Criticizing and Modernizing Computing Curriculum: The Case of the Web and the Social Issues Courses
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The paper critiques and suggests modernizing the computing curriculum, focusing on web development and ethics/social issues, which have been poorly represented in academic literature. It argues against the 'all-the-web-in-one-course' (AWOC) approach to teaching web development, advocating for a more comprehensive multi-course structure to keep abreast of technological advancements and real-world practices. Additionally, it challenges the prevalent algorithmic approach to teaching social and professional issues in computing, urging for a shift towards a more nuanced understanding of technology's impact on society.
Criticizing and Modernizing Computing Curriculum: The Case of the Web and the Social Issues Courses
- 1. Criticizing and Modernizing the Computing Curriculum The Case of the Web and the Social Issues Courses Randy Connolly Mount Royal University, Calgary
- 2. Computing education has faced a variety of ongoing and critical self-examinations of different aspects of the curriculum over the past 15 years.
- 3. Some computing topic areas (e.g., first-year programming) have been rigorously examined in the education literature.
- 4. Other common topic areas have not been as adequately examined.
- 5. This paper provides a set of critiques and alternative teaching approaches for two vital topic areas that have been under-reported in the computing education literature:
- 7. This paper both restates and provides a capsule summary of this author’s more detailed papers on these two subjects.
- 9. In the past decade, the world of web development, has experienced a remarkable transformation
- 11. The web development topics in the ACM Computer Science Curriculum barely changed from 2001 to 2008.
- 12. FURTHERMORE
- 13. Almost all of the topics recognizable as pertaining to the field of web development are marked as elective topics in the CS 2008 (and 2013) curriculum.
- 14. ALSO
- 15. There has been a real dearth of research on the teaching of web topics.
- 17. Given the importance of web technology in the real world of software development, This relative lack of interest in the web by computer science is somewhat surprising.
- 18. Number of Web-Based Software Development Jobs Number of Non-Web Software Development Jobs Based on searches in Oct + Nov 2010 on monster.com and simplyhired.com
- 19. The papers that do exist generally begin by stressing the many difficulties in teaching a web development course.
- 20. Examining the literature, web content is usually being taught using the broad but shallow All-the-Web-in-One-Course (AWOC) approach
- 21. 60% Of CS web education papers reported A single web course 16% Web taught in CS0 or elective 12% Javascript in CS1/CS2 12% Multicourse stream on web
- 22. Given the importance of web systems, the time has come for retiring the AWOC approach
- 23. Back in the early 1970s, a math program might have had a single course in programming in Fortran, but eventually it was recognized that a body of knowledge as complex as programming requires multiple courses to teach the material properly. Web development should be in a similar state today
- 24. While the AWOC approach does give students a sense of the big picture of web development, it by no means provides the students with anything approaching proficiency in contemporary practice.
- 25. Why not?
- 26. Because web development is characterized by peculiar combination of change and persistence
- 27. 2009- Frameworks + Platforms (WordPress,JQuery,Sharepoint,etc) 2006-2009 AJAX + REST/JSON services Semantic Web Standards + 2003-2006 CSS (positional) + PHP/ASP.NET CSS (simple) + 1999-2002 Javascript (simple) + ASP/JSP + Usability 1995-1998 HTML + CGI + Graphics
- 28. For those stuck with the AWOC approach it will become increasingly difficult to keep the course comprehensive and relevant
- 29. Because of the time limitations of the AWOC approach, the content in these single web courses increasingly seem like they are …
- 33. HTML Not just the details (which are trivial) but also how to do semantic separation of content from presentation.
- 34. Due to practitioners’ move towards web standards and semantically-oriented markup, real world CSS is commonly used for positioning and layout.
- 35. This type of CSS is notoriously difficult to master due to browser bugs, incompatibilities, and non-obvious CSS box model interactions.
- 36. Another important part of web development that is almost always left out of the AWOC approach is digital media
- 37. Yet another vital knowledge area in web development is usability, an area that is almost always ignored in AWOC courses. None of the current web textbooks examined for this paper contained any substantial material on usability.
- 38. Javascript has become too complex to be covered in a AWOC course. The type of Javascript that can be covered in one or two weeks (rollovers, form data validation, browser sniffing) was reasonably close to what was needed professionally in the late 1990s.
- 39. Since the discovery of XmlHttpRequest and the subsequent flourishing of new user interface coding and asynchronous communication with web services, Javascript coding as become simultaneously crucial to contemporary web development and significantly more complicated.
- 40. Analogous to the case with CSS, this type of Javascript programming is very difficult to learn due to: browser differences, the untyped nature of the language, the lack of a cross-browser debugging environment, general conceptual complexity of working with callback functions
- 41. A key part of learning real- world web development is the server-side environment. Potentially this is a very large topic, and has its own difficulties from a teaching perspective.
- 42. If students haven’t fully mastered the ability to implement a non-trivial design in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the added indirection of writing a program to generate HTML, CSS, and Javascript can be quite tricky conceptually for a novice developer.
- 43. Server-side development also has a number of substantial additional topics, which are difficult to fit into a single AWOC course.
- 44. Web-based APIs using REST or SOAP services are also an important part of the web world of 2008+
- 45. Web vulnerabilities/security is another area that is difficult to comprehensively cover in the AWOC approach. None of the current web textbooks examined for this paper contained any substantial material on web security.
