UNESCO Mobile Learning Week: Global Initiatives Abound

I spent the last two days attending the UNESCO Mobile Learning Week (UMLW). It has been a while since I have seen so many black and pin striped suits in one gathering. The rare academic in attendance was often identifiable by not having on wing tips. As one might expect, this was a global event, with representation from every continent (perhaps excepting Antarctica), developed and developing countries, industries, governments and teachers - lots of teachers.

The theme of this year's UMLW was "Empowering Teachers With Technology" and I was privileged to hear about initiatives and policy from Chile to Ghana to Pakistan and beyond. Languages abounded, along with excellent simultaneous translations in many of the presentations. I learned a fun piece of international vocabulary when a Portuguese speaker, who offered to speak in Spanish, apologized in advance to the translators if he slipped into "Portagñol". 

So many fascinating projects ... for example, I heard from a Palestinian speaker about coordinated use of SMS for teacher professional development in 5 countries across the Middle East (Gaza, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon) by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). They are working with curriculum contextualized for each country and coordinated with regard to policies. As you can imagine there are interesting challenges to overcome.

It became crystal clear to me this week just why mobile devices hold such promise for assisting in tackling some of the world's fundamental problems (poverty, illiteracy, health care etc). Although (to cite a revealing statistic) 774 million people around the globe are illiterate, (the majority of whom are in a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa), mobile phones have deep penetration among these populations. Mobile phones also have greater connectivity and reliability than Internet connections obtained though more traditional sources. 

Literate and semi-literate people want to read on their phones. People also want to learn on their phones. I heard plenty of data (which I'll skip repeating here) about how people want to learn on their phones - feature phones no less. Many of us may grumble about reading on a 2" feature phone screen, but it turns out that millions of people around the world regularly read entire books on these tiny screens. Not only this, but 2/3 of those who are illiterate across the globe are women, and as I learned in my "How to Change the World" MOOC, providing equal opportunities to women for improving their lives has a direct economic effect on their entire family and community.

Thus, the many ongoing creative projects using feature phones - from delivery of informational, motivational and instructional material via SMS, to customized pedagogical videos. There is a lot going on with tablets as well. There were interesting conversations about which to use, why and when.

One of the over riding themes of the UMLW was how to go from the promise of technology to the expected outcomes. Pretty much everyone in these rooms, as well as most of you I suspect, does not need to be sold on the promise of technology. But many of you, as the attendees this week, have been around long enough to also clearly understand that technology in itself does not solve problems and produce sustainable change for the better.

Whether coming from an education background, development and aid background, or policy leadership position there was repeatedly stated concern for finding ways to perform capacity building and creation of sustainable empowerment of teachers. We heard from those in the trenches all the way up to corporate executives and government ministers. In my next post I'm going to pick up on the policy theme and share some additional observations from this week.

SIGCSE 2013: Swimming in Social and Professional conversations

SIGCSE continues and as usual brain cells are becoming a bit challenged in many people I meet. All for a good cause - input much data for many good ideas and opportunities and there are bound to be a few neural casualties along the way.

Yesterday afternoon the panel I am a part of took place and went off swimmingly. Three colleagues and I (Beth Hawthorne, Flo Appel and Carol Spradling) spoke about the new curricular Social and Professional recommendations in CS2013 - curricular guidelines document for undergraduate computer science education. We dove into what the guidelines have to say and discussed with an enthusiastic audience some of the approaches, benefits and challenges. One of the most exciting aspects of our presentation for me was learning that several faculty in the audience that I had not yet met were already implementing modules or complete courses revolving around sustainability. Sustainability in the CS curriculum was my focus on the panel.

So many people are doing good work and flying quietly under the radar. They aren't tooting their own horns but given the opportunity to share what they are doing with interested colleagues they are all over it. In terms of sustainability, I was particularly enthused because we are looking for additional exemplars to include in the final version of CS2013.

We'd love to hear from people willing to share their work with others in the community. 

