8 ms·

What humanities scholars want students to know about the internet

57 points by panic 3y ago

Hibernia 3y ago
(I'm attending a conference right now and Mark Guzdial's keynote mentioning this very blog was excellent. Surreal to see it here.) I was lucky that my secondary (high school) education included Classical Studies, because it gave me a taste of subjects outside of STEM. As a computer science educator I'm always thrilled when one of my colleagues in the Arts and Humanities department is open to collaboration. It's rare but I think it's valuable for both parties.
drewcoo 3y ago
[flagged]
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Who would be a better judge of what aspiring programmers need to know about science and engineering? - A dual-Ph.D. physicist/electrical engineer, whose career had been spent doing "the hard stuff" fabbing modern x86 CPU's - A successful programmer
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    I sense that you want to imply that a successful programmer is a better judge of what aspiring programmers need to know about science and engineering, but I disagree: I would immediately go for the dual-Ph.D. physicist/electrical engineer (and yes, I would especially do that if I were the aspiring programmers, in this sense I put my money where my mouth is). Because of his qualifications, he has a much better general view about science and engineering that the successful programmer very likely lacks, and is thus in all likelihood the much better judge on this topic.
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      > ...he has a much better general view about science and engineering that the successful programmer very likely lacks... Likely false. He is in a brutally demanding 1mm wide x 1km deep niche specialty. And the programmers he is exposed to are in a similar, adjacent niche. I you interpret my "what aspiring programmers need to know" as "to do their jobs as programmers" - well...by definition, the successful programmer knows that (implicitly or explicitly). If you interpret it more as general education requirements for young people these days - then I'd suggest a biologist, a climatologist, and a civil engineer.
  - brmgb 3y ago
    The answer is both of them together obviously. The dichotomy you propose doesn’t exist. Curriculum like most things are collective endeavour.
- alphager 3y ago
  It's an incredibly good idea. Did you even read the article? The expert wanted to teach SYN/ACK, which is completely irrelevant to the non-experts.
- neel_k 3y ago
  You are reacting to the title, not the actual article. 1. The author is a CS professor who wanted to make a "CS for non-majors" course that non-majors would find actually useful/interesting. So he asked a historian colleague what she wanted her students to know about computers. 2. She replied that she wanted her students to know that (a) databases exist, and if properly designed/indexed can make complex queries very fast, and (b) websites can be automatically populated from the results of DB queries, which makes these search results human-comprehensible. 3. In his CS department, databases and HCI/web design are courses which come late in the sequence, after stuff like algorithms, data structures, and networking. 4. To make (2) accessible without a bunch of pre-reqs, he designed an extension to Scratch/Snap (block-based visual programming languages) which let novices more easily write SQL queries and generate database-backed HTML documents. 5. As a result, he can now teach history majors CS concepts in a way which makes their relevance to historical work directly clear.
awelxtr 3y ago
This is hardly a surprise isn't it? In CS courses you teach students to be CS scholars so it's normal that you teach the fundamentals to make them achieve that goal. When teaching stuff to a people of different background you need to first ask why, why do you need this and then adapt the curriculum to that.
- dahart 3y ago
  Anecdotally I’ve heard some CS professors rant about how we teach things all wrong to CS students, especially math and CS, by going bottom up and focusing on abstract building blocks and tools before presenting enough context or real-world motivating examples. One told me about some research into math education that flipped the normal curriculum for math students and went in a very different order than what we all learned in school, and the claim was that students were learning faster & better. If true that might be a tad interesting and surprising.
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I graduated in CS in Italy. I had to take two mandatory physics courses in the late 80s. Those courses were equations-first with basically no real world examples. The teachers were from the Physics department and the courses for us were watered down versions of what they were teaching to their students there. Those courses were boring as hell, all math and nothing else. Luckily I knew what those equations were about thanks to the physics courses at high school: more watered down but firmly grounded in the real world. Probably the aim of those courses, in the first two years of the degree path, was to make people drop out. The statistics were one graduated every three freshmen. The goal of university was to make new scientists and everybody else, please go away we don't have time for you. That changed later on.
    - dahart 3y ago
      Yes these are legitimately real problems in university education, and not always talked about openly: that optimizing for student learning is not necessarily a primary goal, that ‘weeder’ courses exist to dissuade some people from certain majors, and that some departments and some professors aren’t interested in training people for industry, but only for academic research. Some of that was going on in my undergrad program as well, and it has been shifting toward being more industry friendly over time.
yorwba 3y ago
I did some poking around to find the teaching materials resulting from this collaboration, but unfortunately it seems like they aren't available in full. E.g. chapter 1 of the "Computing for Expression" ebook https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/comp-expression/shapes.html https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/comp-expression... starts with "We saw the Riley Quilt program in class." and dumps a huge pile of Snap spaghetti on the unsuspecting reader, which makes it rather unsuitable as a standalone textbook. A pity, because curating subsets of CS skills useful to non-CS folks seems quite promising to me.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
I'm confused by this insistence on visual programming. Why not teach students javascript and SQL?
