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.

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.

Of Two Minds

Majoring in computer science is associated with a high-paying and rewarding career paths after college, and also with the left (analytical) brain. But to land the most competitive positions, you need to have the right-brain skills too, including creativity, innovation and social intelligence. Majoring in any other discipline is likely complemented by a major or minor in a Computer Science, Information Systems, Discovery Informatics or Computing in the Arts (pending approval), may be your ticket to a promising career. www.cs.cofc.edu

Just in from the Wall Street Journal (12/28/09)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624392641425278.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The WSJ article mentions the need for a working knowledge of emerging trends. What are the emerging trends? How can we discover the emerging trends to get on board before graduating?

Read more from Daniel Pink about how the right brain is the new left brain for success. http://www.danpink.com/

Physicians falling from grace; no longer part of the god class

“Human body is getting reverse engineered. Once this is complete, computer science, computational biology, and bioengineering will revolutionize the concept of treatment in the Medical world. ” http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/21274.asp

Perhaps Richard Florida was right. The doctors, lawyers, realtors and accountants are no longer in the driver’s seat. These information-based professions are now relegated to the service class. Eclipsing them are the creative and innovative professions of computer science and other disciplines involving research and development that produce new memes and products that actually grow the economy instead of leaching off it.

Physician income to drop by up to 80%. How could this happen? Health care reform of a different spin; through outsourcing of medical services and by increasing the supply of physicians. Dr. Rahul Raj in New Dehli is already reading my x-rays. To get your creative juices flowing read http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/21274.asp

Take a look at the change in jobs and remuneration in the creative class versus the service and working classes. http://www.creativeclass.com/creative_class/2009/11/18/service-wage-gap/

Keep quiet, though. We would not want all 1,000 bio/pre-med students at the College of Charleston to find out that the upcoming fields in medicine are computer science, computational biology, bioengineering and discovery informatics < di.cofc.edu >.

Google will even hire an Archaeologist!

…But not just any archaeologist. The archaeologist needs to know something about Bayesian statistics,  analytics and programming. Check out a recent article from the New York Times,

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

One quote in the NYT article stands out:

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The statistics referred to by Varian his not just POS (plain old statistics). He is referring to inferential statistics, predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms. In computer science, these are referred to collectively as a branch of Artificial Intelligence.

Where can students go when the United States to understand how to position themselves to be competitive in a data-rich society?  They can come to the College of Charleston and major in Discovery Informatics or Computer Science. Discovery informatics includes the knowledge and skill set that that archaeologist, Carrie Grimes, needed to know to land that job at Google in Mountain View.

In addition, the computer science faculty at the College of Charleston continue to work on another, new and innovative degree program called Business Informatics. Business Informatics will emphasize business analytics, social network analysis and the technologies that support  these areas, which include XML technologies, scripting, Web services, service oriented architecture, and business process modeling.

So whoever your roommates are, clue them in before it’s too late! If they are creative, like to work with people and love to solve problems, then they can prepare themselves for an amazing career with an education in computing, computational thinking or discovery informatics at the College of Charleston.   And they can still call themselves an archaeologist for that matter, albeit a digital archaeologist.

I know not everyone is up to the challenge. Jumping into the dynamic and creative fields of computer science and discovery informatics takes energy, creativity and intelligence. So we don’t expect these high-power majors to be the largest on campus. But that’s okay. We will still need the service-class people, i.e., undergraduate majors who do not understand or use computational concepts and tools, to assist those of us in the creative class, so that we may enjoy the fruits of our labor in the conceptual age.

References:

Richard Florida (service class,  creative class concepts)

Daniel Pink (information age, conceptual age concepts)

AP Computer Science

Is AP Computer Science (APCS) doing anything to broaden participation in computer science? I’ve been thinking about this question lately and even more after reading Mark Guzdial’s Amazon Blog on the topic < http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1FSG5UQJ2R5MK >.

I used to think of APCS as the solution (in the 1990s) then as a benign anachronism (in the 2000s). I now believe that APCS unnecessarily constrains capable high school computer science teachers in order to prepare students for the exam. I also believe that students in APCS have already self-selected into the discipline thus APCS offers little power to broaden participation. So I respectfully disagree with Dr. Guzdial. Offering APCS in more high schools may only broaden participation linearly at best. 

As chair of a computer science department, I relish new freshmen with APCS coursework, don’t get me wrong, but the value is in the experience not the exam or the transfer credit. Engaging and motivating students in the 8th and 9th grades through computer science courses built around problem contexts, multiple disciplines and current technologies may do more to broaden participation than all of the APCS we could ever offer.

To that end, a group of computer scientists in South Carolina are working together to broaden computing experiences in public and private high schools. We aim to excite students about computer science through a more relevant and broader exposure to computing principles (Peter Denning) and computational thinking (Jeannette Wing). APCS will be promoted too, but without constraining resources or the political will to do so much more for our students than we are doing today with APC

Chris Starr