I teach in a unique graduate program for students who developed an interest in CS after completing a bachelor's degree in another field, usually in the liberal arts or social sciences. For their thesis, students can combine their old field (if it still interests them) with CS. Our grads have been doing great in the market, although it's probably more because of their graduate CS degree than their undergraduate degree. One built upon her English degree to become a tech writer, but most become software engineers.
If you really want to talk about how technology is changing the world and how the next 40 years might look like, you'll have to mention peak oil and climate change.
I absolutely agree, as I elaborate on in this response. What particularly jumps out to me is how they predict technological change but totally miss social change ("The housewife of the future will do her chores with the press of a button." Students: "What's a housewife?")
I'd show them Back To The Future II - especially appropriate since the future they are visiting is 2015. As our world resembles 1985+smartphones more than the 2015 depicted in the film, it could help temper expectations and demonstrate that no matter what predictions one makes, (and let's face it, nothing in BTTF2 aside from flying cars was really that crazy to believe we would have in 25 years), the only thing certain is uncertainty. Obviously it's a fictional film and was not serious futurist prediction, but it would make the point and give something a little lighter to engage the students.
Agreed (although there will still be a half a year left for hoverboards to be invented). See my fuller response.
If you're going to talk about how our literature predicts the future, it's worth taking a look at how past literature predicted us..
Absolutely, that was always part of my plan, although I find it more illuminating to share the stories/articles that were wildly wrong, to teach students a healthy skepticism. I'll check out "A Logic Named Joe" in any case.
First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.
Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.
Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.
Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.
Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.
What I think was meant by the OP's clumsy remarks about "kids, women, and underrepresented groups" is that App Inventor has proven successful at attracting members of underrepresented groups. Some successful outreach programs based on App Inventor include:
That's a stupid comparison. The two products fill different niches. Both Open Office and Google Docs are standard tools at Google, where I work*, and they're used for different tasks. If I need to do complex editing on a document that nobody else will modify, I use Open Office. If I want to have a shared doc that doesn't require fancy features, I use Google Docs. For other tasks, I use other tools, like emacs. Comparing OO and Google Docs makes no sense.
*I do not speak for Google.
Several of the Olin faculty members are fantastic teachers who were denied tenure at MIT because (in my opinion) their devotion to teaching cut into their research, which is all that counts toward MIT tenure. (This includes my advisor, Lynn Stein.) I'd be proud to teach at Olin or to send my children (if I had any) there.
I direct just such a post-baccalaureate program at Mills College in Oakland, California, not far from Silicon Valley. It is coed, although the majority of students are women. Many successful graduates have gone on to industry jobs and CS PhD programs. The application deadline is February 1, if any Slashdotters want to apply.
Interdisciplinary people are harder to replace. That's part of the reasoning behind the Interdisciplinary Computer Science program I direct at Mills College (in the SF Bay area). The program is aimed at people who have a bachelor's degree in a field other than CS. Our graduates are thus knowledgeable in CS and another field, including knowing how to apply CS to that field. Some popular combinations are CS and business (per the article), CS and education, CS and biology, etc. They're potentially more employable and less offshorable than more narrow computer professionals.
I was also saddened by Octavia Butler's death and think highly of her work, but I don't think she (or anyone living) compares in impact to Lem. IIRC, he is (was) the most read SF author in the world.
And I'm a known feminist, not shy about pointing out discrimination that I see.
While I don't know of any offensive recommendations made by our system, there were some funny ones. For example, there was a link from C++ to What's she trying to say? (a community for men who don't understand women). Another interesting relation was between Chocolate and PMS.
A useful trick for finding out what someone would like as a present is to ask him to go shopping with you for presents for other people, then see what he shows interest in. A clever boyfriend did that with me.
Something simpler would be to ask your friend for advice on buying games for someone else. Your friend will end up volunteering what games he has, what's new and hot, what he thinks is cool, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I teach in a unique graduate program for students who developed an interest in CS after completing a bachelor's degree in another field, usually in the liberal arts or social sciences. For their thesis, students can combine their old field (if it still interests them) with CS. Our grads have been doing great in the market, although it's probably more because of their graduate CS degree than their undergraduate degree. One built upon her English degree to become a tech writer, but most become software engineers.
