Curriculum Tutorial
As far as specific deliverables for this course, I'm leaning towards a paper with some analysis of the typical CS curriculum, its purposes, and its success at achieving same (possibly a pair of papers, one talking about what the curriculum attempts to accomplish and benefits and drawbacks of those goals, one talking about how well CS curriculum succeeds at what it tries to do). I'm also considering constructing a curriculum, but I'm not sure how much I'll like or dislike what's already out there; if I agree with everything, there's little purpose in my repeating it.
Jan 26
Some links from Jim:
- http://www.lacs.edu (Liberal Arts CS)
- http://www.uopeople.org (Univ of People CS)
- schools to look at: Bennington, Hampshire, Wellesley
- to do:
- start writing (5pgs/week??) short pieces on that week's reading/thinking
Feb 2
Feb 9
Reading "Is Computer Science Science" and "An Integrated Framework". Pretty soon I think we might start to run out of strictly CS curriculum-related material; I would prefer to deal with this by stretching to general CS education related stuff and writing about its implications on curriculum. Also thinking about looking more closely at other schools' curricula, possibly asking why they have structured those curricula as they have.
- Griped about "great principles" and Denning's stuff.
- Mentioned "structure and interp of computer programming" as one approach to intro course
- Mentioned "mathematical illustration in postscript" as an intro to programming concepts
- Asked: is c++ actually taught in CS1? Maybe a survey.
- Richard: AP exam dropped c++; everyone's a java junky now.
Feb 23
March 2
Preliminary survey of real-world CS curricula.
March 9
March 30
apr 6
apr 13
April 27
Not much to talk about, writing. See private section for an interesting article on IS curriculum--it looks like they did similar stuff to what I'm trying to do for CS, but they did more direct employer research and had an easier job as IS is more specialized than CS.
May 11
Richard says : two articles that may be of interest to you:
