The closing of the CSEd mind

CSEd Mind ful thing any CSEd researcher can do is to obey the Ancient Greek aphorism, “Know thyself” (to which I might add, perhaps redundantly, “And know thy pedagogy”.) In CSEd, one consequence of closed thinking is the notion that there are technological solutions to pedagogical problems. For example, I am concerned about the growing uncritical reception of tools such as Scratch, Alice and Media Computation. Let there be no misunderstanding − I have no problem with the tools themselves, and the people who have developed them. My concern is with the uncritical “plug and pedagogue” attitude of much the audience. That is, my concern is with the use of these tools as a substitute for a rethink of pedagogy, which I believe is not what the developers of these tools intended. As part of the CSEd research agenda, we should make explicit − and critically examine − the implicit assumptions underlying the enthusiasm for these tools. I believe that part of the enthusiasm is due to two assumptions: (1) if students are having fun then they will learn automatically, and (2) syntax is the dominant problem in learning to program ... are these assumptions really self-evidently true? A closed way of thinking leads many computer scientists to uncritically accept a computational metaphor for students and teachers. That approach was most purely expressed in the work of Elliot Soloway and his students (e.g. Spohrer, 1992). The problem is not with that work itself, but with the uncritical notion that it is a selfevident truth. A computational metaphor trivializes the embodied, the social and the cultural aspects of learning, which is the strength of Bloom’s stereotypical “European” philosophy. To borrow from Dreyfus (1992), I fear any pedagogy that models students as learning machines. A closed way of thinking has led many computer scientists to a critical misunderstanding of the nature of constructivism. They confuse the philosophy of constructivism with Papert’s pedagogy of constructionism. It is possibly futile to try to summarize the difference between the two in a single “sound bite” sentence, but − Papert’s constructionism is about what students build with their hands, whereas I RECENTLY READ ALLAN BLOOM‘S (1988) BOOK, “The Closing of the American Mind”. Bloom claims there is a distinctly American way of thinking that has its philosophical origins in the empiricism of Locke and the materialism of Hobbes. He contrasts this American way of thinking with what he claims to be a European way of thinking, as refl ected in the philosophical writing of Rousseau and others. The “closing” in the book’s title is due, so Bloom argues, to the demise of the classical American liberal arts education − specifi cally the reading of the great philosophers (a.k.a Dead White Males). I suspect that Bloom’s sweeping generalization has about as much literal validity as John Gray’s assertion that “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”. For one thing, most non-American CSEd researchers “think in American” (by Bloom’s defi nition). However, it is not the literal accuracy of Bloom or Gray that is important. Instead, what is important is the way that Bloom and Gray make us aware that the ideas we take for granted are not self-evidently true, and that people who disagree with us do not necessarily do so out of ignorance. To borrow from a Chinese proverb, we are like fi sh − people like Bloom and Gray make us aware of the surrounding water. Much of the thinking in CSEd research is similarly closed, because it lacks an explicit and critically examined philosophical basis − most of us are fi sh that are unaware of water. The principal manifestation of closed thinking in CSEd is that the teacher/researcher’s own thinking remains largely unexamined. CSEd research needs to place equal emphasis on examining students AND teachers. Consider this simple