Open Computing at Cal
So, here’s a text that I just ran across through… normal Sunday nerd stuff. procrastinating something.
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/announcements/2023-03-01/subdomains
It’s a post from the Open Computing Federation of Cal, trying to raise some sort of fuss at the UC marketing departments arbitrary decision that NO student groups shall use a *.berkeley.edu domain.
It’s, to me, a supremely “connected” text. There’s a LOT of paths from this little article to the real history of computing that I think helps Group 3 brain students get INTO Topic 1 and the floating ethics questions.
But there’s no way I can lecture scaffold that much context.
Unless it’s a slightly bigger text and I want to hang a “unit” around that… whatever that means for CS. For something that seems so interconnected in my head, I really struggle to help students braid what they call “theory” and the computing reality that surrounds them.
But!
But! They love competitive gameshow bits!
So, maybe split the class in two, give each 40 minutes with the internet and chat GPT to compose 10 “interesting” CS questions that can connect back to this story.
Both sides can get question approval from me (oh, and a system to handle the question traffic and logging is a good IA. basically just a mini ticket system) but I was expecting to do this in person, all in one class period.
With as many approved questions as they have (10 max) then the class ends at whatever competitive Kahoot I want to script up (which is itself an entire IA franchise. Big Picture Board Game skins for kahoot-style interactions. That’s how you do a rich UI and a web app)
This gets me to the “read” side of Cultural Text Communication, or whatever ed jargon I come up with to make this into a conference presentation. I want to build a ramp, a slide, a ladder.. choose your physical or enzymatic metaphor. I’m looking for class procedures (but not necessarily just in-person classroom) to prompt/support/scaffold that “wide net” form of reading. Where getting context or explanation for references you don’t know is part of the reading.
IN a brief conversation with Carl, one of the instructors at the Teaching of Reading workshop running here at ASB, and his real basic questions (How do the students know what you want them to be doing?) made me recognize that I lean entirely towards incentive system. Even though I go out of my way to “not punish” an absence of this reading/writing behavior, when I have a new idea for a classroom system it’s almost always a space/moment where I can create some social/academic reward for a certain kind of reading/writing, but without clear delineation or definition. I’m treating students like LLMs, where if I present enough clearly labeled “successes,” then eventually everyone else will adjust their weights.
Tie And Jeans 