Excerpts from Terri Yu's message of 2015-06-12 02:41:48 +0200: > http://lazowska.cs.washington.edu/NCWIT.pdf > There's heavy demand not just from undergraduates wanting to major in CS, > but also undergraduates from other departments, and even grad students from > other departments. > > The part relevant to Software Carpentry is whether the CS faculty should > teach students from other departments or whether those departments should > be teaching their own students. > > Some interesting ideas suggested in the slides: > > - CS departments might consider becoming their own school or college > instead of being a department. UMass Amherst just put CS in its own > college this past year. > - there should be more graduate programs focused on CS education
an interesting discussion indeed, and i disagree with the idea of separating out CS departments. (although i don't really know what that means, where i come from, that concept does not exist, there are universities, and they have departments, that's it, it does sound like they would be more independent, and less working with others) on the contrary, they need to be more integrated. where i studied CS as major, i was allowed to chose any minor to go with it, because CS applies to everywhere. that was in the early 90s. the above demand shows that this is true. i also don't think departments should teach their own students, at least not exclusively. while it makes sense to have cs classes that focus on applying cs to the students major, i also see great value in students connecting with other disciplines and not only learning from their own. there is also the question of the training and experience that a CS teacher in eg biology will have. the insights and experiences from students and teachers across different majors in how they apply CS in their field, i believe would be great to share with others, and especially for the CS department it is important to learn how their discipline is applied. that is less likely to happen if everyone just teaches their own. i'd like to see more interdisciplinary work in this area. greetings, martin. -- eKita - the online platform for your entire academic life -- chief engineer eKita.co pike programmer pike.lysator.liu.se caudium.net societyserver.org secretary beijinglug.org mentor fossasia.org foresight developer foresightlinux.org realss.com unix sysadmin Martin Bähr working in china http://societyserver.org/mbaehr/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
