CS Education Research: Finding a Community Sally Fincher 32nd SIGCSE Symposium 2001 Charlotte NC, 22nd February

“Community” What is a “community”? –How is it formed? –How does it think of itself? common status( “We’re all University Presidents” ) common activity( “We’re all parking attendants” ) boundaries ( “I may not vote, but I know I live here” ) –But, in general, not common interest

Research Communities Research communities are: –often well-defined by their participants (by status, activity and boundary) –characterised by formal frameworks of dissemination (conferences, journals etc.) Diana Crane Invisible colleges; diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities University of Chicago Press, 1972 Tony Becher Academic tribes and territories : intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines Open University Press, 1989

CS Education Research (i) Because this is an emergent community… –status of participants is not always obvious (no “centres”; no MIT; no Knuth) –there’s hardly anyone for who this is their only research area, or even their central one –“leading lights” are often better known for work in other areas

CS Education Research (ii) Because this is an emergent area: –boundaries of “discipline” are fuzzy and flexible. –Particularly susceptible to what Phil Agre calls “anamorphism and overlap” Phil Agre, RRE Note and Recommendations 20 Aug 2000, d.recommenda12.html

Anamorphosis... View of the World from 9th Avenue Saul Steinberg, 1976 Lots of detail of Manhattan, further you go away from that, the hazier it gets. Lots of detail of my classroom/my department, further you go away from that, the hazier it gets.

… and overlap We can only talk productively together at all because our research maps overlap. “We don't live in different worlds -- we live in the same world. We just have different anamorphic maps of it.” We all have an anamorphic view of the research world (and no-one can know the whole world) Last year’s symposium logo:

The other face of anamorphism... The Ambassadors Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533 Not with us standing at the distorting centre! Is that a real research area? The boundaries of others’ disciplinary communities are here being sharply drawn

CS Education Research (iii) If it’s … –difficult to know who’s “in” the community –difficult to know where the edges of the community are –difficult to define where the knowledge areas overlap … then perhaps it’s easier to track via the more formal frameworks of communication & dissemination

CS Education Research Communities: a matter of subject area Symposium, ITiCSE, ACE Characterised by small-scale investigations on a single aspect (discipline or practice) PPIG, ESP Characterised by investigations of specific mental & conceptual skills JERIC, Visualisation workshops Motivated by use of tools in CS teaching & learning BERA, AERA, Learning Sciences Characterised by investigations based within educationalist tradition (Bruner, Piaget, Vygotsky etc.)

CS Education Research Communities: a matter of temperament & methodology Symposium, ITiCSE, ACE Practitioner Research “Action Research” PPIG, ESP Overlap with Psychology Often (but not exclusively) quantitative/statistical studies JERIC, Visualisation workshops Technology-driven (eg from Hypercard to the Web) BERA, AERA, Learning Sciences Overlap with education Often “theoretical”. ie educational theories applied to CS “Critical enquiry”

Other possible communities FiE (Frontiers in Education) ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education) SEFI (Société Européene pour la Formation des Ingénieurs) IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) TC3, WG3.2 Overlap with cognate disciplines Although all these deal with “engineering”, they all have CS elements - sometime quite substantial

Joining in CSERGI. See: csed-research mailing list (and “CS Education as an Academic Field”) See: Doctoral Consortium (held at SIGCSE Symposium) Help in finding a community Computer Science Education journal. See: Help in defining a community