A Fine Pair of Fellows ...

The ACM has just announced its list of 2007 ACM Fellows, and two names stand out for computing education in general, and for SIGCSE 2008, particularly the keynotes (see below).

Eric Roberts of Stanford University (photo left) has served the SIGCSE community for many years, spearheading such important (and gi-normous*) projects as Computing Curricula 2001 and the ACM Java Task Force (with my co-chair Susan Rodger). Eric received the 2003 SIGCSE Award in Reno, Nevada (where I recall his keynote did address diversity issues in computing education). Rumor has it that Eric taught a computing course for non-majors at Stanford that included Marissa Mayer, one of the SIGCSE 2008 keynotes -- clearly, Eric made the course more than accessible.

SIGCSE 2008 treasurer Scott Grissom told me about a game played at a past SIGCSE where each person names the most famous person who knows you by name -- Eric purportedly started with Bill Gates of Microsoft (yes, the "of Microsoft" part is unnecessary, but ...), but then added Condoleezza Rice of Stanford and "other stuff" -- when it was his turn to name a famous person who knows him, Scott wisely chose Eric Roberts.

The second new ACM Fellow connected (directly) to SIGCSE 2008 is none other than Randy Pausch of CMU (photo right). You can visit previous posts here or here or here to get Randy's background and his bittersweet, very emotional story. Randy will provide the opening keynote address at SIGCSE 2008; we are hoping this keynote is provided in person. Just to be complete, Randy has received the 2008 SIGCSE Award and the 2007 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award as well.

On behalf of SIGCSE, well done to both Fellows.
___

* so big a project I had to squeeze "gigantic" and "enormous" into one adjective :-)

Child Care / Kid Camps announced ...

Finally! We (mostly Susan and Pam, see below) have been exploring an on site child care center and kid camp for SIGCSE 2008 for a few weeks (it was noted on the conference homepage and attendees page) -- details below in Susan's announcement to the SIGCSE listserv, but I am excited at extending the notion of a "SIGCSE Family" to be more inclusive than it already is -- also, I should emphasize that "on site" really means "on site"; the camp will be on the same level of the OCC as the meetings and exhibits (but secluded enough to not disturb meetings ;-).

---

New at SIGCSE 2008 this year, we are in the process of finalizing details for onsite childcare and kid CS camp during the conference, for ages 6 months-12 years (contact us if there is interest in kids older).

DEADLINE for applications: January 10, 2008!

We need to have at least 12 kids signed up by January 10 to guarantee this program. If there is low enrollment, then we may need to cancel.

Here are some of the details for what we are planning. More details and online applications will be available in the next few weeks.

We are contracting with a professional provider who provides onsite care at conferences. (similar to Kids Chi Camp at SIGCHI or the childcare at Grace Hopper). The daycare/kid's camp will be one of the meeting rooms at the convention center, but will be transformed into a fun place for kids.

Younger kids will participate in drama, play, and arts and crafts type activities. As part of the care, older kids can participate in our CS kids activities. We are investigating activities such as CS Unplugged, Scratch, Alice, etc. Student Volunteers will help with the CS activities.

Daycare provider ratios will be 1:2 for kids ages 6 months-11 months, 1:3 for kids 1 to 2 years old, and 1:5 for ages 3-12. Student volunteers for the CS activities will be additional helpers and are not included in this ratio.

Daycare will be provided during the main sessions from

• Thursday, March 13 8am-1pm, 1pm-6pm (whole, half day options)
• Friday, March 14 8am-1pm, 1pm-6pm (whole, half day options)
• Saturday, March 15 8-4pm

This care will be subsidized and you pay for a whole or half session at the rate of

• $6/hr for ages 3-12, and
• $7/hr for ages 6 months-2yr.

We hope to send out more information when our application goes online.

CONTACT: Pam Cutter, Pam.Cutter@kzoo.edu, will be our Childcare/Camp Arrangements contact. Please contact her if you have any questions, ideas, or concerns.

