Computing Education Computing Education Research Communities of Practice

Computing Education, Computing Education Research: Communities of Practice Sally Fincher 18 th PPIG Workshop Carlow, Ireland 5 th – 7 th April 2004 www. kent. ac. uk

Sort-of outline • • • “Things I’m Interested in” Computing Education Research HCI Research Computing Education Some supports I use to think about things so that I gain understanding of them (theories) • So, here goes. 2

More respectable outline • Wenger (and Lave & Wenger)’s Communities of Practice • Eureka Project • Call centre phone operators • • Research & Practice: Monk’s Cycle of Invention Research & Practice: Fincher’s interpretation Boyers’ Four Scholarships On the necessity of a community of practice for Computing Education Research 3

Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger • Theorised that work (and learning) do not exist separate from the context in which they are practiced • That effective learning is situated in a social setting, a community of practice • That learning is achieved by a process characterised as “legitimate peripheral participation” (LPP) by which one moves from peripheral to full participation in a community 4

LPP (definition) “As the beginner or newcomer moves from the periphery of this community to its centre, they become more active and engaged within the culture and hence assume the role of expert or old-timer. Furthermore, situated learning is usually unintentional rather than deliberate” 5

LPP (example) • The canonical example is one of apprenticeship. An apprentice to a fine artist does not start by working on the painting. They start by sweeping the floor. But they sweep the floor of the studio - they joke with other, more experienced, apprentices who are mixing colours, preparing canvasses and so on - their work is situated in a particular context and a specific community: they know themselves to be part of a larger endeavour. 6

Bobrow & Whelan, Brown & Duguid • Eureka Story • Longer telephone cords 7

Computing Education • The reality of Computing Education is that it is (inevitably) situated. • My teaching at the University of Kent is intimately situated within my context. • At an institutional level, it depends on many things quality assurance procedures, on the funding allocation to the department, etc. • At a departmental level it depends on our student intake, our curriculum, our academic expectations, etc. • At a personal level, it depends on the intelligence, sympathy and availability of my colleagues. 8

Situation of Computing Education • All that adds up to a community of practice, which means that Computing Education at the University of Kent is a different thing from Computing Education at the University of Otago (distributed in villas) or the University of Washington (CELT) or anywhere else even though (sometimes) the same subject areas are covered. 9

Communities of Practice: sordid reality • Ariel and her colleagues do not come to [the University] to form a community of practice; they come to earn a living. … They want to make money in order to go on with their own lives, which they see taking place mostly outside of the office. They do focus on their own work, but they keep glancing at the clock, waiting for the moment they are free to leave. For most of the time they spend at [the University], most of them would rather be somewhere else doing something else. Everyone knows this, employees and employer alike. 10

Computing Education Practice • Community of Practice: Local - in my institution - in my department - in my classroom - with my colleagues same curriculum - same student body & student expectation - same QA - same resources, same restrictions • So, I’m have trouble getting my students past all this public static void main stuff. Who do I talk to? 11

Computing Education Practice • The community of peers who are struggling with what I’m struggling with • Disciplinary community - colleagues who teach the same as me - comparative - SIGCSE Symposium (34 years); IEEE Computer Society Fi. E (33 years); NACCQ (15 years); ACE (7 years) • And, more peripherally, places like PPIG, ASEE • Also “teaching tracks” at disciplinary conferences 12

The “Cycle of Invention” (Andrew Monk) Research Effort Designers encapsulation Personal Observation Concepts Experimental Results Guidelines Observation from Field Studies research Principles design Inventions

People learn GUIs by exploration: • ease-of-learning • low-level ease of use • task fit Consistency Reversibility encapsulation Personal Observation Concepts Experimental Results Guidelines Observation from Field Studies research Principles design “Undo”

Csikszentmihalyi: “flow” • clear goals • close match between skill & challenge • constant feedback on performance encapsulation Conditions for • high-engagement • enjoyment Personal Observation Concepts Experimental Results Guidelines Observation from Field Studies research Principles design Inventions Levels in games

Research Effort Designers encapsulation Personal Observation Concepts Experimental Results Guidelines Observation from Field Studies research Principles design Inventions

Research Effort Designers encapsulation Personal Observation Concepts Experimental Results Guidelines Observation from Field Studies research Principles

Research Effort encapsulation Personal Observation Concepts Experimental Results Guidelines Observation from Field Studies research Principles

Research Effort Personal Observation Experimental Results Observation from Field Studies research

Research Effort Personal Observation Experimental Results Observation from Field Studies

Research Effort Personal Observation Experimental Results Observation from Field Studies Computing Educators

Research Effort Personal Observation Experimental Results Observation from Field Studies engagement Computing Educators

Research Effort engagement Computing Educators Personal Observation Concepts Ideas Experimental Results Guidelines Enthusiasms Observation from Field Studies Principles Evangelism research articulation Situated Classroom Practices

The “Flip-flop of Articulation” Research Effort engagement Computing Educators Personal Observation Ideas Experimental Results Enthusiasms Observation from Field Studies Evangelism research articulation Situated Classroom Practices

