SIGCSE 2012 - another outing for the Web Science Curriculum

Web Science (and me) are going to SIGCSE 2012

There is quite a bit of Web Science in the conference this year - although it is hardly taking centre stage.

This blog will be refined over the next couple of days but here we are for starters...

ACM SIGCSE is the Special Interest Croup for Computer Sciecne Education - so as someone who is working in computer science, teaching and researching in computer science and web science, and particularly interested in computer science education and the web science curriculum, you can understand that I would be pitching up to take the pulse of the community.

On top of that, I am able to present the paper which I co-wrote with Michalis Vafopoulos - now of the university of central greece, titled

Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science - the paper is in ECS eprints http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22710/ and will also be in the ACM conference proceedings.

This paper develops further some of the ideas expressed in our highly commended paper presented at the 2011 Web Science Conference in Koblenz last year  Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through Shared Educational Artefacts which is also available from ECS  sprints  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22141/ , direct from the Web Science Trust,  http://journal.webscience.org/439/ or via the ACM digital library.

Web Science Perspectives

Pre-conference

Open Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Computers and Society (SIGCAS)

This session is hosted by the current char and the immediate past chair of the ACM Computers and Society Special Interest Group. With the interdisciplinary nature of web science it is always interesting to see how different people are talking about changes. I am hoping to have some time catching up with these folks

SIGCAS is the ACM Special Interest Group that addresses the social and ethical consequences of widespread computer usage. SIGCAS' main goals are to raise awareness about the impact that technology has on society, and to support and advance the efforts of those who are involved in this important work.

Our members are computer professionals from both industry and academia, as well as ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and others. We welcome students from a variety of disciplines. Our areas of involvement include computer ethics, universal access to computer technology, security, privacy, and reliability. We collaborate with other ACM bodies that are engaged in related work, such as USACM, SIGITE and SIGCSE.

Ben Schneiderman provides a testimonial for the group on its web site http://www.sigcas.org/ which is also testament in a way that Web Science definitely belongs in the SIGCAS community, since probably the first time that the ACM community go a formal heads up on the emerging importance of web science and its implications for the broader computer science community was in the paper in CACM which Ben published in 2007 titled Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science.

Main Program(me) - a timeline view

 

Thursday:

Plenary Session
Keynote Speaker: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - I have a doctoral student (Jian Shi)  looking at students learning programming - so this is really relevant to his area of study

this presentation took the perspective of designing learning rather than delivering teaching, and there was a lot of emphasis on reframing the learning experience - for example flipping the classroom, and critique approaches.

some time was spent talking about team software engineering projects, and various items of advice on how to run sessions - allocating peer marks from a budget, advertising to get external clients - keeping team sizes at 3,4 and 5 with  preference for 4 team memnberts

recommended book to emerge Peopleware by Decosta - have put it on my Kindle Wishlist! should also put time to read on my wish list ;-)

 

Computer Science Curriculum 2013 – Reviewing the Strawman Report from the ACM/IEEE-CS Task Force

This is really relevant to the pitch we are making in our paper, so should be interesting.

http://cs2013.org/

presenters of a very useful (and well attended) session were Mehran Sahami (stanford) Steve Roach (U Texas at El Paso, Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas, San Pablo Catholic University, David Reed Creigton University

The Strawman report - http://ai.stanford.edu/users/sahami/CS2013/strawman-draft/cs2013-strawman.pdf

There was an introduction from Sahami, followed by a presentation of the Body of Knowledge by David Reed

The body of knowledge is chapter 5 in the Strawman report

The consultation on this has been widely representative of different sizes and types of institution, but entirely US centric.

this may not be true as far as the external reviewers were concerned.

main points which came up - revision of BOK, there is a move away from programming to principles to software development fundamentals which is independent of paradigm

seeks to broaden thinking away from equating programming fundamental with introductory programming courses

information assurance and security

parallel and districted computing

networking and comms - replaces net-centric

platform based development (elective only)

curriculum organisation

there tiered classification of BOK units

 

 

 

 

 

for each of the content areas, the topics are listed  and there is an expectation of certain learning outcomes classed under three broad categories

 

 

 

 

special note of interest - software developed by  Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas at San Pablo Catholic University for evaluating existing curricula against the recommended curricula

Friday

 

 

Saturday

 

General Perspectives

Other stuff of interest

Teaching Ethics in Computer Science: Active Learning - workshop

 

THINGS TO FOLLOW UP

Kent state uni are running a digital sciences interdisciplinary bachelors which may be of interest

refs

Shneiderman, B. 2007. Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 50 (6), 25-27.