We hope this subsidized daycare/camp will make SIGCSE more accessible to our attendees. We both hope to bring our kids to SIGCSE 2008 to participate in this new experience for kids.

Susan and JD

Accessibility in the News today ...

Accessibility involving computing has been quite a topic in the news today. I will just highlight a few noteworthy examples here, not all of which involve education but can be argued provide the potential to increase the diversity of the user population of computing (hint: diversity and accessibility are connected by more than the theme of SIGCSE 2008 :-).

• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette has a nice story about the new Quality of Life Technology Center shared between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
• A group of researchers from JHU, CCNY, Northwestern and the University of Maryland-College Park are working on a surface to facilitate a tactile interface for users with vision impairment.
• Science Daily reports on an IBM project to develop a system that can be manipulated by thought (honest).
• And of course, production has begun on the OLPC device (XO), which has also been a topic recently on the SIGCSE listserv.

Providing a low-cost computing device to make information and the Internet more accessible -- who could argue with that? Well, apparently, there is competition in this area.

I am not an economist, so I am not going to comment on the relative merits of such competition. But as a teacher, I think the discussion itself has merit in computing education, especially when we read about the anticipated high demand for computer science people (or "High-demand employment requires high-caliber education") and the benefits such access can provide to all, including those in developing countries (yes, there are consequences too, which is why the discussion is non-trivial).

And clearly accessibility is not limited to those with mobility, vision or hearing issues either. I would be happy to be involved with a SIGCSE conference that facilitated discussion(s) on access around the world, the issues that arise across cultures and political systems, legality, social impact -- hey, I work at a liberal arts college, and I believe computing has much to offer these discussions.

Still, the resources (time, space, energy, pages) at a SIGCSE conference are limited, no matter how many "threads of discussion" are processing. I look forward to learning about initiatives to provide low-cost computing around the globe, and SIGCSE 2008 can be one of the places where I learn more about this topic.

Villanova in the Fall …

Last Friday, computing educators in the Greater Philadelphia Area, also known as the Delaware Valley, gathered at the Conference Center at Villanova University just west of Philadelphia, PA USA (hey, blogs are international :-). Our hosts, Boots Cassel of VU and Manuel Perez-Quinones of VT, used funding from their NSF-CPATH grant to arrange this meeting. All participants submitted background information, current projects and future endeavors from which a tentative agenda was gleaned.

We all met on a crisp autumn day (the colors were astounding!), and immediately got down to work over breakfast. After a sequence of substantial introductions, the floor was open for discussion. We talked about perceptions, priorities, goals, practicalities, diversity and motivations involved in computing education. Other efforts from other disciplines were noted (including Eric Mazur’s work in concept physics at Harvard).

Before we knew it, it was lunchtime -- more food, and more conversation. The afternoon went by as rapidly as the morning, though Boots was able to at least list and reminder everyone of the agenda items. We discussed discovery learning, virtual worlds and robotics, kinesthetic learning and PBSL, whatever came into the stream of the discussion among motivated people. I then realized that our hosts were also demonstrating some of these forms of learning in practice that day: we held loosely to an agenda, we facilitated and provided with surroundings conducive to activity, and then set off to explore. We had lived the ideal, and I was renewed once again, looking forward to returning to Haverford to see if I could implement some of these strategies.

I recall feeling that I was experiencing one of my favorite parts of the SIGCSE conference; namely, the ongoing discussion towards a set of goals, some immediate, some longer term. I believe that this meeting was made more effective because the majority of participants were “SIGCSE regulars” – and the rest of the people were constantly reminded that they should attend SIGCSE soon. I was able to distribute about 30-40 roses as reminders of the City of Portland, OR, home of SIGCSE 2008. I look forward to progress reports and more lively chat (in the real world :-) in a few months at the Oregon Convention Center.

NCWIT report from Seattle

This Blog post is contributed by my esteemed co-chair Susan Rodger -- it took me a few days to post it into this Blog, but I do believe it is worth the brief wait -- the goals of NCWIT line up well with those of SIGCSE in general, and SIGCSE 2008 in particular -- Enjoy, J.D.

