The future of computing education is in providing literacy to all: Video of SIGCSE 2019 Keynote now available
November 25, 2019 at 2:00 am 1 comment
Here in the United States, it’s Thanksgiving week, so it’s a good time to put a cap on one of the events that I’m most thankful for this year.
My keynote at SIGCSE 2019, Computing Education as a Foundation for 21st Century Literacy, was recorded, but something went wrong with the audio. (That happens when the audio includes speaking, singing, harmonica, ukulele, and totally messed up digital sounds.) I reached out to Rebecca Quintana of U. Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation, and they agreed to re-record my lecture in the studio with a professional engineer. It’s a series of smaller videos, rather than one long one hour video.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5-TkQAfAZFbalQod5uP9x1hUQnIUHWnk
The crowdsourced blog post about the keynote is here, and my post with my many thanks is here. The slides are available here:
I fixed some typos and updated a bit the extended abstract associated with the talk. You can get the (non-paywalled) updated paper here.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
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Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take 
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orcmid | November 25, 2019 at 10:54 am
Thank you for the extended abstract. It is very handy. It is a little amusing that the Katie Rich, et.al. summary of 5 features is an adequate characterization of Turing Machines and of algorithms as they are characterized.
I am puzzled a little bit about how one moves from what a program or computation is, versus what it happens to be for in a purposive setting. Perhaps it is a bit like moving from arithmetic, a set of mechanical procedures, to something more like mathematics. But “what is it for” remains a question, seems to me.
When I learned to program, before there was such a thing as computer science as a discipline, I am pretty certain I did not have such questions. But, at some point, it came to matter and fitness-for-purpose, something above the program alone, became important as did the social aspects around elaborate suites of programs for serious human purposes. Looking back, I cannot determine how my attention was expanded to such matters. I wonder where in a curriculum it would fit.