Vafopoulos, M. Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC) Web Science Trust http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html

Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. The Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC). In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S., Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Jonquet, C., Prini, G., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Tiropanis, T. and Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S. and Vafopoulos, M.N. 2012. Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science. 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 28th February-3rd March 2012 (Rayleigh, NC, 2012).

 

ITICSE 09 UPMC Paris

More on ITiCSE:

Fab working group (Professional Values In CS Education) expertly run by Ursula Fuller and Bob Kleim from University of Kent in the UK. You can take a look at the proceedings, and expect our working group report to emerge at the end of the review process as a publication in inroads.
I will be participating in a workshop on a similar area which Tony Jenkins from Leeds will be running at Kent in August 2009 at the HEA-ICS conference.

As well as taking part in the working group on profesional values in computing education, I was at ITiCSE to present a paper about the relationship between research and teaching.

In some ways there are aspects of these two activities which overlap, and in both the paper and the working group we are interested in the perspective of change starting from the curriculum design.

Activities which find and exploit natural links between research and teaching are powerful additions to the traditional curriculum with its content led, technological bias. Researchers are highly tuned learners, and typically activities which relate research and learning, also contribute to the learners understanding of the value of independent/informal learning in a highly authentic context. I've done a few blogs on this subject already, and its a recurrent (and I think, imporant) theme in my work at Southampton..

Our working group at ITiCSE was really strenghtened by contributions from Diana Fitch, who is a careers expert who work very closely with our academic team in ECS at Southampton ( just part of the stuff she does supporting colleagues in a range of schools across the university). Her expertise and understanding of employers' views brings an important addition to the academics' analysis of the curriculum and its interpretation of the requirements of professional accreditation.

The conference was well organised with helpful student assistants


As it turned out, it was a pretty heavy commitment, and I was left exhausted at the end, but hey...

Some good papers in the sessions I was attending, Lil Bloom from toronto was presenting some interesting stuff on working with CS people on communication skills. I already use the university of Toronto materials about writing with some of my students, at various levels. Her paper included some fine examples of good practice.

Highlights
I have a few pics,

• I was awed by the UPMC building which is in the process of being renovated.

• We went to a few restaurants, and had good meals accompanied by good conversation. We went to the Big Ben Bar next to the Blue Train for a few wines one evening, that was after the reception where the stalwart few were rewarded for our waiting by a final wine course of some quality champagne. But did not take pics
• However on campus, the mural/grafitti of a fish tank was impressive

• particularly liked the escalators in our building, although we never figured out when exactly they actually worked...
  

• The coach left for the boat trip ridiculously early, with a few photo opportunities

• After the boat trip (we had to wait an hour an a half on the quay, but the food was good, I did not take any of the the usual tourist pics although we went past Notre Dame, Quay D'Orsay etc etc)

• and...as I was saying... after the boat tripUrsula and I went to find her hat shop in rue St Sepulchre
  

• Diana was a star, fortuitously speaking excellent french, the result of a fine international education.

• Joyce and Chuck, who completed our team were good folk, and helped us understand a different perspective on values education.

The picture of the working group taken on the final day shows a rather tired band of people. Thanks to Karen Fraser (HEA-ICS) for this bit of photo journalism!

Afterwards I went to Gare de Lyon, had a nice lunch ( and got to understand why the big ben bar had a resident cat) I then got on the TGV for the south.

I was a bit exhausted so don't have so many pics from then....

