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Mark Guzdial and the Computer Science Education Travail

Mark Guzdial’s Amazon Plog.  Amazon placed Mark Guzdial’s “Plog” on my personalized amazon.com page because I’ve purchased his book with Kim Rose, Squeak: Open Personal Computing and Multimedia.  I’m a little wary of his more-recent Python and Java books (about which I was unaware) because they may straddle what I want to do with nfoWare.  Of course I will look at them one the time comes. 

{tags: Computer Education Computer Science Computing4Fun CP4E Personal Computing Mark Guzdial orcmid}

Observations on Guzdial’s Plog about computer science and the current anguish over drops in enrolments is something that I want others to know about.  I will be interested to see more.  This figures in other conversations I have seen around education, computing in education, and computing for enthusiasts, not just professionals. 

The problem with Amazon Plogs of course is (1) they can’t be subscribed to and (2) they appear in a place where I am not looking for blog posts.  I almost always come to amazon.com with a purpose, and reading plogs is not consistent with getting that done.

Having said that, Mark’s Plog is an useful find.  I have mentioned Squeak a few times in blog comments elsewhere, and maybe here too.  It first came up in a conversation with Todd Blanchard at the March Meetup of Seattle Webloggers.  Although Todd was arguing that the basic structure of programming languages has been got wrong for years, I am unconvinced.  I am attentive to Todd’s promotion of Squeak and it reminded me that Smalltalk is (or should be) immune from a number of abstraction defects (and accompanying lies) around data representation using the dominant, conventional programming systems.  It was Smalltalk’s simplifying abstraction of data away from machine formats that had me wonder whether something like Squeak would simplify computer education and the introduction of beginners to computing.  That led me to the book.

This is a marker for Mark’s efforts.  It’s a reminder to me that I have much more to say on making computing accessible to all and on some defects in our models that we must address if computing is to be popularly useful.  Now, what the heck was I looking for on amazon? …

posted by orcmid at 4/24/2006 05:02:43 PM, rating data by NewsGator Online