TITLE: Another Connection to Journalism
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 17, 2009  9:48 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
<A HREF="http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/2209070679/">
   <IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/people/dave-winer.jpg"
        WIDTH="64"  HEIGHT="90"
        HSPACE="15" VSPACE="5"
        BORDER="0"  ALIGN="right"
        ALT="a picture of Dave Winer"></A>

While reading about the fate of newspapers prior to
writing my recent entry on
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-06.html#e2009-06-11T20_24_02.htm">
   whether universities are next</A>,
I ran across a blog entry by Dave Winer called
<A HREF="http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/17/ifYouDontLikeTheNews.html#p8">
   If you don't like the news...</A>.
Winer had attended a panel discussion at the
UC-Berkeley school of journalism.  After hearing what
he considered the standard "blanket condemnation of
the web" by the journalists there, he was thinking
about all the blogs he would love to have shown them
-- examples of experts and citizens alike writing
about economics, politics, and the world; examples of
a new sort of journalism, made possible by the web,
which give him hope for the future of ideas on the
internet.

Here is the money quote for me:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
I would also say to the assembled educators -- you
owe it to the next generations, who you serve, to
prepare them for the world they will live in as adults,
not the world we grew up in.  Teach <B>all of them</B>
the basics of journalism, no matter what they came to
Cal to study.  Everyone is now a journalist.  You'll
see an explosion in your craft, but it will cease to
be a profession.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Replace "journalism" with "computer science", and
"journalist" with "programmer", and this statement
fits perfectly with the theme of much of this blog
for the past couple of years.  I would be happy to
say this to my fellow computer science educators:
Everyone should now be a programmer.  We'll see an
explosion in our craft.

Will programming cease to be a profession?  I don't
think so, because there is still a kind and level
of programming that goes beyond what most people
will want to do.  Some of us will remain the
implementors of certain tools for others to use,
but more and more we will empower others to make
the tools they need to think, do, and maybe even
play.

Are academic computer scientists ready to make this
shift in mindset?  No more so than academic
journalists, I suspect.  Are practicing programmers?
No more so than practicing journalists, I suspect.

Purely by happenstance, I ran across another quote
from Winer this week, one that expresses something
about programming from the heart of a programmer:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
i wasn't born a programmer.            <BR/>
i became one because i was impatient.  <BR/>
-- @davewiner
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I suspect that a lot of you know just what he means.
How do we cultivate the right sort of impatience in
our students?
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