Maria Knobelsdorf, University of Dortmund, Germany - Didaktik der ...

(Some) Grand Challenges of Computer Science Education
in the Digital Age: A Socio-Cultural Perspective
ABSTRACT
The goal of this paper is to articulate (some of) the grand
challenges that computer science education (CSE) at the school
level faces in the digital age. Based on the socio-cultural
theoretical idea that learning means entering a culture, I suggest
viewing schooling as an encounter between intertwined cultures.
Computer science (CS) students can be viewed as members of
many intertwined cultures: (a) they are newcomers to the
professional computing culture, but (b) most are also old timers
in a “user” culture, living in a world surrounded by informationcommunication
technologies (ICT), and also have informal
learning experience (and values) within ICT, mostly from out-ofschool
experience; and finally, (c) they are members of the
school culture which itself is currently in a process of
transformation due to the digital age). Using this framework, I
discuss two interrelated grand challenges of CSE in K-12 school
levels: (1) the need to adjust the CS curriculum to better overlap
with life-long learning skills; and (2) the need to better learn the
characteristics of the “digital” generation and attune education to
address these needs.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information
Science Education – computer science education.
General Terms
Human Factors
Keywords
Digital age, sociocultural theories, cultural encounter, challenges
in CSE, K-12
1. INTRODUCTION
Due to the accelerating processes of globalization and
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Conference’04, Month 1–2, 2004, City, State, Country.
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Yifat Ben-David Kolikant
School of Education
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem
Israel 91905
Tel: 972-2-5882056
Yifat.Kolikant@mail.huji.ac.il
91
digitalization, educational goals in many countries have changed.
More emphasis is put on innovation and knowledge creation in
order to maintain or increase a country's competitiveness in a
global economy. To this end, the new primary objective of
schooling is to provide opportunities for students to develop lifelong
learning skills. Moreover, much work has been invested in
transforming the school agenda to move beyond information and
teaching practices and from being teacher-centered to being more
student-centered. This creates a great challenge to education, and
as I argue in this paper, CSE is no exception.
This paper offers a socio-cultural perspective to discuss (some
of) the grand challenges that the digital age poses to CSE. The
socio-cultural perspective is described in Section 2. Section 3
presents a socio-culturally inspired viewpoint on CSE as a
cultural encounter. Section 4 presents the challenges to education
in the digital age. Section 5 discusses the challenges and
opportunities CSE deals with due to the digital age and finally in
Section 6, conclusions and implications are provided.
2. THE SOCIO-CULTURAL
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
According to Lave and Wegner [10], learning is a process of
enculturation into a culture or a community of practice by
newcomers' participation in peripheral yet legitimate, genuine
activities of the target culture. The newcomers gradually, through
continuous negotiation on the meaning of actions achieve a
holistic viewpoint of professional practice and increase their
participation, ultimately becoming full-fledged participants.
Instructional models that rely on this theoretical framework
emulate "real world" participation in a culture in school. In these
emulations, the teacher usually represents an old-timer in the
culture whereas students are viewed as newcomers to the culture
(e.g.,[4]). Figure 1 is a schematic representation of the social
fabric as pictured by this approach. This power relationship
faithfully reproduces the power relationship between newcomers
and old-timers described by Lave and Wenger [10] in craft
apprenticeship.
Nevertheless, I claim that in certain domains, the metaphorical
view of the educational milieu as a "busy tailoring shop" [4]
where the expert tailor is the teacher and the students are merely
apprentices (or newcomers) does not capture the complicated
social fabric of the milieu and is therefore limited in its ability to