---

I just got back from my first NCWIT meeting held in Seattle, Washington. NCWIT stands for National Center for Women & Information Technology. They have been meeting since May 2005, and Duke has been a member, but this is my first time in attending. There were 200-300 people attending, all dedicated to increasing interest in IT.

As I saw at the meeting, NCWIT has been very active in producing many products to attract women to IT. For example, they have created Program-in-a-Box programs to provide all the materials you need for a presentation on a topic such as outreach. The "box" is actually just online resources, easily accessible.

An example is "Outreach-In-A-Box: Discovering IT"

This box has lots of materials to help provide you with an outreach presentation to a middle school including sample letters to introduce yourself to the school, activites you can do with kids, presentation slides, and a tech brochure.

The NCWIT meeting had a practices workshop for all the attendees that was held at Microsoft and included two Keynote speakers. Curt Coffman, the author of the best-seller First Break All the Rules gave a very lively talk on attracting and engaging talented people with many great suggestions. The second keynote speaker was Evelynn Hammonds from Harvard who spoke about rationale for diversity in science and technology.

NCWIT has several alliances, Academic, K-12, Workforce and Entreprenurial. As part of the meeting the individual alliances meet. Duke is a member of the Acadmic Alliance. This alliance met to discuss issues on recruiting, curriculum, and climate.

As part of every NCWIT meeting, there is an awards ceremony for recognizing young women at the high-school level for their computing-related achievements and interests. On the second day of NCWIT, the awards ceremony was held at the University of Washington.

If you are not a member of NCWIT, consider joining one of the alliances. They have two meetings a year and have created an enormous amount of resources for diversity in the pipeline at all levels.

NCWIT will be attending SIGCSE 2008, so stop by and talk to NCWIT representatives to find out more about the NCWIT meetings and alliances.

-- Susan

2008 SIGCSE Awards Announced

Just last week we discovered the names of the 2008 SIGCSE Awards, and I am proud to be chair of the conference where these awards will be presented.

The SIGCSE Award is presented to the person who has made a substantial and lasting impact on computing education. Randy Pausch (photo left), a name most recently posted here in this Blog, is the 2008 recipient for his contributions, especially the Alice virtual world environment for introducing many potential computing students to the wonderful world of programming. And in Alice, it can be as wonderful, rich, visual and musical a world as the creativity of the student can provide.

For example, I have used Alice in a CS0 course at Haverford, and been surprised at the range of students that are engaged by this tool. If you have Alice installed (Windows or Windows; Linux is a challenge ;-), you're invited to download and hear Charles Babbage sing Karaoke (13 Mb) by one of my CS majors (yes, he started in CS0 and switched to CS1, ...).

The 2008 recipient of the SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service is Dennis J. Frailey (photo right) of Raytheon and of Southern Methodist University. Dennis has also made many contributions to SIGCSE, but I have seen his ideas shared during discussions of the "math-thinking" discussion group hosted by Doug Baldwin and championed by people like Peter Henderson.

On behalf of the SIGCSE 2008 steering committee, our sincere congratulations, we are now even more excited about the upcoming symposium in Portland.

I do recommend checking here and at the SIGCSE 2008 website, there is much preparation underway, and with the BOF/poster deadlines tomorrow, there will likely be more than I have time for (nicely ending with a split infinitive & a preposition ;-).

CDC Hosts Academic Workshop

No, not the Centers for Disease Control, this is the Coalition to Diversify Computing (and a more appropriate group for this Blog :-) -- CDC is a group that works to promote diversity across many dimensions in computing; a group that we hope will participate at SIGCSE 2008.

Their next project is a workshop -- in their words: "The goal of the workshop is to mentor underrepresented assistant- and associate-level faculty and senior doctoral students about the tenure and promotion processes in academia."

The workshop takes place at the end of Nov into Dec 2007 in Texas, but the deadline to apply is close, Nov 9, 2007 -- start there, end up in Portland in March 2008!