The Ironman Draft of CS2013 was officially released just as SIGCSE opened, and the comment period will last until June. If you have comments, thoughts, contributions on this final draft please, send them along using the contact information provided on the Ironman Draft site.

There is a lot of synergy around issues of computing and social good these days. Without having planned it, our panel complemented the morning special session on computing and social good that I discussed in my last post. Lots of exciting future projects are being discussed (things I overheard or participated in). There are working group reports, case studies, a growing collection of exemplars....what next?

Today, I participated in many discussions about computer science in the K-12 curriculum in the United States. This is another very important topic and a lot of momentum is building around it. There are an increasing number of state and national initiatives and, as Jan Cuny from the National Science Foundation stated in her lightening talk yesterday:  

"We will need all hands on deck. It  is not 'what can you do' but 'What will you do' ".

More and more people in and out of computing education are realizing the importance of doing something about the lack of computer science opportunities in our primary and secondary schools. Not only that, more and more people are realizing they can play a part, sometimes small, sometimes large, in moving towards inclusion of CS in K-12.

Have you thought about what contribution you can make, given your experiences, areas of expertise and connections?

Late this afternoon I had a small window of unscheduled time and decided to take advantage of it by getting some exercise. The pool at this hotel is an outdoors pool. Considering this is Denver, Colorado and it is early March, and a snow storm appears to be on the way, it was an opportunity to obtain a particularly rapid and effective chilling out session. The pool was heated, so this was no suicidal event, but 82 degrees isn't exactly a hot tub. As I tore up and down the lanes and was forced to focus on the moment and only the moment, I obtained the mental space to remember once again just how grateful I am to be here surrounded by so many people who are passionate about teaching and learning and making a difference.

SIGCSE: Computing For Good in the Morning

What a day for engaging with issues of computing for social good in computing education. There was a special session this morning called "CS Education for the Social Good". The presenters were Michael Goldweber (Xavier University), John Barr (Ithaca College), and Elizabeth Patitsas from the University of Toronto.

Mikey (as he often likes to be called) Goldweber started off the session by looking out at the audience and saying "This is the group of people who want to save the world". Yes. Yes we do. We want the world to be a better place, and how really terrific it was to be in a room full of people who felt likewise and are using their professional experience and skills to that end. I had a no holds barred warm and fuzzy moment.

Moments later, Mikey G. made a provocative statement that caused us to stop in our tracks:

"What is the message we send when we teach games in introductory computing?" 

If you aren't in computing education you may not realize the full impact of that question. Many computing programs have infused game development, or "gamification" as it is sometimes called, into the curriculum. There has been solid evidence in favor of doing so. Games appeal to  many students' interests. Replacing deadly dull applications (e.g. the fibonacci sequence, tic-tac-toe, vending machine simulation) with game development has become quite popular. Faculty like it, students like it, enrollments in these classes often increase.

On the other hand...games are a form of entertainment. Mikey's question asked us to consider what we are saying about what computer science is when we introduce it via entertainment.  It certainly made me stop and think. Does this approach help our overall perception problem? Are we as professionals primarily about entertainment? Are we primarily about short term mindless gratification? Is this a beneficial way to teach first concepts and principles?

Interestingly, there is evidence that although students may enjoy some early gamification, it isn't enough to sustain their interest in studying computer science. After all, this field isn't all about games. In fact, it is very little about games, unless you just happen to get a job as a professional game developer. A lively discussion ensued as some in the room wanted to defend the game approach.

Mikey went on to suggest that there was a difference between appealing to student interests and student values. He posited the idea that in fact, appealing to student values was a more effective way to engage students and that it also provided an opening, not provided by most gamification, to address meaty societal concerns. Also something to stop and ponder.

How to do it? The session members discussed quite a few approaches. One division stood out: there are some areas of integrating social good into computing that necessitate additional content knowledge in another field. In this case it might pay off to collaborate with a content expert in that other field. Or a variety of other approaches to bring in that depth knowledge. Then there is the wrapper approach, which is to repurpose something you are already teaching.

