CS2105.01: Making Computing Socially Relevant

Location: Bennington College
Term(s): Spring 2011
Class size: ~ 20 students/term

Educators are beginning to attend to the challenges of developing meaningful computer science education: identifying a common core of intended learning outcomes, instructional designs, and assessments. Computer scientists are beginning to attend to the challenges of making computing relevant to communities and society and educating the next generation of computing professionals.

However, existing approaches to teaching computing tend to focus on small projects, solely for the consumption of the teacher and students in the class (“toy projects”); formal methods (the “traditional” approach); game development (“projects about toys”); or examples intended to be meaningful to the digital generation (“relevant” projects, but with a lower-case “r”).
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Reason I wish Apple wasn’t so secretive #43

When a new product comes out, it takes 6-12 months for production of accessories to ramp up, by which time you already have something that works (rather than something you’d love to have) and you’re approaching a new product release (which will change the device’s form factor). For example, iPhone 4 cases… MacBook cases… iPad cases, etc…

I love my MacAlly faux-suede Bookstand iPad case… I worried about ordering them sight unseen, but I couldn’t have been happier with mine — it has provided great protection and no fuss. It gives me access to all the ports and gives me comfort when I put the iPad into a bag.

Yet, if these two things had been out at the time, I might have gone with the combination of them, instead:

I don’t whether I would have liked them better or worse than the Bookstand, but I like the idea of them.