Programming vs Technology

Recently I read an article on the Chronicle of higer education on Program vs Technology. It was interesting, I'll give it that. It's just that recently (last couple of years) geeks both the blogosphere and the twittersphere seem to be longing for a time when computer science was taught in all of our schools (high school and specifically in this article University), and we've moved away from a "computer science for all" approach, or we've severely dumbed it down, by introducing those silly office applications. In a previous blog post I also had commented on a similar story lamenting the fact that schools weren't teaching kids programming language in school and the author had taken so much away from learning a programming language (BASIC I think) that it's inconceivable that kids aren't taught programming (now if only I could easily find that blog post).

In any case, some of these commentators and bloggers are clamoring for a time that didn't exit. I am fairly young, about a dozen years since I graduatd high school. We had computers, and we had computer science courses, but these were electives, they weren't required courses. Just as there were elective courses in computer science back then, so th are now. Even in college, I was a computer science major and we didn't have non majors in our courses. Computer science was not a requirement.

Even when I mention that students ought to have a required ICT course for those pesky office applications, I get resistance because no one wants to extend the time to graduation, and no one wants to cede a course from their department in the general education curriculum - but everyone seems to lament the fact that undergraduates (and grads!) don't know how to format a paper, use excel, make a good presentation, use a computer effectively or troubleshoot basic things.

Universal computer programming isn't the answer. If anything should be universal, it should be 4 years worth of a foreign language so that students leave college multilingual. Just adding another requirement for graduation, like computer programming, this means that you'll get 2 semesters worth of computer programming, which in my opinion is about as useless as 2 semesters of a foreign language. Sure, you get some idea about a language, and it affects your cognitive processes, but you can't really use it. If there were a required ICt curriculum it wouldn't be programming.

Thoughts? Comments?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more