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Context: A history professor wants her (presumably history) students to build web sites to explain history research to the public. If good-enough-for-that-job visual programming tools are available, then teaching them javascript and SQL would, at best, be a time-sucking side quest.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Put another way, this is an example of people in tech seeing computers as the end to a means while everyone else rightfully sees computers as a means to an end (aka a tool). It's natural for the CS professor to instinctively teach how computers work first, because the computer is the goal. The inner workings of computers are the means to an end: "How do I make a computer say 'hello world'?" But for everyone else like the history professor, they want to know how and why making a computer say "hello world" can be useful to them and their goals. The computer is simply just another tool that might help them achieve something, and nobody cares about how any of it specifically works.
    - amadeuspagel 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm the one who sees tech an "end to a means" for thinking students should learn boring technology[1], while CS professors who use students to try out their custom-made visual programming kit are the ones who "rightfully see computers as a means to an end". [1]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
      - DonHopkins 3y ago
        You're wildly mischaracterizing and misunderstanding where the people who developed and inspired Snap! are coming from, and what their background and experience in teaching computer science and other subjects to kids and college students really is. If you'll please take the time to read some of the things they've written, especially the The Beauty and Joy of Computing, and the long history of Scratch and Logo and Scheme that led to and inspired the development of Snap!, you'd probably find that you agree with a lot of things they say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer) https://bjc.berkeley.edu/team/snap/ https://bjc.berkeley.edu/team/snap/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/research https://snap.berkeley.edu/research https://www.snapcon.org/users/5 https://www.snapcon.org/users/5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Solomon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755836 Seymour Papert, introducing "The Turtle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs Also thanks to Lars Brinkhoff's research: Here's a video uploaded by Cynthia Solomon. Seems legit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ Definitely check out the rest of Cynthia Solomon's youtube video treasure trove, with lots of great stuff by Marvin and Margaret Minsky, Seymour Papert, and others from MIT and Atari Cambridge Research: https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos Seymour Papert on Logo, Turtles and Giraffes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM A gestural programming system developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M Marvin Minsky demonstrating a Logo Machine with an acoustic modem and cassette tape, talking about education theory, and showing a part of his first "thinking" machine: a simulated nerve synapse (1 of 40) with an adjustable knob that he built in 1951 out of WW-II surplus hardware, and discussing playing with Tinker Toys as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 David Levitt demonstrating his musical improvisation software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys List of Logo memos from MIT AI Lab: https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 >In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teaching Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...]
motohagiography 3y ago
> ... students use the HTML blocks to create a resume for a fictional or historical character in a homework assignment. This is probably the most valuable exercise described in the article. It is essentially an exercise in art, where you can reflect on the path that someone you actually admired took, and what your own representation to the world looks like. The tone of the course materials about justice and power are sort of gross to me, but maybe the physical competence and reflection will imbue the students with more character and insight than their instructors. The "write the resume of a historical or fictional figure," idea looks like a really interesting project.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > The tone of the course materials about justice and power are sort of gross to me, In what way? I quite like the precrime cluedo, which will show what the problems with that approach are: "Department of Police of Clueville, Pennyslvania has contacted you. They received a tip that someone planning a crime used our Eliza chatbot. They think that it was either Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, or Mr. Green. The tip to the police said that the person was really angry and seemed to think that Eliza was a real person. “I think they told Eliza about their plans,” said the tip. The fakelog.txt dataset is based on the log file from when our class was interacting with Eliza. Your job is to figure out: The IP address of who is planning the crime, what they said to Eliza, and see if you can figure out (a) the room where they are planning their crime and (b) what weapon the planner intends to use. (Hint: Probably mentioned on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo.)."
- totetsu 3y ago
  >> The tone of the course materials about justice and power are sort of gross to me, Which is: > The focus of the course is on text, which is at the traditional heart of the humanities. We study how text appears and is used in computing, and how computation has changed the experience of text. Most of the text we deal with daily is on the Web. We trace the development of computational text from the early days to today’s Web, as a lens to understand computing’s impact on the world. We will address directly how early computing biased towards supporting only certain kind of texts for only certain kinds of people. The Web was created with a bias towards America and Europe, men, and most strongly, towards English. Each section of the course will teach about computing, explicitly including programming, in the frame of justice. How was computing created, and for who and what purposes – both explicit and implicit? What computational skills, knowledge, and insights support critical study of the impact of computation on our lives? Strange thing to be grossed out about, but hey..
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bsenftner 3y ago
It looks like the author did not take their humanities conversation seriously. All the humanities person wanted was for the students to understand databases and the use of templates to present database information. Why the use of Snap at all? All the students need to understand is information is maintained in a database, and here's one simple way to make a template, which when run though this "software black box" replaces the template variables with database information. That software black box being nothing more than a string replacement engine. That is all they really need. The use of Snap feels like still clinging to the idea that the students "must program", when writing a template already is programming.

