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Google-Funded Project Envisions Nation's Librarians Teaching Kids to Code (ala.org)
"We're excited to double down on the findings of Ready to Code 1," says one Google program manager, "by equipping librarians with the knowledge and skills to cultivate computational thinking and coding skills in our youth."
theodp writes:
Citing the need to fill "500,000 current job openings in the field of computer science," the American Library Association argues in a new whitepaper that "all 115,000 of the nation's school and public libraries are crucial community partners to guarantee youth have skills essential to future employment and civic participation"... The ALA's Google-funded "Libraries Ready to Code" project has entered Phase II, which aims to "equip Master's in Library Science students to deliver coding programs through public and school libraries and foster computational thinking skills among the nation's youth."
"Libraries play a vital role in our communities, and Google is proud to build on our partnership with ALA," added Hai Hong, who leads US outreach on Google's K-12 Education team... "Given the ubiquity of technology and the half-a-million unfilled tech jobs in the country, we need to ensure that all youth understand the world around them and have the opportunity to develop the essential skills that employers -- and our nation's economy -- require."
"Libraries play a vital role in our communities, and Google is proud to build on our partnership with ALA," added Hai Hong, who leads US outreach on Google's K-12 Education team... "Given the ubiquity of technology and the half-a-million unfilled tech jobs in the country, we need to ensure that all youth understand the world around them and have the opportunity to develop the essential skills that employers -- and our nation's economy -- require."
Corporate America sees a problem: not enough computer programmers, and a solution: teach people programming.
If salaries went up, along with job security, many self-starting adults would seek out the education they need to make that money. But we can't have THAT!
But without that, it doesn't matter how much education you do...once people learn the reality of the industry they will jump right out of it.
Them's the facts.
Who will teach the librarians to code well enough so that they can pass on that knowledge to the kids?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
..."by equipping librarians with the knowledge and skills to cultivate computational thinking and coding skills in our youth."...
Do librarians really have the appropriate innate skill set, and desires, to teach kids how to code? This sounds like Google was looking around for someone to do the teaching, and someone at the meeting said, "librarians!," to which everyone agreed (in typical meeting style).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As somebody who works with kids & technology, I'm convinced that things would go a lot more efficiently if kids could use a keyboard effectively along with knowing how to use a mouse.
Most kids are quite adept at working with touchscreen on a phone or a tablet, but put them in front of a keyboard and anything you are trying to teach them is lost as they search out basic letters and then try to figure out how the shift key works.
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I'm in my 50s, with 30 years of programming experience in many languages and fields. Can't get hired because of age and I guess I want too much money. This is reality in this field.
So I suppose Google is really saying let's get kids to code so we can hire them at 20 and pay them peanuts. Then let them go when it's too expensive and do it all over again.
Who knows what jobs will be available in twenty years, between AI and offshoring? Coding doesn't look like a sure thing at all.
If you are going to focus on a skill, focus on ones that serve in that kind of future environment: being able to pick up on human context and nuance; to decode, no just the literal level of communication, but implicit levels of communication. Because even if AI and foreigners take our coding jobs, somebody is going to have to lay out specifications, and that take imagination and subtlety.
And you know what would be really, really good for developing those kinds of skills? Reading and discussing books.
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Doctors are too expensive. Lets teach all the kids...
Lets teach all the kids plumbing...
Hey, politicians are too expensive...lets teach all the kids politics...
They'll have a family, so they'll want to get paid more and work less hours. Also by 40 they'll start having health problems that'll cut into their hours even more.
And we've already established they're not more experienced. In your scenario they just got trained up (probably on the cheap, my kid's in college and it's gonna take about $160k to get her through if I count food/transportation/etc. That's a nursing degree. Double that if she decides to switch to pre-med).
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This is silly. It's like saying the nation's librarians need to teach kids to perform appendectomies, or how to fly a jet airplane, or how to speak Swahili. There's no way that the majority of librarians are qualified to teach programming. If they were, they probably would be doing something related to writing software and not related to library science. And learning to code is no different than learning to engineer a bridge or learning to perform brain surgery. It requires aptitude in the student and competency in the teacher and years of hard work. Trivializing "coding" as if it were something like "typing" or "burger flipping" shows how out of touch the people proposing this actually are. Shame on them for wasting our time and money.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
and you're bound to hit something. Especially with the occasional kid from a poor neighborhood who wins the genetic lottery and is naturally good at math.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
But someone at google is completely out of touch with reality. Perhaps they are living in la-la lonad, or in some sort of drug-induced fog.
