Online Version - Last Updated - 20 Jan 2012 |
 |
| Home |
| |
| Procedures and Resources for Authors |
|
| Information and Resources for Volume Editors |
| |
| Orders and Subscriptions |
| |
| Published Articles |
|
| Upcoming Volumes |
| |
| Contact Us |
| |
| Useful External Links |
| |
| CRPIT Site Search |
After the gold rush: toward sustainable scholarship in computing
Lister, R.
In just thirty years, we have gone from punched cards to
Second Life. But, as the American National Science
Foundation (NSF) recently noted, 'undergraduate
computing education today often looks much as it did
several decades ago'. Consequently, today's
'Nintendo Generation' have voted with their feet. We
bore them. The contrast between the changes wrought via
computer research over the last 30 years, and the failure
of computing education to adapt to those changes, is
because computing academics lead a double life. In our
research lives we see ourselves as part of a community
that reaches beyond our own university. We read
literature, we attend conferences, we publish, and the
cycle repeats, with community members building upon
each other's work. But in our teaching lives we rarely
discuss teaching beyond our own university, we are not
guided by any teaching literature; instead we simply
follow our instincts.
Academics in computing, or in any other discipline, can
approach their teaching as research into how novices
become experts. Several recent multi-institutional
research collaborations have studied the development of
novice programmers. This paper describes some of the
results from those collaborations.
The separation of our teaching and research lives
diminishes not just our teaching but also our research.
The modern practice of stripping away all 'distractions'
to maximize research output is like the practice of
stripping away rainforest to grow beef - both practices
appear to work, for a little while, but not indefinitely.
Twenty-first century academia needs to bring teaching
and research together, to form a scholarship of computing
that is an integrated, sustainable, ecological whole.
Cite as: Lister, R. (2008). After the gold rush: toward sustainable scholarship in computing. In Proc. Tenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2008), Wollongong, NSW, Australia. CRPIT, 78. Simon and Hamilton, M., Eds. ACS. 3-18.
(from crpit.com)
(local if available)