Professional Values, Attitudes and Development in the Computing Disciplines

If the phrase being in the pink means anything to you, you will appreciate this photograph of our working area at UPMC (Paris VI), host to the 2009 ACM SIGCSE ITiCSE conference.

We are working on professional values, attitudes and development in the computing disciplines.  More later, but in the meantime, admire the architecture and the interior design

Multinational perspectives on the development and assessment of professional values in CS

Another part of the work which I am doing here at Southampton is concerned with professional education of our students who study Computer Science and Information Technology in Education. As well as actually doing the teaching its important to find time to develop some well considered bases for the approach which we take.

The SIGCSE community is one where the underpinning values of this part of their studies is considered. This year I am taking part in a working group which will be hosted at the annual ITiCSE conference, this year to be hosted in Paris at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6, France).

The working group is being led by Ursula Fuller and Bob Klein from The University of Kent, and it is titled Multinational perspectives on the development and assessment of professional values in CS. You can download a pdf of the original proposal here

Its one of a series of working groups at this year's conference the plan is to meet and write in the days immediately prior to the conference. Our report to the conference is scheduled for 11-11.45 on Wednesday 8th July, so its all pretty intensive.

Southampton input is coming from me and my colleague Diana Fitch who actually works in our careers service. Diana works very closely with our school. I find her help invaluable, she contributes to some of the teaching we do, hosts and organises special events for our students, as well as all the rest of her portfolio.

The group's work in progress is being supported by a group wiki. With so many thinks going on at work, its important for me to have loads of links to the background information, and we've scheduled regular meetings between Diana and myself to keep us on track.

First task is getting a survey of students experiences and beliefs. But at the same time I need to get my head round the literature, not too extensive, but all the more reason to know it back to front.

Apparently the seminal paper was developed a few years ago,

• Little, J.C., Granger, M.J., Boyle, R., Gerhardt-Powals, J., Impagliazzo, J., Janik, C., Kubilus, N.J., Lippert, S.K., McCracken, W.M., Paliwoda, G. and Soja, P. 1999. Integrating Professionalism and Workplace Issues into the Computing and Information Technology Curriculum. Inroads 31, 106-120.

It seems to me that there is quite a lot of related reading, and a publications which have emerged following the work through. Documents which we will also be looking include:

• The Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula. Computing Curricula 2001: Computer Science, 2001.
• UK QAA subject benchmarking statements for Computing (2007)
• Professional statements from the BCS and IET - both of whom accredit our degrees here at Southampton.
• Information Technology 2008: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree programs in Information Technology http://www.acm.org//education/curricula/IT2008%20Curriculum.pdf

Other more recent papers include

• Fuller, Ursula and Keim, Bob. Should we assess our students' attitudes? Proceedings of the Seventh Baltic Sea Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling 2007), Koli National Park, Finland, November 15-18, 2007, Raymond Lister and Simon, Eds, 2008.
• Fuller, Ursula and Bob Keim, Assessing students' practice of professional values. Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Madrid, Spain, 2008, pp 88-92.

while some of the original foundations are going to have us skurrying over to the University Library ( and I know they are there because I have taken them out before!) - basically looking back to the original work on educational objectives looking at just two of the three domains - congnitive (the one we always quote) and affective (the one which comes up less often). I guess in the area of professional values I am happy to concede that the psycho-motor domain is going to be less important.

• Bloom, B.S., Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H. and Krathwohl, D.R. 1956. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook 1 Cognitive Domain. Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, London.
• Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S. and Masia, B.B. 1964.Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals. Handbook 2 Affective domain. McKay, New York.

Our work
There is a survey to be done of students attitudes and experiences, and some data to collect from employers too ( Diana's contacts are going to be very valuable here)

Overall, apart from way in which a better understanding of this area can trickle into the curriculum, there are a few external reasons why this will be important.

We want the work we do in our professional modules to be really valuable to the students. Also it relates to current developments and focus areas of eSkills, the HEA-ICS Advisory Board ( and the rest of their community) plus perhaps the CPHC-LDG.