57 points by panic 3y ago

(I'm attending a conference right now and Mark Guzdial's keynote mentioning this very blog was excellent. Surreal to see it here.) I was lucky that my secondary (high school) education included Classical Studies, because it gave me a taste of subjects outside of STEM. As a computer science educator I'm always thrilled when one of my colleagues in the Arts and Humanities department is open to collaboration. It's rare but I think it's valuable for both parties.

drewcoo 3y ago

[flagged]

bell-cot 3y ago
Who would be a better judge of what aspiring programmers need to know about science and engineering? - A dual-Ph.D. physicist/electrical engineer, whose career had been spent doing "the hard stuff" fabbing modern x86 CPU's - A successful programmer
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  I sense that you want to imply that a successful programmer is a better judge of what aspiring programmers need to know about science and engineering, but I disagree: I would immediately go for the dual-Ph.D. physicist/electrical engineer (and yes, I would especially do that if I were the aspiring programmers, in this sense I put my money where my mouth is). Because of his qualifications, he has a much better general view about science and engineering that the successful programmer very likely lacks, and is thus in all likelihood the much better judge on this topic.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    > ...he has a much better general view about science and engineering that the successful programmer very likely lacks... Likely false. He is in a brutally demanding 1mm wide x 1km deep niche specialty. And the programmers he is exposed to are in a similar, adjacent niche. I you interpret my "what aspiring programmers need to know" as "to do their jobs as programmers" - well...by definition, the successful programmer knows that (implicitly or explicitly). If you interpret it more as general education requirements for young people these days - then I'd suggest a biologist, a climatologist, and a civil engineer.
- brmgb 3y ago
  The answer is both of them together obviously. The dichotomy you propose doesn’t exist. Curriculum like most things are collective endeavour.
alphager 3y ago
It's an incredibly good idea. Did you even read the article? The expert wanted to teach SYN/ACK, which is completely irrelevant to the non-experts.
neel_k 3y ago
You are reacting to the title, not the actual article. 1. The author is a CS professor who wanted to make a "CS for non-majors" course that non-majors would find actually useful/interesting. So he asked a historian colleague what she wanted her students to know about computers. 2. She replied that she wanted her students to know that (a) databases exist, and if properly designed/indexed can make complex queries very fast, and (b) websites can be automatically populated from the results of DB queries, which makes these search results human-comprehensible. 3. In his CS department, databases and HCI/web design are courses which come late in the sequence, after stuff like algorithms, data structures, and networking. 4. To make (2) accessible without a bunch of pre-reqs, he designed an extension to Scratch/Snap (block-based visual programming languages) which let novices more easily write SQL queries and generate database-backed HTML documents. 5. As a result, he can now teach history majors CS concepts in a way which makes their relevance to historical work directly clear.