I loved the radioactive rodent example. Apparently, during the Fukushima power plant crisis in Japan a whole lot of mice became radioactive. Now, humans may obey instructions and stay outside the radioactive perimeter, but mice don't obey instructions They migrate wherever they feel like going. Along the way they may die, they may get eaten by other animals, they may (nay, will) poop. This is a problem. So the Japanese sent in robots to hunt down and kill the mice.

I'm not going to comment on the complicated ethics of mouse slaughter. But to some people, this would be a relevant issue. That question did not come up this morning, but I point it out because I know people for whom killing any living animal presents an ethical quandary. An interesting ethics question - the value of human life as compared to animal life. Are there alternatives to addressing the contamination problem? How might the robots be reprogrammed? What are the costs and benefits? Where do values fit into the decisions?

But, back to the discussion this morning. One session member told about how he turned a cops and robber application in his introductory computing class into a cat and mice application. Instead of a police officers hunting down bad guys, he turned the robbers into mice and the cop into a cat. The amount of work on his part was minimal and suddenly he had an activity for his computing students that engaged with a contemporary complicated social issue. And taught core computing concepts at the same time.

This session was chock full of examples of how computing could connect with values rather than interests. Others included, water pollution (modeling?), voting systems (security? algortihms?), sexually transmitted diseases (graph theory), Red Cross disaster relief (Dijkstra's shortes path algorithm).

That was just the beginning. We hadn't even gotten to lunch yet.

World Information Architecture Day - Cool Stuff

15 cities officially celebrated World Information Architecture (IA) Day on Saturday - possibly more than 15, but there were 15 official selected locations for WIAD 2013 around the globe. One of those sites was Los Angeles, sponsored by the User Experience Professionals Association of Los Angeles  (LA-UXPA) and I was there along with several hundred other people.

LA-UXPA did an amazing job. It was a high energy, well organized, event with an incredible amount of useful and thought-provoking information packed into a one full day of interdisciplinary speakers. You see, IA people hark from the arts, law, computing, psychology, design, sciences... I spoke to people from each of those fields. Disney was there (they sponsored  a tasty lunch among other things) along with a host of other generous sponsors. Every time you turned around your brain was being challenged to switch gears to look at things from another perspective. You gotta love this kind of event.

For example, one of the speakers, David Fiorito a self described computer geek, came out from Philadelphia to to talk about "thinking navigation". From his perspective, IA draws heavily on Linguistic Anthropology: recognizing the use of language as a common source of meaning among groups, drawing awareness to cultural meaning systems encoded in words (e.g. symbols) and utilizing ethnography to decode relationships between the symbols (words). To keep you on your toes, David also described IA in terms of ontology, taxonomy and choreography. That last item was a pleasant surprise; I had an immediate mental image of ballerina-like labels and categories (taxonomy) doing pirouettes among each other to tell a story (ontology).

A completely different sort of inspiration landed in my lap during Aaron Irizarry's opening presentation. Recently, I have been pondering how to address concerns in the computing education community about integrating sustainability into the undergraduate curriculum (the topic of my own presentation in a few weeks at SIGCSE 2013). Then Aaron launched into a discussion of tackling the MVP: Minimal Viable Problem.

As in: in an increasingly complex interconnected technology driven world, we will inevitably find ourselves in a room with peers who all want to "address it" but who don't even agree on what "it" is (IA, UX, Design...Sustainability). We struggle to arrive at a common understanding of terms, goals, expected common value of customer/user (student, faculty) experience. What is "it"? What is "its" value? How to respond to "we don't have the resources to do that"?

Is UX valuable? Is IA valuable? Is Sustainability in the Computing Curriculum valuable? Yes. Yes. Yes.

It doesn't matter if we are in industry or academia, if we are talking product development, service provision, or pedagogical content knowledge. So! went off the light bulb hovering over my head! When we are breaking new ground, we often slam into the same communication challenges. Aaron provided some nicely targeted insights into tackling this problem. Little does Aaron know, but he helped me a great deal with plotting and planning my presentation. Thanks Aaron!

