Carl, the Institute and Jeannette Wing plan to think more
together. She was very upfront about her general ignorance about
complexity, and could only say that "intuitively" she felt they might
have something to say to each other. Her list of examples of
computational thinking--which I now have thanks to Owen's pointers
(many thanks indeed for your research, Owen)--all precede any notion
of the sciences of complexity. Indeed, one could argue (and George
Cowan, for example, does) that thinking about complexity in the way
the Santa Fe Institute and its offspring think about complexity was
impossible in any rigorous, scientific way before computing.
But nomenclature is a funny thing, and who knows what this kind of
thinking, these kinds of mental tools, will end up being called?
On Jul 12, 2008, at 5:01 PM, Carl Tollander wrote:
Why computational thinking rather than complexity thinking or (egad)
category thinking or political ethics or conflict resolution or good
design or shop or....? What makes computational thinking more
enabling
(if not more "fundamental")?
ct
Owen Densmore wrote:
I'm not sure how many of us were there, but I found the talk quite
thought provoking.
An earlier version of her slides are here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/ct-and-tc-long.pdf
.. and a more narrative article is here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing06.pdf
.. and the "5 Deep Questions" article is here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing08.pdf
.. more on her home page:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wing/
I think the fundamental problem she poses is: "What are the core
concepts in computing". Sort of searching for the spanning set for
educational purposes.
I rather like the concept. Much different than "How do I program?"
and more like "What is computational epistemology?"
I wish she had a blog/web presence. But she's quite busy and may not
find blogging natural to her way of doing things. Ken Iversion was
interested in this problem and wrote a few high-school textbooks
using
APL. Ken was approaching the problem a bit differently: he wanted to
disambiguate standard mathematical notation and to use that to
build a
concrete computational epistemology .. i.e. build the spanning set I
think Jeannette is interested in, although without the internet
components.
-- Owen
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
"All things created have an order
in themselves, and this begets the form
that lets the universe resemble God."
Dante, "Paradiso"
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
