2023 Itau Social Talk

.title[
## LITERACY-BASED APPROACHES TO COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
]

Dr. Chris Proctor<br>
March 20, 2023

.refs[
chrisproctor.net/slides/2023-itau-social-cs<br>
]

???

- Assistant professor of Learning Sciences at UB
- PhD at Stanford with Paulo
- Current role: CS teacher preparation program

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# <span style="color:var(--sketch-line-purple);">Research</span>

Rethinking computational thinking

Teaching and learning with computational media

CS teacher preparation

]]]

???

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# What is our motivation for teaching computer science?

.refs[
Blikstein (2018); Santo, Vogel, & Ching (2019)
]

???

I want to start by asking why we are here. What is our motivation 
for teaching computer science? In the United States, the big push 
for computer science has come from industry and from the military. 
The argument has been that we need CS skills in the workforce, and 
that we need CS skills to maintain national competitiveness.

These are important but they're not the only reasons CS is important. 
From the very beginning, computer scientists and educators have been 
arguing that this is a dangerously limited view of why CS is important. 
What will happen when the layoffs start? Is CS no longer important?

So why CS? My goal today is to develop a better answer to that question 
in the concept of computational literacies, and then to share a few
examples of work I'm doing to bring literacy-based CS into being.

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    <h2>Cognitive CT</h2>
</div>

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    <h2>Cognitive CT</h2>
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    <h2>Situated CT</h2>
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## Computational literacies

.refs[
Freire & Madedo (1987), Ivanič (1998), diSessa (2001), Holland, Lachicotte,
Skinner, & Cain (2001), <br>Wertsch (2009), Lee & Garcia (2014), Vee (2017)
]

???

This diagram is my attempt to bring together conceptions of literacy from the
learning sciences and from the field of new literacies. At the top you can see
practices at the cognitive, the situated, and the critical scales. One axis of
literacy is radial. We can ask questions about literacy practices at and across different scales.

Literacy is about communities of practice reading and writing texts, broadly understood. It's about symbolic systems.
Different infrastructural technologies--books, Twitter, the law--have different
possibilities for practice at each scale. So a second axis is the relationship
between infrastructure and practice.

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???

Led to powerful conversations about our worlds and who we can be in them. 
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???
In Unfold Studio, users can write interactive stories in a programming language
called Ink. They enact choose-your-own-adventure-style games,
which you can see running on the right. Users of Unfold Studio can write and
share stories, follow users, and keep up with their community via a social feed.

Here is a story written by a student in the study. Note the three framings of
practice. To write this story, Isiah had to know how to use...

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## Infrastructure supports<br> connecting across literacies

“If there’s a story with tons of different possibilities that interlock and weave together, that’s cool to think about. That’s why I like Unfold Studio. I want to be an author when I grow up, and with coding you have to think of what to do before you do it. I have to think ahead of time, what’s it going to be like when I put this in?”

I shared that my motivation for creating Unfold Studio was to help people connect computer science to other forms of expression they already cared about. He replied, “That happened for me. Do you know why? Because I really love books, and stories, and things like that. And I really like messing around with things, changing them… It’s like I’m a fictional engineer” (Interview 2).

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## Assessing cognitive CT
<img src="/slides/2019_job_talk_buffalo/images/state_flow_hist_vertical_a.png" style="margin-top: -24px;">
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## Assessing cognitive CT
<img src="/slides/2019_job_talk_buffalo/images/state_flow_hist_vertical_b.png" style="margin-top: -24px;">
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## Assessing situated CT

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## Assessing situated CT

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<video controls autoplay="true" src="/slides/2019_job_talk_buffalo/images/literacy_graph.mp4" width="100%" style="margin-top: -20px;">
.caption-bottom-left[
<span style="color:#833457;">&#11044;</span> User<br>
<span style="color:#715884;">&#11044;</span> Story
]

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# Summary

- Why CS? Computational literacies.
- Cognitive, situated, and critical framings of CT.
- Let's build and study infrastructure to support literacy-based CS pedagogy!

.refs[
Kafai & Proctor (2022)
]

]]
.half-right[<img width="100%" src="/images/ed_researcher.png" style="margin-top: 36px;">]
]
---
.title[
## LITERACY-BASED APPROACHES TO COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
]

Dr. Chris Proctor<br>
chrisp@buffalo.edu<br>
March 20, 2023

.refs[
chrisproctor.net/slides/2023-itau-social-cs<br>
]