Summer Undergraduate Research Program Opportunity

New CSCI Course Offering – Spring 2012

Junior and Senior Computer Science majors — Are you looking for an interesting class for Spring 2012?  Dr. Anderson will be co-teaching a Special Topics course with Dr. Shedlock of the Biology Department.  CSCI 490-02: Vertebrate Genome Lab.  The course is a 3 Credit hour offering on Thursdays from 5:30 – 7:30 pm.  Check out the flier below for more details or email Dr. Anderson if you’re interested andersonp@cs.cofc.edu.

Steve Jobs: Computer Science is a Liberal Art

Computer science has been informed by the liberal arts. Now it is time for the liberal arts to include computer science for all who seek a liberal education. Like language, science, history, philosophy, and math, computer science embodies a set of notions that informs the intellectual capabilities and computational thought. Computer science embodies the abstractions of information, communication, computation and coordination, among others (Peter Denning).

In 1996, Steve Jobs, promoted computer science as a liberal art somewhat before I was fully convinced. Hear the short interview at NPR.

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-science-is-a-liberal-art

Analytics is a Sexy Major (When hell freezes over)

Analytics may soon be able to reveal in the enrollment data that the freeze has started. The movie Moneyballs (Brad Pitt, Robin Wright and Jonah Hill) may do for analytics programs what The Social Network did for computer science – attract more smart young adults into the discipline of analytics. The College of Charleston offers a BS in Discovery Informatics for students who are passionate about finding value in data, just like Billy Bean did when he managed the Oakland A’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/business/after-moneyball-data-guys-are-triumphant.html?_r=1&hpw

How to Keep the (traditionally) Educated Population Ignorant

When is it right to include computational thinking into a general education program in higher education? When we all fully understand it? No. When we can most afford it? No. When it does not cause academic turf warfare? Not really. It’s only when we are ready to graduate students who are better prepared to succeed through an understanding of and the facility with abstraction, information and processes, which have come to define and influence their personal and professional lives.

Conversations are happening over computational thinking (Jannette Wing 2006) on college and high school campuses. Some traction is developing, but there is still a chasm of ignorance between the computing community, which can get excited over problem solving through computational thinking, and colleagues in other disciplines who still view computing today as if it were 1990…you know, the if-only-my-students-knew-formulas-in-Excel faculty members.

Looking at the College of Charleston’s General Education program, reading, writing and math stand prominently, echoing the traditional educational triad well into the 21st century. While the three Rs remain foundational, I argue that computational thinking, represented by a fourth R, algorithms, is a new leg upon which liberally educated people must stand in this century. (Tony Hey, Microsoft Research 2009) Or is it simply asking too much of universities?

In the mean time, computer scientists, a group that already studies reading, writing, math, history, language, philosophy, and the arts, will continue to be singularly well educated. We have already emerged as a population (Richard Florida 2004) who are best positioned to succeed in a world in which we increasingly draw value and power from information and processes. And we are progressing at speeds that boggle human understanding and may soon exceed it.

In the short term, we have much to gain by keeping the traditionally educated population ignorant. When people get hungry for managing complexity, for understanding how to solve problems computationally, and for digitally implementing ideas that can transform scientific, social, political and economic spaces in time frames with shorter and shorter half-lives, let them run Excel. In the mean time, let’s relax. Let’s keep the computational key until someone is keen to notice.

2011 First Student Researcher Roundtable

Student researchers from CIRDLES, I-Lab, and MusicLab gathered with Dr. Bowring and Dr. Starr for a roundtable discussion over pizza at Andolini’s on Friday, 28 Jan. The lively discussions prompted plans for future gatherings.

Password Aging at the College of Charleston

When LDAP came along, I just knew life for users of IT on the College of Charleston campus would be so much better. Before LDAP we all had to keep up with multiple logins and multiple passwords, one for each computer system that required user authentication. Now that LDAP is here and stable, we have single sign on for multiple campus systems. However, the efficacy gains through LDAP are thwarted by password aging. Aging passwords, at least with the frequency selected and enforced by IT at the College, may cause more harm to computer security than it is intended to provide. There is certainly nothing wrong with requiring strong passwords. But the frequent aging of strong passwords begs three questions:

1) How does the user change a strong password to something different and still strong?
2) How does the user remember the next, new strong password?
3) How does the user remain patient with IT because the user has lost work that was interrupted by the non-negotiable demand to change one’s perfectly good strong password at the worst possible time.

Any thoughts on the matter of including the human in the security equation? There are solutions and plenty of data to back them up. What is your position? What would you recommend to the IT at the College of Charleston?

When the educated do not compute

What happens when students graduate from the College of Charleston (and many other universities in the US) unprepared to engage in a world that is changing faster than they have learned to adapt? They remain blissfully unaware. Fully incognizant of their deficiency, some will wonder why they cannot get a job, move between jobs or keep a job. Few will take the red pill and move through a world in which they will have a chance to affect.

Graduates at large cannot think computationally or recognize computational issues including managing complexity and change. The problem is a curriculum that has not changed enough. The curriculum deficiency starts in K12. We still expect high school students to take multiple years of mathematics but not even a day of computer science. Even worse, high school students in the Charleston County School District at least are required to complete DIT (Digital Input Technologies), aka keyboarding for those of you with college degrees who don’t even know enough to parse the official title. A notable exception is Porter Gaud School’s computer science curriculum in Charleston, SC.

Problem solving, abstractions, and symbolic manipulation may be better learned through a computer science curriculum and within a computational context. Without a computer science course covering computational issues of mind and machines, we graduate students from high school with a middle school preparation for the world of college and work. Likewise few undergraduates programs in the United States state learning outcomes for computational and informational proficiency, including computational thinking. Princeton University’s General Education Program is a notable exception.

Until there is a general education goal for computation/computational thinking or the recognition that computer science is also well positioned to deliver quantitative literacy along side traditional (and nearly unchanging) mathematics, better students will not waiting for a requirement.

You are educated.  How could you not compute?

Programming if Phun

CSTA published an article by David Whitus in Voice 6:2 about programming in middle school. Scratch is too elementary for middle school… Essentially, long live Phrogram, but its $45/per and only on Windows under .NET. Any experience? I think I’ll stick with Python for my 6th-8th graders.

On interesting quote, “At the middle school level, programming is about learning how to think abstractly and use math concepts to solve problems.” You don’t often hear this from middle school teachers! Thank you David Whitus.

Student Researchers’ Roundtable

Student researchers from CIRDLES and ILab met at Andolini’s Pizzeria on Friday at noon (04.09.2010) to enhance their margins of excellence by getting to know each other. Look to Fall 2010 for more roundtables!