PyCon Day 2: Opening Keynote, Lorena Barba
Beyond “Learning to Program” – Education Open-Source Culture and Structured Collaboration in Language
Two things I care about: Education and Science
- I’ll be talking about education, because we only really have time for that.
- NumFocus provides sponsorship to smaller open source projects that wouldn’t be able to survive on their own.
Language
- “People act through language” and I’m interested in exploring that with respect to education.
- Obama administration announced “Computer Science For All”. Half of all STEM jobs will be related to Computer Science in 2 years.
- Used to be “CP4E”: “Computer Programming for Everybody” worked on by Guido back in the mid-90s.
- The origins of the Python Software Foundation come from this program.
- 1999, “…what would the world look like if users could program their own computer?” DARPA funded CP4E proposal.
- Highlighted
- a new programming curriculum
- A user-friendly programming environment
- build community (Python is a demonstration of the success of this community)
- Community -> culture -> language
- Allows us to coordinate with each other to create value
- More than just volunteer work
- This culture makes it possible for people to create high-complexity projects together
- ergo, the language and community plays a big role in education
- “… we compare mass ability to write and modify software with mass literacy…” –CP4E proposal, 1999
- 2006 Jeannette M Wing, Computational Thinking, Comm of the ACM. “It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists…
- Computational Thinking was mentioned in the book “Mindstorms” 1980.
- This was written by Seymour Papert who designed the “turtle” which was actually a physical robot before it was the robot on the screen that we all used.
- “People act through language”
- Winograd & Flores, 1986. Language/Action perspective
- I learned about this when I was an undergrad in Valparaiso, Chile in a workshop with Fernando Flores
- Learned about “conversations for action”
- Came to the realization that when we’re having conversations, we’re actually working
- The converse is true: when we work, we have to be having conversations
Fernando Flores
- Fernando Flores
- Famous invention was “Project CyberSyn, 1971”.
- Implemented a system to manage the national economy over TELEX
- See “Cybernetic Revolutions” book
- See “Network World” 1994 article, Network Innovators
- Was a political prisoner from 1973-1976 during the military coup
- Came to the US and became a PhD student at UC Berkely in the late 70s
- Worked with Terry Winograd, a CS professor at Stanford
- Created “The Coordinator”
- Sold half million copies
- Communications of the ACM in May 2006 called the book a “groundbreaking textbook on system design”
- Premise was that communication is for action, promises, requests, invitations, work, etc.
Conversations for Action
- Converstaions for Action
- Published recently in 2013
- Edited essays from the 1980s
- Should design conversations around the network of commitments that we make to each other
- We make explicit promises to each other
- Promises changes the future
- When we fail to communicate, trust diminishes
- Structure of a conversation for action
- A makes a request or offer
- B makes a promise or accepts
- B declares to have delivered
- A declares to be satisfies
- Sometimes we forget about the final 2 steps
- Of course, you also have to work and actually do things outside of this conversation
- Full analysis has more outcomes
- After A makes the request, there are 5 more outcomes
- B accepts
- B rejects
- B negotiates
- A can withdraw the request
- A can modify the terms
Open Source Collaboration
- Open source collaboration
- In a pull request
- contributor A wants project owner B to perform some action: pull new changes into their repo (review and merge)
- B can decline; END
- B can accept, and B will merge the PR -> the agreement is implicit
- B can review, work will happen outside the conversation
- B can counter, and a pull request discussion ensues
- Commitment-based culture of collaboration
- Commiter agrees to review the PR
- GitHub Issues, project contribution policy: “Log an issue for any question or problem”
- Implicit in that is a promise that issues will be reviewed
- The genius of GitHub is that it has encapsulated an action based conversation in one button
- Tool-of-the-trade in open-source world that supports the workflow and promises
- In a pull request
- Ed FOO
- Tim O’Reilly’s session
- Access to knowledge-on-demand is changing work for humans
- With facts available at your fingertips, what do we need to teach?
- “Critical thinking”… what does it actually mean?
- What are the foundational skills of the modern age?
- “How about the work of Terry Winograd?”
- Expert behaviour comes from knowing what commitments to make and how to deliver on them
- I think that this framework has permeated the Open Source culture
- Tim O’Reilly’s session
- Back to CP4E
- Develop a new curriculum
- Better tools
- Build a user community
- Actively participate in the user mailing list to foster community
- “…we design our organizations around the networks of commitments being made…” ~F. Flores
- When people coordinate through commitments, trust grows, we strengthen community
- “Building community” == “Building commitment”
Finally…
- Last year’s keynote by Gabriella Colman
- Published “The ‘Con’”
- The lasting effect of a conference are that any doubts about the individuals commitments are dispelled and the commitment is solidified
- In education: Maker -> Hacker
- Speech acts–Language rituals that build trust
- also include offers, declarations, etc.
- Language/Action Perspective
- Online learning
- can we have a platform as effective as GitHub for online learning?
- Language/action perspective can help us do this
- Core values for open source
- Culture
- Community
- Commitment
- Trust/Belonging
- Language
- If you’re an educator, move beyond the narrative of “Learning to code”. It’s more than just about coding. It’s about the language ritual that create the culture of commitment.
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