TITLE: A Change in Direction at ChiliPLoP
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 19, 2008 12:40 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
As I mentioned in my
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-03.html#e2008-03-18T13_08_54.htm">
   last SIGCSE entry</A>,
I have moved from carefree Portland to Carefree, Arizona,
for ChiliPLoP 2008.  The elementary patterns group spent
yesterday, its first, working on the idea of integrating
large datasets into the CS curriculum.  After a few years
of working on specific examples, both stand-alone and
running, we started this year thinking about how CS students
can work on real problems from many different domains.
In the sciences, that often means larger data sets, but
more important it means authentic data sets, and data sets
that inspire students to go deeper.  On the pedagogical
side of the ledger, much of the challenge lies in finding
and configuring data sets so that they can used reliably
and without unnecessary overhead placed on the adopting
instructor.

This morning, we volunteered to listen to a presentation
by the other hot topic group on its work from yesterday:
a "green field" thought experiment designing an undergrad
CS program outside of any constraints from the existing
university structure.  This group consists of Dave West
and Pam Rostal, who presented an earlier version of this
work at the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-10.html#e2005-10-17T21_54_33.htm">
   OOPSLA 2005 Educators' Symposium</A>,
and
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/">
   Richard Gabriel</A>,
who brings to the discussion not only an academic background
in CS and a career in computer science research and industry
but also an MFA in poetry.  Perhaps the key motivation for
their hot topic is that most CS grads go on to be professional
software developers or CS researchers, and that our current
way of educating them doesn't do an ideal job of preparing
grads for either career path.

Their proposal is much bigger than I can report here.  They
started by describing a three-dimensional characterization of
different kinds of CS professionals, including provocative and
non-traditional labels as "creative builder", "imaginative
researcher", and "ordinologist".  The core of the proposal is
the sort of competency-based curriculum that West and Rostal
talked about at OOPSLA, but I might also describe it as
studio-based, apprenticeship-based, and project-based.  One
of their more novel ideas is that students would learn
<EM>everything</EM> they need for a liberal arts, undergraduate
computer science education through their software projects
-- including history, English, writing, math, and social
science.  For example, students might study the mathematics
underlying a theorem prover while building a inference
engine, study a period of history in order to build a
zoomable timeline on the web for an instructional web site,
or build a Second Life for a whole world in ancient Rome.

In the course of our discussion, the devil's advocates in
the room raised several challenging issues, most of which
the presenters had anticipated.  For example, how do the
instructors (or mentors, as they called them) balance the
busy work involved in, say, the students implementing some
Second Life chunk with the content the students need to
learn?  Or how does the instructional environment ensure
that students learn the intellectual process of, say,
history, and not just impose a computer scientist's
worldview on history?  Anticipating these concerns does
not mean that they have answers, only that they know the
issues exist and will have to be addressed at some point.
But this isn't the time for self-censorship...  When trying
to create something unlike anything we see around us, the
bigger challenge is trying to let the mind imagine the
new thing without prior restraint from the imperfect
implementations we already know.

We all thought that this thought experiment was worth
carrying forward, which is where the change of direction
comes in.  While our group will continue to work on the
dataset idea from yesterday, we decided in the short term
to throw our energies into the wild idea for reinventing
CS education.  The result will be two proposals to OOPSLA
2008: one an activity at the
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2008/cfp/cfp-edusym.html">
   Educators' Symposium</A>,
and the other an
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2008/cfp/cfp-onward.html">
   Onward! paper</A>.
This will be my first time as part of a proposal to the
Onward! track, which is both a cool feeling and an
intimidating prospect.  We'll see what happens.
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