awelxtr 3y ago

This is hardly a surprise isn't it? In CS courses you teach students to be CS scholars so it's normal that you teach the fundamentals to make them achieve that goal. When teaching stuff to a people of different background you need to first ask why, why do you need this and then adapt the curriculum to that.

dahart 3y ago
Anecdotally I’ve heard some CS professors rant about how we teach things all wrong to CS students, especially math and CS, by going bottom up and focusing on abstract building blocks and tools before presenting enough context or real-world motivating examples. One told me about some research into math education that flipped the normal curriculum for math students and went in a very different order than what we all learned in school, and the claim was that students were learning faster & better. If true that might be a tad interesting and surprising.
- pmontra 3y ago
  I graduated in CS in Italy. I had to take two mandatory physics courses in the late 80s. Those courses were equations-first with basically no real world examples. The teachers were from the Physics department and the courses for us were watered down versions of what they were teaching to their students there. Those courses were boring as hell, all math and nothing else. Luckily I knew what those equations were about thanks to the physics courses at high school: more watered down but firmly grounded in the real world. Probably the aim of those courses, in the first two years of the degree path, was to make people drop out. The statistics were one graduated every three freshmen. The goal of university was to make new scientists and everybody else, please go away we don't have time for you. That changed later on.
  - dahart 3y ago
    Yes these are legitimately real problems in university education, and not always talked about openly: that optimizing for student learning is not necessarily a primary goal, that ‘weeder’ courses exist to dissuade some people from certain majors, and that some departments and some professors aren’t interested in training people for industry, but only for academic research. Some of that was going on in my undergrad program as well, and it has been shifting toward being more industry friendly over time.

yorwba 3y ago

I did some poking around to find the teaching materials resulting from this collaboration, but unfortunately it seems like they aren't available in full. E.g. chapter 1 of the "Computing for Expression" ebook https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/comp-expression/shapes.html https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/comp-expression... starts with "We saw the Riley Quilt program in class." and dumps a huge pile of Snap spaghetti on the unsuspecting reader, which makes it rather unsuitable as a standalone textbook. A pity, because curating subsets of CS skills useful to non-CS folks seems quite promising to me.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

I'm confused by this insistence on visual programming. Why not teach students javascript and SQL?

