[Air-L] Non-Code-Centric Texts in Introductions To Computer Science?

[Bernhard Rieder]

  Hi Peter,

I think that there are actually quite a lot of books out there that may 
capture the interest of CS people without being centered on code or 
engineering practices. I'd suggest the following classics:

"Winograd & Flores: Understanding Computers and Cogition"
"Agre: Computation and Human Experience"
"Brown & Duguid: The Social Life of Information"

A good place to lookfor more may be: 
http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/

I also think that the historical approach to computing has the potential 
to provide a wider perspective to your students.

"Edwards: The Closed World" is quite fascinating and "Campbell-Kelly & 
Aspray: Computer. A History of the Information Machine" is still the 
best general history of computing I've read.

cheers and good luck for tickling that inner humanist in your codesquad...
B.


-- 
Bernhard Rieder
Laboratoire Paragraphe
Université de Paris VIII

bernhard.rieder at univ-paris8.fr
http://bernhard.rieder.fr
http://thepoliticsofsystems.net

On 9/27/10 6:18 , Pete[r] Landwehr wrote:
> 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
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