If you really want to talk about how technology is changing the world and how the next 40 years might look like, you'll have to mention peak oil and climate change.
I agree 100%.
I love humor. I'll check it out.
Thanks! I'd read and liked Rainbows End but do need the quicker reads. I'll check it out.
Thank you so much!
Thanks! I'm so ignorant of poetry that I didn't think to even request it. I'll check it out.
I absolutely agree, as I elaborate on in this response. What particularly jumps out to me is how they predict technological change but totally miss social change ("The housewife of the future will do her chores with the press of a button." Students: "What's a housewife?")
Thanks! I love Dyson's Disturbing the Universe but didn't know about The Sun, The Genome and the Internet.
I'd show them Back To The Future II - especially appropriate since the future they are visiting is 2015. As our world resembles 1985+smartphones more than the 2015 depicted in the film, it could help temper expectations and demonstrate that no matter what predictions one makes, (and let's face it, nothing in BTTF2 aside from flying cars was really that crazy to believe we would have in 25 years), the only thing certain is uncertainty. Obviously it's a fictional film and was not serious futurist prediction, but it would make the point and give something a little lighter to engage the students.
Agreed (although there will still be a half a year left for hoverboards to be invented). See my fuller response.
Thanks for the suggestion and second. My students (and I) are very interested in issues such as the distribution of wealth.
If you're going to talk about how our literature predicts the future, it's worth taking a look at how past literature predicted us..
Absolutely, that was always part of my plan, although I find it more illuminating to share the stories/articles that were wildly wrong, to teach students a healthy skepticism. I'll check out "A Logic Named Joe" in any case.
Thanks! I love "Superiority" and will check out the others.
Thanks a lot! Both that site and its blogroll look fun and useful.
First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.
Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.
Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.
Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".
Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.
Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.
Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.
The claim isn't that members of these groups can't learn traditional CS, just that they've generally chosen not to.
That's a stupid comparison. The two products fill different niches. Both Open Office and Google Docs are standard tools at Google, where I work*, and they're used for different tasks. If I need to do complex editing on a document that nobody else will modify, I use Open Office. If I want to have a shared doc that doesn't require fancy features, I use Google Docs. For other tasks, I use other tools, like emacs. Comparing OO and Google Docs makes no sense. *I do not speak for Google.
Several of the Olin faculty members are fantastic teachers who were denied tenure at MIT because (in my opinion) their devotion to teaching cut into their research, which is all that counts toward MIT tenure. (This includes my advisor, Lynn Stein.) I'd be proud to teach at Olin or to send my children (if I had any) there.
cartoon about Knuth
I'm so sorry about that. Please try again.
I direct just such a post-baccalaureate program at Mills College in Oakland, California, not far from Silicon Valley. It is coed, although the majority of students are women. Many successful graduates have gone on to industry jobs and CS PhD programs. The application deadline is February 1, if any Slashdotters want to apply.
There was a recent article about the program in the San Francisco Bay Guaridan. For more information, see http://ics.mills.edu and/or contact me.
Interdisciplinary people are harder to replace. That's part of the reasoning behind the Interdisciplinary Computer Science program I direct at Mills College (in the SF Bay area). The program is aimed at people who have a bachelor's degree in a field other than CS. Our graduates are thus knowledgeable in CS and another field, including knowing how to apply CS to that field. Some popular combinations are CS and business (per the article), CS and education, CS and biology, etc. They're potentially more employable and less offshorable than more narrow computer professionals.
I was also saddened by Octavia Butler's death and think highly of her work, but I don't think she (or anyone living) compares in impact to Lem. IIRC, he is (was) the most read SF author in the world. And I'm a known feminist, not shy about pointing out discrimination that I see.
Dave Cutler
While I don't know of any offensive recommendations made by our system, there were some funny ones. For example, there was a link from C++ to What's she trying to say? (a community for men who don't understand women). Another interesting relation was between Chocolate and PMS.
A useful trick for finding out what someone would like as a present is to ask him to go shopping with you for presents for other people, then see what he shows interest in. A clever boyfriend did that with me.
Something simpler would be to ask your friend for advice on buying games for someone else. Your friend will end up volunteering what games he has, what's new and hot, what he thinks is cool, etc.