Week 7 Readings

Note: Since I am pressed for time, this will just be a short blog for this week's readings. Rather than taking a look at each individual article, I will be looking at them as a whole.

After reading this week's readings, I took away a thought that I don't think any of the authors intended. That thought? Disaster! America is headed for a technological disaster.

Well, after reading such things as: "CS (computer science) as a major dropped 60% between 2000 and 2004" (Wang, p.1) and "only .5% of incoming female freshmen expressed interest in a CS undergraduate degree" (p.1) and "Too often the call for an educational focus on preparing students to operate in a knowledge-based society has only resulted in attempts to improve surface-level computer literacy skills like word processing or internet use" (Klopfer, p.34) and "Various forms of multimedia design, particularly that which uses Adobe Photoshop and Hyperstudio software, have been taken as the main artistic expression of digital media in primary and secondary educational settings, whereas professional artists are using advanced programming to manipulate and create digital expressions" (Peppler, p.1) and "Analysis of data is considered an inquiry skill in only 17 of 72 activities in a laboratory manual that accompanies a standard high school biology text" (Kolpfer, p.2) and on and on and on...

It just seems to me that if the United States is going to remain technologically innovative in future years to come, we are going to have to make some drastic changes in school curriculum regarding the use of computers. All of these articles offer good places in which to start, but what concerns me is that they all still seem to speak of test cases (or whatever you call them) where only a handful of students participate. I suppose that is how research is conductive, but what kept striking me was that we need to get past the research phase and into the implementation phase.

Why can't art classes offer more than just Photoshop and instead get down to the nitty-gritty aspects of digital programming? Why can't biology classes focus more on data analysis through computer aid rather than just collection or observation of data if in fact that is how "professional" biologists operate? Why aren't more computer science classes utilizing StarLogo TNG (or similar type of programming) to help students better visualize computer programming concepts? Why aren't there more places like the Digital Design Studio (the media arts studio found at a community technology center in South Central Los Angeles in one of the cities poorest areas)?

It seems to me we a raising a generation of internet savvy school kids who actually have little idea that there's more to computers than the internet. I would hazard to guess that more students are going into internet design now than are going into actual computer science. Great. So America will have some of the best designed websites in the world. But educationally and technologically, how are we going to be able to compete?