-- Details:
Friday, November 30, 2007 - Sunday, December 2, 2007
Hilton Hotel in College Station, Texas
http://www.cdc-computing.org/programs.html
Deadline for Participant Applications - Friday, November 9, 2007
Contact Valerie Taylor, vet3@cs.tamu.edu

Doctoral Consortium: replanting the garden

Hey, I like the title, esp. when I recall the metaphor of "eating our seed corn" a few years ago during the dot-com boom -- the annual SIGCSE Doctoral Consortium always gets rave reviews from both participants and discussants, and the deadline for application is just a week away, click here for more information, and/or contact Josh and Donald directly.

From Josh, the aims of the Doctoral Consortium are:

• To offer a friendly forum for students to discuss their work and receive constructive feedback so as to advance each student's research.
• To provide relevant information on issues important to doctoral candidates.
• To nurture a community of researchers in computing education.

The Consortium is designed for students currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program. The Consortium allows participants to interact with established university researchers in computing education (the discussants) and with other PhD students, and to reflect -- through short activities, information sessions, and discussions -- on the process and lessons of research and life in academia.

Rambling home from PDX again ...

The initial post to this blog was made two months ago from the lovely Portland, Oregon airport (PDX), also the site of this post. The program committee for SIGCSE 2008 has been working hard to put together a comprehensive set of paper presentations, panels, special sessions and workshops to address the important issues in computing education from around the world. There are still some logistics to resolve, but we are optimistic that the schedule will be made public by the end of October 2007 (as planned). Again, I am amazed (for the 4th time) with how many people contribute submissions, reviews and sheer energy in processing these materials, persisting through many tough decisions as the schedule is never long enough to include all the material we really want to include.

So, while sitting in PDX (with great free wireless -- hear that PHL???), I discovered that President Bush proclaimed October 2007 as National Disability Employment Awareness Month -- I read through the White House press release, and I know that the President was too busy to compose it himself, but most of the proclamation seems reasonable -- I certainly agree that "It is important that we continue to expand on these opportunities [ADA] for Americans with disabilities by eliminating the barriers and false perceptions that hinder them from joining the workforce."

Who could argue with that goal? What I would like to concentrate on are the actual means to realize true accessibility, and since my expertise lies in computing education, I'll start there. Computing traditionally starts its approach to accessibility with assistive technology and HCI; these are important approaches, and have benefited many people with disabilities.

I would like to suggest that these approaches are not enough, and there are many computing educators who realize this point as well. I would argue that we need to actively seek expertise from learning researchers, colleagues, and especially from the students themselves. I would not be surprised to find that many of the obstacles encountered by students with disabilities are less physical/structural and more process/culture/incorrect assumptions.

And this is important work -- Jan Cuny (University of Oregon, photo left) has stated in a NYTimes article that also featured one of the keynote speakers for SIGCSE 2008, Ed Lazowska (and I'm paraphrasing, please forgive ...) that we need to discover more students with potential in computing from not just the traditional areas or there will be shortages of prepared professionals (i.e., we need to reach women, minorities, and those with disabilities) -- if only there was a conference that addressed this -- well, there are a few, including SIGCSE 2008, but also ASSETS, ITiCSE 2007, ....

OK, I feel better now -- SIGCSE 2008 is only a few months away -- I look forward to again discussing and reflecting on these and other issues involving computing education -- the program schedule, registration and hotel reservations should be open soon, so return here or visit the virtual home of SIGCSE 2008 so that you can visit the real home of the Symposium next March.

Now to return to my real home (miles to go before I sleep ...).

An Invitation to SIGCSE 2008 ...

The planning committee for SIGCSE 2008 are busy, well, planning, so I will be brief -- kudos to Paul Tymann for the Roommate Database to match attendees and share expenses (and thus increase attendance) -- more kudos to Tammy VanDeGrift for the excellent Hotel, Shopping and Restaurant Map where you can interact and plan your conference.

Congrats also to my co-chair Susan Rodger, whose educational tool JFLAP was celebrated as a finalist for the Premier Award at the recent Frontiers in Education Conference. Susan has the slides and a demo at her JFLAP site.

