Where is this Discourse?

1. Where is this Discourse? BRACE (Building Research in Australasian Computing Education) First Workshop, Dunedin, 23-26 January 2004

2. “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”)

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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, http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.notes.and.recommenda12.html

6. 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.

7. … 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)

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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 CS Education Research Communities: a matter of subject area BERA, AERA, Learning Sciences • Characterised by investigations based within educationalist tradition (Bruner, Piaget, Vygotsky etc.) JERIC, Visualisation workshops • Motivated by use of tools in CS teaching & learning

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

12. What you think …