This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a series of posts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much an instructor can do: some students get it, others don’t; it’s all in genetics or other external factors that CS educators can’t influence (aka the Geek Gene Hypothesis). I am with Mark on this, but I feel a bit stronger about it than he does. I think that attitude is bullshit, and the studies supporting it are unsound by means of making conjectures ignoring an enormous number of confounding factors.
Throughout history, and even today in certain parts of the world, attitudes like this have been the basis for keeping entire segments of the population uneducated (“teaching women to read and write?! seriously, they can’t do it, look how much longer it takes for them to learn” or “blacks in Universities?! seriously, they can’t do it, look how their grades are so much lower”). This is basically the attitude of a class of educators who live so much inside the box of convention and intellectual lazyness that they are uncapable of seeing the big picture. I know this, because of two things. First, after the first few years of being a professor, my conclusion was the same: there’s nothing I can do, some students get it others don’t. I’ve learned a few things since then, and I know I was completely wrong. I was being a “Null Professor” at the time. Now I know better. Second, looking back at my own experience as a college student I was one of those students who “didn’t get it” at first. In fact, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up, and in my Electrical and Computer Engineering program, programming was one of many topics that came my way; understanding and learning to love programming was a slow process that came only in my 3rd year of college.
Let me expand on these two points. Continue reading →
Automation
As a computer scientist specializing in programming, the social consequences of software-for-business-efficiency are worrying me more and more. Here at home, we’ve been having a conversation about what post-capitalism would look like in the face of quasi-universal automation, in the best case scenario. It’s really hard to tie all the loose ends of such a vision. It’s sort of like Communism, but where people don’t need to work in order to have a decent life; the machines do all the work for us. There would be no money. All basic needs would be available free of charge. Food? Free. Transportation? Free. Housing? Free. Health care? Free. Education? Free. Justice? Free. Law and order? Free. No need to work, other than voluntarily. Everything would be provided by an automated production system powered by intelligent software.
Continue reading →