CS Education Research:Finding a Community

Sally Fincher

32nd SIGCSE Symposium 2001

Charlotte NC, 22nd February

“Community”

• What is a “community”?– How is it formed?– How does it think of itself?

• common status (“We’re all University Presidents”)• common activity(“We’re all parking attendants”)• boundaries (“I may not vote, but I know I live here”)

– But, in general, not common interest

Research Communities

• Research communities are:– often well-defined by their participants (by status,

activity and boundary)– characterised by formal frameworks of

dissemination (conferences, journals etc.)

• Diana Crane Invisible colleges; diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities University of Chicago Press, 1972

• Tony Becher Academic tribes and territories : intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines Open University Press, 1989

CS Education Research (i)

• Because this is an emergent community…

– status of participants is not always obvious (no “centres”; no MIT; no Knuth)

– there’s hardly anyone for who this is their only research area, or even their central one

– “leading lights” are often better known for work in other areas

CS Education Research (ii)

• Because this is an emergent area:

– boundaries of “discipline” are fuzzy and flexible. – Particularly susceptible to what Phil Agre calls

“anamorphism and overlap”

Phil Agre, RRE Note and Recommendations 20 Aug 2000, http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.notes.and.recommenda12.html

Anamorphosis ...

• View of the World from 9th Avenue Saul Steinberg, 1976

• Lots of detail of Manhattan, further you go away from that, the hazier it gets.

• Lots of detail of my classroom/my department, further you go away from that, the hazier it gets.

… and overlap

• We can only talk productively together at all because our research maps overlap.

• “We don't live in different worlds -- we live in the same world. We just have different anamorphic maps of it.”

• We all have an anamorphic view of the research world (and no-one can know the whole world)

Last year’s symposium logo:

The other face of anamorphism ...

• The Ambassadors Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533

• Not with us standing at the distorting centre!

• Is that a real research area?

• The boundaries of others’ disciplinary communities are here being sharply drawn

CS Education Research (iii)

• If it’s …– difficult to know who’s “in” the community– difficult to know where the edges of the community

are– difficult to define where the knowledge areas

overlap• … then perhaps it’s easier to track via the more

formal frameworks of communication & dissemination

CS Education Research Communities: a matter of subject area

Symposium, ITiCSE, ACE• Characterised by small-scale

investigations on a single aspect (discipline or practice)

PPIG, ESP• Characterised by

investigations of specific mental & conceptual skills

JERIC, Visualisation workshops• Motivated by use of tools in

CS teaching & learning

BERA, AERA, Learning Sciences

• Characterised by investigations based within educationalist tradition (Bruner, Piaget, Vygotsky etc.)

CS Education Research Communities:a matter of temperament & methodology

Symposium, ITiCSE, ACE• Practitioner Research• “Action Research”

PPIG, ESP• Overlap with Psychology• Often (but not exclusively)

quantitative/statistical studies

JERIC, Visualisation workshops• Technology-driven (eg from

Hypercard to the Web)

BERA, AERA, Learning Sciences

• Overlap with education• Often “theoretical”. ie

educational theories applied to CS

• “Critical enquiry”

Other possible communities

• FiE (Frontiers in Education)• ASEE (American Society of

Engineering Education)• SEFI (Société Européene

pour la Formation des Ingénieurs)

• IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) TC3, WG3.2

• Overlap with cognate disciplines

• Although all these deal with “engineering”, they all have CS elements - sometime quite substantial

Joining in

• CSERGI. See:www.docs.uu.se/csergi/

• csed-research mailing list (and “CS Education as an Academic Field”) See:

www.cs.utexas.edu/users/csed/academic/

• Doctoral Consortium (held at SIGCSE Symposium)

• Help in finding a community

• Computer Science Education journal. See:

www.szp.swets.nl

• Help in defining a community