[Air-L] Air-L Digest, Vol 74, Issue 31

[Campbell, W. Gardner]

Hi Pete,

I'm trying to do something like this on a broader or more general scale, aimed at faculty-staff development across the university, with a Networked New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar. Principal information here: http://gardnercampbell.wetpaint.com/page/Baylor_NMFS_F10. The portal aggregating network-wide content (primarily blogs) is here: http://www.netvibes.com/gardnercampbell#NMFS_F10.

Our text is primarily "The New Media Reader" (MIT 2003). Had I world enough and time, I'd add many more essays from the NMR, Howard Rheingold's "Tools for Thought," and perhaps Bardini's "Bootstrapping" to the mix.

Best regards,
Gardner


Dr. Gardner Campbell
Director, Academy for Teaching and Learning
Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Learning, Honors College
Baylor University
One Bear Place #97189
Waco, TX 76798-7189
254-710-4064
www.gardnercampbell.net


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Message: 7
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:18:59 -0400
From: "Pete[r] Landwehr" <plandweh at cs.cmu.edu>
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: [Air-L] Non-Code-Centric Texts in Introductions To Computer
	Science?
Message-ID:
	<AANLkTiks_jgCTEo3bEfQX9D4nqzZHn2ZOWN-09kJZEnM at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hey list,

I have an open ended question for this list that is intended to be a
bit selfish and (hopefully) a bit beneficial for everyone else.
Recently, I read Weizenbaum's Computing Power And Human Reason, in
which he makes arguments about the things that AI should & shouldn't
address. (It's a bit dated.) In it, he makes a point that because he
is trained as a computer scientist he considers himself a poorly
educated entrant to the debate, & later suggests that an introduction
to computer science should be more than an introduction to
programming, but also into some of the theory behind the field. (By
"theory", I mean the conceptual ideas behind computing, not discrete
mathematics.) As a computer scientist whose introduction to computer
science was essentially an introduction to programming along with some
key algorithms in the field and a few good software engineering
practices, I found his argument appealing.

As such, I'd like to ask the list -both computer scientists and non-
what (if any) texts would you like undergraduate computer scientists
to be exposed to that are _not_ solely focused on good practices in
C++/Java/<Language of Choice> programming?  Baudrillard's Simulacra
And Simulations? Lessig's Code v. 2? Simon's The Sciences Of The
Artificial? Some linguistics text by Chomsky? Or is this whole idea
dumb & everything is totally hunky-dory?

Best,

pml