More "shout-outs" to Jeliot 3, also a finalist for the Premier Award at FIE 2007; clearly computing is producing useful tools for engineering education.

Below is the text from our invitation sent to the SIGCSE listserv today.

++

We are pleased to provide you with information about the SIGCSE 2008
conference to be held in Portland, Oregon: March 12-15, 2008.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08

Ten highlights here on information about SIGCSE 2008 including
how it may be different than years past and why you should head to
SIGCSE in the northwest this year!

More details on these items are below.

1) Call for Posters and Bofs: Deadline November 5
2) Registration rates - same as 2007!
3) Conference hotel - free metro ride from convention center
4) Events in the Conference Hotel
5) Three Keynote Speakers: Mayer, Lazowska and SIGCSE Award Winner
6) Saving trees - CD instead of paper proceedings
7) Come early for the pre-conference events
8) Stay late for a workshop! Portland TrailBlazers! Cirque du Soleil!
9) Find a roommate - available now
10) Portland is great! No sales tax, wine country, nice restaurants!

Here are more details.

1) Call for Posters and Bofs: Deadline November 5

There is still a chance to submit. See details at:

http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/authors.html

2) Registration rates - same as 2007!

We've managed to keep the registration rates the same as 2007.
Registration rates are posted on the attendees page:

http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/attendees.html

Registration will be available in November.

3) Conference hotel - free metro ride from convention center

The conference hotel, the Hilton Portland and Executive Towers,
will be in downtown Portland. The Oregon Convention Center
is across the river. There is a free metro (called MAX) that you can
take one block from the Hilton and it drops you off right in front
of the convention center.

Two other hotels, Inn at the Convention Center and the Red Lion,
will be available near the convention center.

Hotel registration should be available soon on the conference site.

4) Events in the conference hotel

The Birds of a Feather and the Thursday night SIGCSE Reception will
be held at the Conference Hotel, The Portland Hilton and Executive
Towers. All other events will be held at the Oregon Convention Center.

5) Three Keynote Speakers: Mayer, Lazowska and SIGCSE Award Winner

We have three keynote speakers lined up. The SIGCSE Award Winner (to
be determined) will speak on Thursday. Marissa Mayer, Vice President
of Search Products and User Experience, at Google will speak on Friday
morning. Ed Lazowska, the Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer
Science and Engineering at the University of Washington will speak at
the Saturday Luncheon.

6) Saving trees - CD instead of paper proceedings

We will be saving trees and issuing CD proceedings instead of paper.
You can pre-order a paper proceedings for $35. Please register
early to guarantee availability of paper, as we will limit the printing
of paper proceedings.

7) Come early for the pre-conference events

There will be a Doctoral Consortium and Roundtable for Department
Chairs during the day on the Wednesday before SIGCSE. There may be other
pre-conference events scheduled on this date.

And as usual, there will be SIGCSE Wednesday night workshops starting
at 7pm.

8) Stay late for a workshop! Portland TrailBlazers! Cirque du Soleil!

Saturday workshops will be scheduled from 4-7pm.

Saturday night you could watch the Portland Trailblazers play at 7pm (you
can walk across the street to the arena after attending a workshop!) or
catch a Cirque du Soleil show.

9) Find a roommate - available now

If you would like to find a roommate, Paul Tymann has graciously
provided the Roommate Database again this year. Please check it out
now on the attendees page.

http://www.cs.duke.edu/sigcse08/attendees.html

10) Portland is great! No sales tax, wine country, nice restaurants!

That's right, stay and shop, there is no sales tax in Oregon. Also
check out a winery and try some of the many nice restaurants. We have
included a google map on the attendees page that shows the conference
hotels, the convention center and many recommended restaurants.

Plus there's Powell's Books, including
Powell's Technical Books, 33 NW Park, Portland - (503) 228-4651.

And we have ordered sunny weather!

Susan Rodger and J.D. Dougherty
SIGCSE 2008 Symposium Chairs
rodger@cs.duke.edu, jd@cs.haverford.edu