Critical Computational Thinking
Critical Computational Thinking Critical literacies educators seek to help their students become more skillful communicators with language, but they also want students to develop understandings of how language’s role as a semiotic mediator channels power. Because language mediates our sense-making, our worlds are changed when the language with which we approach the world changes. The same is true of our own identities. This is what Freire meant by reading the world and reading the word.
One way of using power is by changing the language so that certain realities are presumed to be true. Then, by asserting that nothing has been done—that our use of language is natural, reasonable, normal, we make it incontestable. Through this mechanism, ideological constructs like race and gender are cemented as part of our realities. Critical literacies educators seek to undo this erasure, tracing the historical development of what appears normal and unproblematic, to make available other futures.
Because so much of the reality of youth is mediated by computational processes, the same need exists to develop a critical computational literacy. To analyze the ways in which computational artifacts (by which I mean artifacts relying on computation to function, or through which users can perform computation) present reality in certain ways and make it impossible to contest them. One important site of computational mediation is the interface, the surface at which a user interacts with a computational artifact.
Concretely, consider a social network such as Facebook. Facebook’s interface presents social relationships in certain ways, through use of language, patterns of quantification (likes are countable), hierarchies of information, policies allowing and disallowing access to certain information. Inferfaces are therefore much like ideologies; they rigidly shape the way the world can be for us.
Programming and other aspects of computer science are some of the technical skills required for critical computational literacy, because they are prerequisites for understanding the true terms of engagement to an interface, and for richly considering alternatives. For example, people who imagine different power relationships than those afforded by Facebook in the sociotechnical world have created Mastodon, a federated protocol allowing many of the same interactions as Facebook. Without a broadly-distributed awareness of how Facebook shapes power and the ability to implement alternatives, a project like Mastodon can neither be enacted not become legible as an important tool.
It may actually be that computational mediation is more subtle (and therefore harder to contest) than linguistic mediation—though they are hard to disentangle. Computation may be more flexible, responsive, hegemonic, and can potentially appropriate other people and texts. When you participate in Facebook, you become part of the interface for other users.
One first step is to analyze the rhetoric of computation. How do we experience it? This is where interactive storytelling is useful. We can distinguish between immersion and interactivity: the extent to which we are aware of the interface. It also provides narrative as a platform for using computation to enact certain effects on the player, and to critique what they do.
ABSTRACTION AND CONCRETENESS
The first wave of programming showed us that abstraction isn’t where the power is, at least at first. You have to fight your way to abstraction.
MODERNISM
—> Math Talk Dyjkstra
INTERPRETATION
The mathematicians come.
The beginning of the pipeline Constructivist
Other kinds of computational activities
People who knew how to use the system had a good intuitive understanging of what the levers are. —> This is the argument for a civic computational thinking
ICER: April
WIPSI (Workshop on Primary and Secondary Informatics)
Scribner // Functional, Political, Personal diSessa // Material, Cognitive, Social