- 46. Our students also need to learn a certain amount about hosting and administration issues, such as: The architecture of the main web server platforms such as Apache and Microsoft’s IIS. Hosting topics such as web gardens, web farms, load balancing, and server configurations for scalability. Image Source: http://sharepointmagazine.net
- 47. More and more organizations are using already existing open- source and/or proprietary web frameworks instead of creating their web infrastructure from scratch.
- 48. This is perhaps the most substantial revolution in web development since the mass adoption of CSS in the early 2000s
- 49. Content management systems, blogging systems, and web forums are more and more often being used as the main framework for an organization’s public or private web presence, since these systems handle many of the most common web needs of an organization.
- 50. Similarly, due to the complexity of layout- oriented CSS and AJAX- focused Javascript, it is becoming increasingly common to use an existing CSS or Javascript framework.
- 51. For the students, it is important to learn about the existence of these existing frameworks and templates because the future of web systems will increasingly lie in their use, integration, and customization. Sometimes multiple existing systems will be used by an organization and the key role of the web professional will be to get these systems to interoperate through their public APIs.
- 55. Students “need to understand the basic cultural, social, legal, and ethical issues inherent in the discipline of computing.”
- 56. of American computer science programs include SPI in curriculum (Social and Professional Issues)
- 57. of international computer science programs include SPI in curriculum
- 58. Teaching SPI within computing has been dominated by a very specific analytic approach. Can you spot it?
- 62. Articulate the impacts of ICT and ethically evaluate those impacts
- 63. Almost all of these books follow a similar algorithmic methodolog y
- 65. It is not hard to see the attraction of this approach for us computer professors
- 66. The “many gray areas of computer ethics are often frightening … to professors who are worried about how to answer things of which they themselves are unsure.”
- 67. of SPI courses taught by computer science faculty
- 68. Some have indeed argued that using this algorithmic provides a sense of security and methodology for nervous CS faculty teaching an SPI confidence course
- 69. I am going to argue that both this algorithmic methodology and the theoretical understanding of the relationship between technology and society that it is based upon are deeply flawed.
- 70. I will try to convince you that we need to move away from the ethical evaluation of impacts and instead emphasize the social context of computing
- 71. In particular, the way we teach SPI material needs to integrate the decades-old of researchers in the philosophy, history, and sociology of insights that emphasizes a very different approach to technology SPI.
- 73. The common way of seeing technology is it is akin to a cue ball that impacting or altering the rest of society
- 74. In this perspective key technological inventions have transformed the world. Thus new technologies need to be analyzed to understand wide changes they will enact. the
- 75. This approach to technology is generally referred to as Technological Determinism
- 76. Dependent Variables (society, politics, economy, psychology, etc) determines Independent Variable Technological Chang
- 77. It is understandable why computer professionals find technological determinism attractive. people helping to We are the invent new technologies
- 78. It feeds our to be clear socially desire relevant
- 79. … and our desire to believe that we computer geeks are the driver of social change, and not politicians, business people, or celebrities.
- 81. Most current historians and sociologists of firmly reject technological technology determinism because it is theoretically inconsistent and empirically under-supported
- 82. The well-established academic field of science, technology and society (STS) studies (that began in the 1960s) has time and time again found that when examined carefully most technologies rarely have had the effect that was expected or had the transformative impact people claim.
- 85. economy history technolog y cultur e society politics
- 87. 1. Empirically false 2. Not used by STS research community 3. Naively focused on functional capabilities
- 88. functional capabilities? Most technological deterministic impact prognosticators do their work by looking at the functional capabilities of a given technology
- 93. In all these cases – and practically any other set of prognostications and impact evaluations than begin from an unquestioned belief that the functional capabilities of a technology (i.e., the means) do what is promised (i.e., achieve their ends) – the expected social impacts ended up being wildly wrong because the prognosticators believed in a naïve technological determinism.
- 95. The introduction of household technology did not end up creating, in the words of Ruth Schwartz Cowan, less work for mother, but in fact more work because of a series of social changes that could not have been predicted if one limited one’s analysis just to the functional capabilities of the household technologies.
- 96. Efficient internet search-engines have not resulted in people with too much knowledge; instead, unpredicted changes in how people interact with words and even possibly cognitive decline due to the brain’s plasticity have arguably resulted in the exact opposite consequence
- 97. The introduction of anti-lock disc brakes have not reduced accidents at all, because drivers tend to drive faster and tailgate more closely due to the improved braking technology and also partly because of increases in the intensity of traffic due to unexpected changes in urban geography.
- 99. The first step Then we should take in our Social and Professional Issues courses is to communicate how rarely technologies achieve their promise and indeed, how many do the opposite.
- 100. The revenge effect of technology is extremely well documented yet it is uncovered in any of the computer ethics textbooks examined for this presentation.
- 101. One way to achieve this goal would be by beginning the SPI course with examples and readings on how certain vital technologies had little impact on some societies, or on how certain technologies were strongly modified and differently adapted in different cultures and countries.
- 102. This more historically-nuanced approach to technology and society is what is generally called social constructivism
- 103. In this approach, one looks at how technologies are researched, invented, financed, developed, adopted, marketed, and propagated within a very complex system generally referred to as society.
- 104. In other words, our SPI courses should look more like a historical sociology course and a lot less like a philosophic ethics course.
- 105. CONCLUSION
- 106. It has been this paper’s contention that both the web and social issues courses need to be modernized in terms of their curricula.
- 107. These two sometimes-neglected knowledge areas can also provide students with experience in working with integration and complexity.
- 108. Randy Connolly Dept. Computer Science & Information Systems Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada [email protected] Images from iStockPhoto and stock.xchng