College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) 801 Atlantic Drive Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280 Phone: (404) 894-5618 Fax: (404) 894-0673 Email: guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
Mark's Ph.D. is in Education and Computer Science from the University of Michigan (advised by Elliot Soloway). He is the author of the Prentice-Hall textbook "Squeak: Object-oriented design with multimedia applications" and co-editor (with Kim Rose of Disney Imagineering R&D) of "Squeak, Open Source for Computing and Multimedia" (also from Prentice-Hall). His research is funded by the National Science Foundation (including a Career award), Intel, Sun, and the Mellon Foundation. He is on the editorial boards of "Journal of the Learning Sciences," "Interactive Learning Environments," and "Journal of Interactive Learning Research."
The desktop user interface as we know it today was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970's in order to realize the vision of a "Dynabook," the computer as a metamedium for exploring and authoring a rich assortment of personal, dynamic media. The new, open source programming language Squeak is where the effort to create the Dynabook has shifted, but now in the context of a ubiquitous World Wide Web. The result is the potential for Collaborative Dynabooks where multimedia is jointly created by hundreds of authors, critiqued by far-flung experts, and shared in a community of authors. This lecture describes the vision of the Dynabook, Squeak, prototypes of the Collaborative Dynabook, and what studies of these prototypes are telling us about the future of this vision. (A computer projector for live demonstrations would be helpful for this talk.)
Smalltalk-80 was the medium through which the Xerox PARC inventions of the desktop user interface and object-oriented programming were communicated to the world. In 1995, a team of researchers at Apple Computer, including some of the original Xerox PARC Smalltalk developers (Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, and Ted Kaehler), resurrected the original Smalltalk-80, updated it, made it highly portable, and released it to the Internet. Today, it runs on virtually every major computing platform, from Windows CE to Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Developers all over the world continually maintain and enhance Squeak, to include features such as a pluggable web-server (from Georgia Tech) and an end-user-programmable 3-D world (from Carnegie-Mellon University). This lecture presents Squeak, its history, what makes it unique and interesting, and where it is going in the future. (A computer projector for live demonstrations would be helpful for this lecture. A VCR is not necessary, but would also be helpful.)
In 1961, Alan Perlis called for all educated people to learn to program. He argued that programming is part of a general, liberal education. If Calculus as the study of rates is considered part of a liberal education, then so should Computer Science as the study of process which is even more important than rates in many fields. But our success in teaching programming generally is pretty miserable. Empirical studies, withdrawl/failure/drop rates in introductory courses, and the depressingly low rates of women and minorities taking computer science courses all point to the need for a new approach. Perhaps we need to re-think how liberally educated people use a computer and what they might want to learn to program for. We note that media are increasingly becoming digitized, and that digitized media are manipulated with software. Programming, then, becomes a communications skill: If you know how to program, you can say something even if Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft don't support you in saying it. We are developing course materials (based in Python/Jython) to try teaching programming as multimedia to a class of 100 non-CS-majors in January 2003, with plans to ramp up to 400-600 a semester in Fall 2003. This talk reviews the idea of "Introduction to Media Computation," the current course, its assessment, and the tools created to make it work. (A computer projector for live demonstrations would be helpful for this lecture.)
Using a computer to enable on-line collaboration for the goal of learning is not a new idea -- the first such environment actually predates most computer supported collaborative work applications. But the rapid proliferation of Web browsers and ubiquitous Internet access has made Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) an important research field whose findings tell us about how to use and invent tools for real classrooms. This lecture surveys the history and the state of the art in CSCL, with a particular emphasis on the latest empirical findings and open questions.