Session M1F
Work in Progress - A Web Presence for the IEEE Computer Society Alan Clements University of Teesside, England TS1 3BA,
[email protected] Abstract - The IEEE Computer Society is the world’s oldest organization of computer professionals. In spite of the Computer Society’s importance, it lacks a journal, a dedicated conference, or a significant web presence devoted to computing education. This work in progress discusses the setting up of a website to better serve the Computer Society’s membership by providing highquality material to support computing education. Such a site will enhance the Society’s profile in education and provide a high-quality service to both members and nonmembers. A web presence is proposed because a conference or journal is expensive to implement and would not have the impact necessary to serve all the membership and to significantly improve recruitment. Index Terms – Web, On-line journal, IEEE Computer Society, Educational Activities Board. INTRODUCTION The Computer Society serves three masters: its membership, the profession, and society at large. Because the educational activities of the computer society are central to each of these three constituencies, the society puts education at the heart of its work. The Computer Society must play an important role in education from the K-12 level to postgraduate and continuing education. National and international computer societies play major roles in computing education. For example, the British Computer Society is involved with accreditation and also sets exams that amount to a degree-level qualification. Similarly, the ACM organizes conferences devoted to education. Indeed, one of the ACM’s major components, SIGCSE (the Special Interest Group in Computing education), contributes much to the ACM’s success. The IEEE Computer Society is involved in the creation of curricula [1] and in undergraduate accreditation. Currently, the CS lacks a journal dedicated to computing education, or a conference (although it participates in FIE, CSEE&T and ITiCSE). The IEEE does have a journal, Transactions on Education, but that is largely concerned with Electrical Engineering. This work in progress discusses the setting up of a web presence to enhance the Computer Society’s role in CS education. The proposed web presence will provide highquality articles on computing education, teaching material for faculty and students, promote recruitment, and cover professional issues. The web presence will, of course,
enhance the Computer Society’s profile in education and provide a new high-quality service to its members. A web presence is proposed because a new conference or journal would be expensive to implement and probably not have the impact necessary to serve all the membership and to significantly improve recruitment. Moreover, a conference or printed publication cannot be made freely available to members and non-members alike. The web presence will not simply be a bulletin board or an electronic version of a classic journal; it will serve the broad needs of the membership and include areas such as education, accreditation, the promotion of diversity, recruitment into the profession, support for Computer Society chapters, and be a forum for competitions. The initial phase of this project will be to examine other web-based systems in computing education and to plan the implementation of a system that includes the best features of existing systems while going well beyond their scope. The most important aspect of the planning will be to work out how to marshal the Computer Society’s volunteers to make such a web presence a reality. THE AUDIENCE Such an ambitious project requires a considerable effort in terms of design, maintenance, and support. Organizations can no longer provide significant funding for new projects unless they generate an appropriate return on investment. What is the audience for the proposed website? A website dealing with pedagogical issues in computing education could be aimed at academics and implemented by means of a subscription, a pay-by-article service, or as part of a digital library. I do not wish to target exclusively this audience. I envision this web presence as being a Computer Society flagship product with wide appeal. There will be no payment to access this website. The contents will be targeted at students and their teachers rather than a professional audience. By providing high-quality material, the image of the Computer Society itself will be enhanced and revenue generated indirectly by increased membership and improved retention. Of course, it will be difficult to determine a causal relationship between the website and future membership levels. THE CONTENT What should be on the website of a computer society devoted to serving professionals, students, and the wider community? The prime goal is to provide two types of
978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference M1F-1
Session M1F educational material: teaching material and learning material, although, of course, there will be an overlap. The academic is always looking for pedagogical matter, material helping him or her to do a better job (that is one of the principal functions of FIE itself). There are two broad types of educational material – the first concerns teaching practice, curriculum design, teaching methods and technology, and the second includes specific teaching material (e.g., material that helps you to get over concepts that students traditionally find difficult to comprehend). The website will also act as a repository of high-quality material that can be used directly by students. However, the scope of the website is far wider than a conventional educational journal. Some of the areas that I propose be covered by the website are: • Pedagogy – teaching techniques, teaching hardware • Course material – fundamentals • Problem solving • Material omitted by conventional curricula (history) • Background material omitted in conventional texts (e.g., emerging technologies such as quantum computing). • Interesting and entertaining material • Examples of excellence (exemplary capstone projects) • Competitions • Educational activities • Promotion of the profession • Promotion of the Society’s training activities I. Putting the fun in computing education I attended an IEEE international student conference earlier this year where a keynote speaker made the point that professional societies cannot expect to attract students by simply promising them things that will enhance their professional careers a decade or more in the future. Students generally have more immediate goals and concerns. It is interesting that (in the UK at least) some of the growth areas in computing have been in forensic computing and games design – areas that young students perceive as being interesting. More conventional computing courses are suffering a decline in applications. The above statement was made with reference to student chapters and the ways in which they go about attracting student membership on campus. The same is true of a website devoted to education. Simply providing academic papers or obscure technical material is not going to fire the imagination of the majority of students. The proposed web presence will also be the focal point of Computer Society student competitions. Over the years, the Society has organized student design, and web-based history competitions. This website could provide an excellent forum for such competitions both by attracting students and providing background information, rules, and FAQ pages. Moreover, over the years the best examples of student work could be included to give students everywhere an aiming point – by providing examples of excellence.
A significant element of the website should be devoted to the profession itself. The Computer Society exists, partially, to promote computing as a profession. Consequently, the web will provide information about the profession and what is happening within the profession – particularly with respect to the type of jobs available (students can be notoriously unaware of the range of opportunities within computing). In particular, emphasis will be placed on promoting diversity and gender balance within the industry. PEER REVIEW, PURGING, MAINTENANCE Creating a website is relatively easy. Maintaining it is not. There are two costs involved with maintenance. The first is the cost of physically maintaining the site and updating it – that will have to be borne by the Computer Society itself because its own staff will carry out most of these activities. The second cost is that of obtaining the material, ensuring that it is in a suitable format and peer-reviewing it. This cost will be borne by Computer Society’s volunteers in the same way that the Society’s journals are written, edited and reviewed by volunteers. Material on this web should be peer reviewed; its quality and authenticity must be maintained in exactly the same was as any other journal published by the society. Without peer review, the material cannot be trusted and the Computer Society’s reputation could be at risk. Moreover, I suggest that a means of purging (or, at least, archiving) existing material be implemented in order to remove material that is no longer irrelevant or which can be demonstrated to be flawed in the light of current developments. IMPLEMENTATION A key issue of this work in progress will be the implementation strategy. It will be necessary to create an awareness of the need for such a project within the CS executive and the Board of Governors. The first activity will be to create a steering committee and subcommittees to organize the various components of the website. A decision that will have to be taken early is the nature of the web site; do we integrate it into the existing housestyle, create a totally new site, or use tried and tested Wikipedia methodology? REFERENCES [1]
Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula, IEEE Computer Society, ACM, "Computing Curricula 2001", 2001.
978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference M1F-2
