybe we overestimate the impact because of the bubbles we live in.

ACM SIGCSE now has the ACM Global Computing Education Conference (CompEd), held this last October in Botswana. I hope that this conference will help all of us see our CS education problems and issues in new perspectives. Tony helped me see the New Zealand perspective in his columns. My time in India gave me new insight into the US-centrism of the AI discussions I’m part of. We could use those additional 80 IQ points.