Situated Classroom Practices … • Satisfy the Institution (acceptable pass rates & retention of students) • Satisfy the Department (meets curricular & progression requirements - they learn things my colleagues in subsequent courses need them to learn) • “The Students Like It” 25

Other drivers: institutional, disciplinary, industrial etc. Research Effort engagement Computing Educators Personal Observation Ideas Experimental Results Enthusiasms Observation from Field Studies Evangelism research articulation Situated Classroom Practices

Especial Driver … • “Scholarly Engagement” or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning • Ernest Boyer (President of Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching) • 1991 Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate • The work of an academic - whatever it is - is to be scholarly • Expressly written, in part, to bridge teaching/research divide 27

Boyer’s Four Scholarships • Scholarship of discovery • creation of new knowledge within a discipline. Traditional “research” • Scholarship of integration • connects information & ideas between disciplines or areas of knowledge • Scholarship of application • use of new knowledge for practical purposes • Scholarship of teaching • applying research results & rigour to teaching 28

Scholarship of teaching: Shulman’s vision • “How many professional educators, when engaged in creating a new course or a new curriculum, can turn to a published, peer-reviewed scholarship of teaching I which colleagues at other colleges and universities present their experiments, their field trials, or their case studies of instruction and its consequences? … In this respect the scholarship of teaching is dramatically different from the scholarship of investigation. It’s one of the reasons why any sort of progress is so hard to come by pedagogically—because blindness and amnesia are the state of the art in pedagogy” 29

Evidence-base • Evidence-based Medicine, Evidence-based Dentistry (Medical schools, PBL, authentic practice) • Evidence-based teaching? 30

Object-orientation • Dhal, Nygaard, Kay • Simula, Smalltalk Conditions for effective learning engagement Personal Observation Ideas Experimental Results Enthusiasms Observation from Field Studies Evangelism research articulation Situated Classroom Practices “Objects-first”

Rosenberg, Kölling, Utting Blue, Blue. J engagement • No blank screen • Code always available Personal Observation Ideas Experimental Results Enthusiasms Observation from Field Studies Evangelism research articulation Situated Classroom Practices 338 Universities

Other voices … • Michael de Raadt Introductory Programming: what’s happing today and will there be any students to teach tomorrow? (ACE 2004) reported “ … over half of all introductory programming students were taught using a procedural paradigm, even though 81% were taught using an object-oriented language. ” • Prof. Philip Bourne in his keynote address The Future of Bioinformatics lamented that biologists only use Word and the Web, so are not sufficiently interfaceaware to deal with complex visualisation systems. • In ITP we have rather the opposite problem … 33

Attribution dammit: From: Mr Bunny's Big Cup o'Java, Carlton Egremont III, Addison Wesley, 1999. People who bought this book also bought: Core J 2 EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies. How worrying is that?

The alternative to IDE is ILE, not command line

Computing Education Research • So • There is a relationship between Computing Education and Computing Education Research • “The world didn’t need Isaac Newton to know that apples fall off trees. It did need Newton to give a general theory that explains why apples fall off trees” • The world doesn’t need Computing Education Research for you to know that “I get a good pass rate”, “my colleagues don’t complain” and “the students seemed to like it” 36

Computing Education Research • What - where - is the Community of Practice for Computing Education Research? • Like other research communities. (Tony Becher, Diana Crane) • Yes … but … • Immature and emergent • No common methodologies • No specific “meeting place” (No Computing Education Research conferences/publications) 37

Shameless advertising (i) 38

Shameless advertising (ii) Bootstrapping, Scaffolding, BRACE Putting researchers together, common identity, common practice (“experiment kit”) 39

Why Computing Education Research • “There is more to medicine than biology, but basic medical science drives progress and helps doctors make decisions that promote their patients’ physical well-being. Similarly, there is more to [computing] education than [computing education research], but [computing education research] can drive progress and help teachers make decisions that promote their students’ educational well-being” J. T. Bruer 40

References • Lave, J. , & Wenger, E. (1990). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press. • Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press • Brown, J. S. , Collins, A. & Duguid, S. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32 -42. • Brown, J. S. , & Duguid, P. (2000) The Social Life of Information Harvard Business School Press • Boyer, E. (1997) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Jossey-Bass 41

References • Marton, F. & Saljo, R. (1976) On qualitative differences in learning: Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46, 4 -11. • Marton, F. & Saljo, R. (1997) Approaches to learning. In F. Marton, D. Hounsell & Entwistle, N. (Eds. ) The experience of learning. Implications for teaching and studying in higher education. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. • Bruer, J. T. (1993) Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom MIT Press • Daniel Bobrow & Jack Whelan (2002) Community Knowledge Sharing in Practice: The Eureka Story Journal for the Society of Organizational Learning 4. 2 42

References • Diana Crane (1972) Invisible colleges; diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities University of Chicago Press • Tony Becher (1989) Academic tribes and territories : intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines Open University Press • Jack Whalen and Eric Vinkhuyzen (2000) Expert systems in (inter)action: diagnosing document machine problems over the telephone in Paul Luff, Jon Hindmarsh, & Christian Heath Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing System Design Cambridge University Press • Lee Shulman (1999) Taking Learning Seriously Changes Vol 31, no. 4 pp 10 -17 43