[NetBehaviour] Iteracy And The Digital Humanities

[dave miller]

Hi Ruth

Took me a lot longer than 2 weeks, and am still quite flaky.

But I really agree we should all learn basic computer programming.
Watched a TV newsnight discussion last week on how the UK has lost its
IT advantage. Their argument was that many years ago a generation grew
up experimenting with ZX spectrums. Now we have ICT depts in all
schools, but all they do is teach Microsoft Office, or maybe web
design (at secondary school) - using software applications - and not
coding. Reason seems to be that ICT teachers can't program, and also
it's not seen as important in the curriculum. My limited experience of
teaching Interaction at Uni - BSc - they hardly did any coding - the
view was they can always get someone in to code it for the students,
so it's sort of looked down on.

dave


On 13 October 2011 14:59, ruth catlow <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org> wrote:
> Nice!
>
> I watched a video of Doug Rushkcoff talk to a gathering of Etsy folk
> about establishing peer to peer economies.
> http://www.rushkoff.com/blog/2011/9/22/toward-a-peer-to-peer-economy.html
>
> As part of his talk he said that it has taken over 2000 years (after the
> invention of the alphabet) for mass literacy to take hold.
>
> And that in order to participate fully in contemporary democracy we all
> now need to learn basic computer programming (he reckons most people
> would need 2 weeks for a basic grasp of principles and elementary
> programming ability). On the principle that otherwise we are handing
> over the power to programme our societies to an elite few.
>
> What does everyone else think?
> As a remedial level programmer (I learned some php once, used to be able
> to build Drupal sites, could cut and paste javascript and perl, know my
> way around HTML and ccs- with ref to the web) I'm interested to know
> what people who do it all the time think.
>
> Do we need to programme to have a say in contemporary democracy?
>
> : /
> R
>
>
>
> On 12/10/2011 19:06, Rob Myers wrote:
>> David Berry (whose excellent "Philosophy Of Computing" I reviewed for
>> Furtherfield recently - ) has blogged about "iteracy" as a form of
>> computational literacy -
>>
>> http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2011/09/iteracy-reading-writing-and-running.html
>>
>> "I would like to suggest that iteracy might serve as the name for the
>> specific skills used for understanding code and algorithmic culture – as
>> indeed literacy (understanding texts) and numeracy (understanding
>> numbers) do in a similar context. That is, iteracy is specifically the
>> practice or being able to read and write code, rather than the more
>> extensive notion of digital Bildung"
>>
>> And his next book looks really good as well -
>>
>> http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2011/09/understanding-digital-humanities.html
>>
>> - Rob.
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