By the time these kids leave school/university, AI will probably be doing 80% of the programming. We may as well be teaching kids how to make buggy whips. What we SHOULD be teaching kids is social science, citizenship, art, history etc etc because within 20-30 years most people will be unemployed. We will need psychologists , social workers, psychiatrists and the like to work with people who reject technology. The idea of "Working for payment" is going to die, it will be "Working for emotional/intellectual reward". Sure there will be some jobs only people can do, but they will reduce too as AI and robotics gets better. And we may see more modular stuff where it takes 2-3 times as long to assemble, but its easier for robotics to do it that way, again the removal of human intervention. This has nothing to do with the value of programming, its all about Geeks making Jocks fail at something.
The truth of the matter is that the public school teachers of the USA (and Canada!) collectively lack the ability to teach basic reading comprehension, basic arithmetic and basic interpersonal communication. We know this because the victims of their incompetence turn up in university year after year, unable to read, count or speak coherently.
Google is probably seeking an "arrangement" with the national teacher's union. Slide them some money, make another front in the Anti-Trump Crusade.
If the Republicans are smart, they will de-unionize teachers and eliminate the federal Dept. of Education. Sadly, I know they're not that smart. They'll try to Make A Deal, and get slaughtered. Again.
âKif, equip these useless librarians with the ability to code, I'll want them all turned into hackers by midnight"
I think a prerequisite for that is making evolution run backward.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is nothing stopping boys from having gender reassignment surgery if they want to learn how to program with the grrls.
Does it apply now, or after everyone learns to program?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Librarians have enough to do. Libraries have become homeless shelters, and librarians have to deal with the demented and the despairing. In San Diego, the beautiful new downtown library now has roving security guards rousting the poor, especially those who dare to nod off. Same problem in the smaller branch libraries. Maybe a trip to visit and chat with some librarians would be in order. With all the cuts in hours and salaries, listen to them tell you what they need. Making them adjunct faculty could be a non-starter, given their already onerous workload.
This seems to me like it was designed to look good PR wise but never actually succeed. Which seems to be the case with a lot of these "teach the kids to code" schemes.
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> A huge number of professions would benefit from people being able to script up something to reduce their work load.
> There are companies still doing books in Excel by hand (not relying on any of Excel's built in functions).
That is a great example. In 1990-2000, VBA scripting was something that could be very useful to a lot of people. These days, the spreadsheet is probably in the cloud (on the internet), pulling data from some source on the internet. Having people who can almost barely code creating code for your business, including those web-enabled spreadsheets, will very likely end up with one of them making all your data from your spreadsheets available online.
As someone who learned to code in the 1980s, writing various types of macros and shell scripts that I ran on my computer, I feel for anyone starting to learn now. These days, most code is exposed to the web in some way, so it's attacked a hundred times per day. It's awfully hard to learn b safely in a business environment, when the smallest mistake will be exploited by hackers.
> having the average computer user familiar with using the command line
Perhaps. Having the average computer user exposing their scripts to internet is very dangerous. Which made it much easier when I learned, before the www was a thing.
I could replace half the circulation of the library they're failing to perform usable work at with a couple of low powered, robust systems with access to JSTOR and good network connection, and cut their annual costs by at least one full-time salary
And how, pray tell, will the patrons check out those robust systems and that good network connection and take them home? You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of what makes a library different from, say, Wikipedia.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
The biggest problem with expensive professional services is in health care. So, instead of having librarians teach kids how to code, why don't we have them teach kids how to treat patients? Librarians are smart, aren't they? Surely the could teach anything from GP diagnosis to pathology, radiology, and brain surgery, right? They are librarians! And by increasing the supply of medically trained kids, we could then better satisfy the demand for doctors!
Classic capitalism. Google wants society to pay for these programmers education so they can benefit. Socialized cost, privatized profits. Never forget that.
..seems to me our collective hands full enough teaching kids to read.
That estimate is off by a few orders of magnitude. My estimation would be at the very least a few billion orders of magnitude.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I do not want my kids learning to code. I want for them to learn mathematics, physics, etc. and to develop their critical thinking schemes. I do not want for them to be trained to become code monkeys.
Have gnu, will travel.
Include a Raspberry Pi with an opensuse tumbleweed (rolling updates to stay secure) server with privoxy and hosting a TOR exit node. It could double or triple the number of nodes for a measly $580,000.
# of public libraries:
Central Buildings* 8,895
Branch Buildings 7,641
Total Buildings 16,536
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Looking back at my very early start as a coder I would say that it was solving real world problems for people and then being rewarded for doing so. Given the incentive to code, I learned, I did, and I kept getting better.
But just sitting me down with double linked lists would have bored the crap out of me and I would have probably resented coding and dumped it.
So what could help kids today? I would say a combination of making sure they have the resources, the ability to get mentorship when they need it, and someone to connect them to someone who needs some code.
"Find similar ways to replace all the $200,000+ salaried CEO and management positions?"
$200k? That's low level management here in the DC burbs.
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