Knowing and Doing

A short passage from Innocence, by Penelope Fitzgerald:

In 1927, when they moved me from Ustica to Milan, I was allowed to plant a few seeds of chicory, and when they came up I had to decide whether to follow Rousseau and leave them to grow by the light of nature, or whether to interfere in the name of knowledge and authority. What I wanted was a a decent head of chicory. It's useless to be doctrinaire in such circumstances.

Sometimes, you just want a good head of chicory -- or a working program. Don't let philosophical ruminations get in the way. There will be time for reflection and evaluation later.

A few years ago, I picked up Fitzgerald's short novel The Bookshop while browsing the stacks at the public library. I enjoyed it despite the fact that (or perhaps because) it ended in a way that didn't create a false sense of satisfaction. Since then I have had Fitzgerald on my list of authors to explore more. I've read the first fifty pages or so of Innocence and quite like it.

With the exception of teaching our database course during the COVID year, I have been teaching a stable pair of courses for the last many semesters: Programming Languages in the spring and our compilers course, Translation of Programming Languages, in the fall. That will change this fall due to some issues with enrollments and course demands. I'll be teaching a course in client-side web development.

The official number and title of the course are "CS 1100 Web Development: Client-Side Coding". The catalog description for the course was written years ago by committee:

Client-side web development adhering to current Web standards. Includes by-hand web page development involving basic HTML, CSS, data acquisition using forms, and JavaScript for data validation and simple web-based tools.

As you might guess from the 1000-level number, this is an introductory course suitable for even first-year students. Learning to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript effectively is the focal point. It was designed as a service course for non-majors, with the primary audience these days being students in our Interactive Digital Studies program. Students in that program learn some HTML and CSS in another course, but that course is not a prerequisite to ours. A few students will come in with a little HTML5+CSS3 experience, but not all.

So that's where I am. As I mentioned, this is one of my first courses to design from scratch in a long time. Other than Database Systems, we have to go back to Software Engineering in 2009. Starting from scratch is fun but can be daunting, especially in a course outside my core competency of hard-core computer science.

The really big change, though, was mentioned two paragraphs ago: non-majors. I don't think I've taught non-majors since teaching my university's capstone 21 years ago -- so long ago that this blog did not yet exist. I haven't taught a non-majors' programming course in even longer, 25 years or more, when I last taught BASIC. That is so long ago that their was no "Visual" in the language name!

So: new area, new content, new target audience. I have a lot of work to do this summer.

I could use some advice from those of you who do web development for a living, who know someone who does, or who are more up to date on the field than I.

Generally, what should a course with this title and catalog description be teaching to beginners in 2023?

Specifically, can you point me toward...

• similar courses with material online that I could learn from?
• resources for students to use as they learn: websites, videos, even books?

For example, a former student and now friend mentioned that the w3schools website includes a JavaScript tutorial which allows students to type and test code within the web browser. That might simplify practice greatly for non-CS students while they are learning other development tools.

I have so many questions to answer about tools in particular right now: Should we use an IDE or a simple text editor? Which one? Should we learn raw JavaScript or a simple framework? If a framework, which one?

This isn't a job-training course, but to the extent that's reasonable I would like for students to see a reasonable facsimile of what they might encounter out in industry.

Thinking back, I guess I'm glad now that I decided to play some around with JavaScript in 2022... At least I now have more context for evaluatins the options available for this course.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please do send them along. Sending email or replying on Mastodon or Twitter all work. I'll keep you posted on what I learn.

I just started reading Joshua Kendall's The Man Who Made Lists, a story about Peter Mark Roget. Long before compiling his namesake thesaurus, Roget was a medical doctor with a local practice. After a family tragedy, though, he returned to teaching and became a science writer:

In the 1820s and 1830s, Roget would publish three hundred thousand words in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and also several lengthy review articles for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the organization affiliated with the new University of London, which sought to enable the British working class to educate itself.

What a noble goal, enabling the working class to educate itself. And what a cool name: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge!

For many years, my university has provided a series of talks for retirees, on topics from various departments on campus. This is a fine public service, though without the grand vision -- or the wonderful name -- of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. I suspect that most universities depend too much on tuition and lower costs these days to mount an ambitious effort to enable the working class to educate itself.

Mental illness ran in Roget's family. Kendall wonders if Roget's "lifelong desire to bring order to the world" -- through his lecturing, his writing, and ultimately his thesaurus, which attempted to classify every word and concept -- may have "insulated him from his turbulent emotions" and helped him stave off the depression that afflicted several of his family members.

Academics often live an obsessive connection with the disciplines they practice and study. Certainly that sort of focus can can be bad for a person when taken too far. (Is it possible for an obsession not to go too far?) For me, though, the focus of studying something deeply, organizing its parts, and trying to communicate it to others through my courses and writing has always felt like a gift. The activity has healing properties all its own.

In any case, the name "The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge" made me smile. Reading has the power to heal, too.

I'm not sure what to think of the fact that my bank says it received my money NaN years ago:

At least NaN hasn't show up as my account balance yet! I suppose that if it were the result of an overflow, at least I'd know what it's like to be fabulously wealthy.

(For my non-technical readers, NaN stands for "Not a Number", and is used in computing interpreted as a value that is not defined or not representable. You may be able to imagine why seeing this in a bank transaction would be disconcerting to a programmer!)