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Kernighan Teaches... Liberal Arts?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the old-programmers-are-never-free()'ed dept.

Flamerule writes "The New York Times has an article (free registration required) examining a new course Brian Kernighan is teaching at Princeton, called "Computers in Our World", aimed at liberal arts students who won't be going into the tech field. The author describes it as "a kind of intellectual smorgasbord, combining public policy - like technology's impact on privacy, copyright and antitrust matters - with large helpings of practical knowledge of how things work, from operating systems to disk drives." The K&R text is mentioned, though not as reverently as some would demand."

4 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. The Perfect Opportunity by BetterThanJimbo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think this is exactly the types of classes needed out there.

    For all the people who know nothing of issues like electronic voting, DMCA, Elrdrid v. Ashcroft, the hardest thing was to get the idea out to non-computer folk. Raising awareness of complex technical issues is usually next to impossible, and this is a great start.

    1. Re:The Perfect Opportunity by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I think this is exactly the types of classes needed out there.

      For all the people who know nothing of issues like electronic voting, DMCA, Elrdrid v. Ashcroft, the hardest thing was to get the idea out to non-computer folk. Raising awareness of complex technical issues is usually next to impossible, and this is a great start.


      It's a start, yes, but it's not enough. This is going to be a bit of rant, I'm afraid ...

      Why in God's name do students at Princeton -- Princeton, which at least used to be known as the greatest math school in the US! -- need to take only one course in "quantitative reasoning?" As a math major at a perfectly average state college, I had to take quite a few classes in English, communications, history, and other liberal arts subjects. I'm not complaining about this; a good liberal education is, and should be, part of what being a college graduate in any subject means.

      But "liberal education" should include science as well as liberal arts. There's no reason at all why students "headed toward degrees in politics, history, English, art history, psychology and economics" shouldn't learn how to differentiate a polynomial, calculate Gibbs free energy, or write "Hello, World." Studying the effects of science and technology on our world is all well and good, but those studies will only mean something if they know what science actually looks like.

      I'm with Clarke on this one, not snow: there are not two cultures. There is only one culture, and if you can't discourse on the structure of a sonnet and the second law of thermodynamics with equal ease, then you're uncultured, period.
      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  2. CS and Liberal Arts have a lot in common.... by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Another good article is "The Elements of (Unix) Style" abuot Unix as literature.

    Anyway, my point is that a lot of these Lberal Arts kids are going to be interested in knowledge about a wide area of subjets--that's the whole focus of a Liberal Arts education. Computers is another area (though, today it would be extra interesting since everyone uses them but so few know how the "magic" works) to learn about. Of course, there are always some who don't want to learn.

    I was wondering about textbooks or notes and looked up the course info at Princeton's site. It's COS 109... unfortunately they don't have many details but searching for K himself led me to his notes and problem sets (link is HTML, but notes are pdf). He obviously used cal(1) for the schedule, too.

    Enjoy!

    1. Re:CS and Liberal Arts have a lot in common.... by crimsun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree, both CS and the "classical humanities" (ala classics, history, languages, political "science") share a certain analytical methodology. Having majored in both computer science and English, I've heard from classmates the seeming apprehension (perhaps even disdain) each side holds. It basically stems from a type of closed mentality; a lot of CS enthusiasts and students shy from the seeming frivolous creativity and expression in classics; a lot of classical humanities majors avoid the "heavy math" of the sciences. In fact these views are misled. Granted, there's always an artistic element in studying a discipline, but one must often thoroughly understand the building blocks of various disciplines before attempting to define and explore the sinergy of "CS and Liberal Arts." An incorrect approach to "combine" or "bridge" the two camps would be to "talk down" to each discipline; you end up with dissatisfied students. You need more cross-discipline professors, as Professor K teaching a "liberal arts" seminar, or an esteemed classics professor teaching a programming languages concepts course. Unfortunately they're few and far between.