bell-cot 3y ago
Context: A history professor wants her (presumably history) students to build web sites to explain history research to the public. If good-enough-for-that-job visual programming tools are available, then teaching them javascript and SQL would, at best, be a time-sucking side quest.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Put another way, this is an example of people in tech seeing computers as the end to a means while everyone else rightfully sees computers as a means to an end (aka a tool). It's natural for the CS professor to instinctively teach how computers work first, because the computer is the goal. The inner workings of computers are the means to an end: "How do I make a computer say 'hello world'?" But for everyone else like the history professor, they want to know how and why making a computer say "hello world" can be useful to them and their goals. The computer is simply just another tool that might help them achieve something, and nobody cares about how any of it specifically works.
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm the one who sees tech an "end to a means" for thinking students should learn boring technology[1], while CS professors who use students to try out their custom-made visual programming kit are the ones who "rightfully see computers as a means to an end". [1]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      You're wildly mischaracterizing and misunderstanding where the people who developed and inspired Snap! are coming from, and what their background and experience in teaching computer science and other subjects to kids and college students really is. If you'll please take the time to read some of the things they've written, especially the The Beauty and Joy of Computing, and the long history of Scratch and Logo and Scheme that led to and inspired the development of Snap!, you'd probably find that you agree with a lot of things they say. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Harvey_(lecturer) https://bjc.berkeley.edu/team/snap/ https://bjc.berkeley.edu/team/snap/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/research https://snap.berkeley.edu/research https://www.snapcon.org/users/5 https://www.snapcon.org/users/5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Solomon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Solomon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755836 Seymour Papert, introducing "The Turtle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_OPfmbbCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTO-Ruby-Uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJlRGe5QGhs Also thanks to Lars Brinkhoff's research: Here's a video uploaded by Cynthia Solomon. Seems legit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ Definitely check out the rest of Cynthia Solomon's youtube video treasure trove, with lots of great stuff by Marvin and Margaret Minsky, Seymour Papert, and others from MIT and Atari Cambridge Research: https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos Seymour Papert on Logo, Turtles and Giraffes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDzjHIiXZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDyym_9-E-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha8sTgtUejM A gestural programming system developed by Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Daniel Huttenlocher, David Wallace (Gumby), and Radia Perlman at the MIT-AI Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M Marvin Minsky demonstrating a Logo Machine with an acoustic modem and cassette tape, talking about education theory, and showing a part of his first "thinking" machine: a simulated nerve synapse (1 of 40) with an adjustable knob that he built in 1951 out of WW-II surplus hardware, and discussing playing with Tinker Toys as a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4kMzrDr4jQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S72xF3gd-mI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZRQQl8mA0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfKRNHRyD64 David Levitt demonstrating his musical improvisation software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys List of Logo memos from MIT AI Lab: https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos https://github.com/pdp11/sits/wiki/List-of-Logo-memos Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 >In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teaching Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...]

motohagiography 3y ago

> ... students use the HTML blocks to create a resume for a fictional or historical character in a homework assignment. This is probably the most valuable exercise described in the article. It is essentially an exercise in art, where you can reflect on the path that someone you actually admired took, and what your own representation to the world looks like. The tone of the course materials about justice and power are sort of gross to me, but maybe the physical competence and reflection will imbue the students with more character and insight than their instructors. The "write the resume of a historical or fictional figure," idea looks like a really interesting project.

pjc50 3y ago
> The tone of the course materials about justice and power are sort of gross to me, In what way? I quite like the precrime cluedo, which will show what the problems with that approach are: "Department of Police of Clueville, Pennyslvania has contacted you. They received a tip that someone planning a crime used our Eliza chatbot. They think that it was either Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, or Mr. Green. The tip to the police said that the person was really angry and seemed to think that Eliza was a real person. “I think they told Eliza about their plans,” said the tip. The fakelog.txt dataset is based on the log file from when our class was interacting with Eliza. Your job is to figure out: The IP address of who is planning the crime, what they said to Eliza, and see if you can figure out (a) the room where they are planning their crime and (b) what weapon the planner intends to use. (Hint: Probably mentioned on this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo.)."
totetsu 3y ago
>> The tone of the course materials about justice and power are sort of gross to me, Which is: > The focus of the course is on text, which is at the traditional heart of the humanities. We study how text appears and is used in computing, and how computation has changed the experience of text. Most of the text we deal with daily is on the Web. We trace the development of computational text from the early days to today’s Web, as a lens to understand computing’s impact on the world. We will address directly how early computing biased towards supporting only certain kind of texts for only certain kinds of people. The Web was created with a bias towards America and Europe, men, and most strongly, towards English. Each section of the course will teach about computing, explicitly including programming, in the frame of justice. How was computing created, and for who and what purposes – both explicit and implicit? What computational skills, knowledge, and insights support critical study of the impact of computation on our lives? Strange thing to be grossed out about, but hey..

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bsenftner 3y ago

It looks like the author did not take their humanities conversation seriously. All the humanities person wanted was for the students to understand databases and the use of templates to present database information. Why the use of Snap at all? All the students need to understand is information is maintained in a database, and here's one simple way to make a template, which when run though this "software black box" replaces the template variables with database information. That software black box being nothing more than a string replacement engine. That is all they really need. The use of Snap feels like still clinging to the idea that the students "must program", when writing a template already is programming.