There's more to tell about WIAD. I'm still hoarse from all the talking on Saturday. Stay tuned for Part 2!

What is Your Opinion About Sustainability in the Computing Curriculum?

I'm making final edits to my blurb on Sustainability for a panel presentation description about social and professional issues in the computer science curriculum*. More precisely, I'm thinking about conflict. There isn't much time when you are on a panel. What to focus on, what to focus on...so many choices and I'm conflicted. And oh boy, so will be some of my audience. Conflicted. Perhaps many of them, if past performance is any predictor of future performance. Which market analysts remind us all the time is not the case.

Yet, enlightened educators and psychologists tell us about the beneficial opportunities for managed conflict. Not the kind where you duke it out and slug your neighbor, but the kind where something provocative lands in your lap and you wrestle with it in a civilized manner as a group.

Sustainability in the computing curriculum is my little piece of the panel presentation**. When I wrote my original blurb I ended it with "Lisa will discuss the sometimes controversial sustainability knowledge unit in the social and professional practice knowledge area".

One of the anonymous reviewers asked: what is controversial? I wasn't sure if s/he was positively inclined and surprised by the statement or didn't know much about the issue and was just curious. I am 99.99% sure the reviewer was not negatively inclined towards the idea of sustainability in the computing curriculum. Anyone who gets all p.o.'d about the idea knows they are in conflict with a growing movement.

Another reviewer suggested that I bring up to speed members of the audience who are not familiar with the fundamental issues. In light of the first reviewer, this makes good sense. Ok, will do - if you wrote that and are reading this, then yes, I will make sure when I speak to cover the fundamentals for those who are not already deeply embroiled in everything.

And embroiled many people are. I was momentarily surprised to read the question asking what is controversial about infusing sustainability into the undergraduate computing curriculum. Perhaps because I routinely encounter professional colleagues who have strong opinions on the matter. In prior outreach on this issue I have encountered everything from:

"Thank goodness AT LAST this issue is being taken seriously!" 

to 

"Oh no, not ANOTHER mandate being shoved down my throat!"

(Mandate? Mandate? They are called "recommendations" for a reason).

There are also people in the professional community of computing education who are curious, curious, to hear about what the controversy is all about. Not ready to bite my head off nor to shower me with roses. Just curious.

I am reminded by this reminder that rather than presuming either roses or rotten tomatoes when I speak next March, I can view this as a micro-classroom opportunity. Perhaps challenge the crowd with comments such as these:

Sustainability is part and parcel of computer science and you ignore it at your peril

Sustainability is more than reducing your electricity load - which we suck at by the way

The "solution" isn't sending your old electronics off to a developing country for recycling  and patting yourself on the back

I believe all of the these, and I could continue with some evidence, but the point isn't (and won't be) for people to sit and take solemn notes about the pros and cons and the logic of it all. The whole point here will not be for me to talk talk talk but to get people off their comfy little conference hall chairs and engaging with the challenge of sustainability in their classrooms. What a panel can provide is an opportunity for constructively dealing with a difficult, challenging, conflicted topic with one's peers. In person. Where it is a lot harder to flame someone.

If you are a computing educator and think sustainability in the classroom is great stuff but haven't overcome the challenges of curricular rubber hitting the road let's all wrestle with your excitement and questions.

If you are a computing educator and think infusing sustainability in the classroom is silly or impossible let's all wrestle with your skepticism.

If you are a computing educator and not sure what you think - even better. I would like to put you right smack in between your opinionated peers and let's all talk about it.

*The Panel will be presented at the SIGCSE 2013 Symposium in Denver, Colorado and is called: "Computer Science Curriculum 2013: Social and Professional Recommendations from the ACM/IEEE-CS Task Force".

**My fellow panelists and wonderful colleagues are: Beth Hawthorne - bravely moderating this adventurous panel, along with Flo Appel and Carol Spradling, both of whom are battle seasoned veterans of the social and professional issues world of computing.