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From: gilbert@aimmi.UUCP (Gilbert Cockton)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Resources and education
Message-ID: <5@aimmi.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-May-87 07:46:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: aimmi.5
Posted: Mon May  4 07:46:00 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 7-May-87 05:00:28 EDT
References: <780@killer.UUCP> <1262@arthur.cs.purdue.edu> <170@a.UUCP>
Reply-To: gilbert@aimmi.UUCP (Gilbert Cockton)
Organization: Heriot-Watt/Strathclyde Alvey MMI Unit, Scotland
Lines: 44

In article <170@a.UUCP> djw@a.UUCP (Dave Wade) writes:
>
>Perhaps it is time that we force CS students to read about general
>semantics?  Perhaps we can screen out Aristotelian thinking in our
>Computer Science Departments?  But then Computer Science would
>start to look like the Philosophy Department.  Perhaps that's
>wise,  we could change its name to Philosophistry...
>

I've been led into this line of reasoning whenever I consider the
problem of CS graduates being asked to handle problems for which they
do not have the right sort of attitudes and intellectual approaches.
However, I really do doubt whether we could really effectively expand
the disciplines taught to CS undergraduates. In the UK, most students
are narrow specialists by the age of 18, so it would only be cruel 
making them think philosophically, write elegantly, reason with humility and 
enquire into the appropriate body of knowledge before programming their
amateur AI programs or reinventing graphic design. Few of these skills count 
for anything in the maths and science subjects which most of them have studied 
at high school level. Instead they are force fed from cookbooks and pushed
into the narrow epistemologies of mathematical  logic, 2-variable 
experimental method and seat of the pants modeling techniques.

It would seem more sensible to regard CS graduates as highly skilled
doers and fixers, the craftsmen rather than the designers of IT,
and to recruit additional graduates for more abstract and conceptual work.
There is a tendency to ask too much of technically trained people who
do what they have been trained to do well, and to ask them to develop skills,
self-taught and with no humbling peer criticism, which already exist elsewhere.
No-one round here heard of division of labour?

There are now many people who have studied some computing, but whose
main subject could not be studied at all without a high degree of
intellectual flexibility, imaginative hypothesis generation and a
sound exposure to those nasty philosophical problems that just can't
be programmed away. And what's more they can write about them without
slavish addiction to the nonsense of technical writing pundits (no
passives! - 17 word sentences - who are these cultural vandals?).
What many can't do is finish a dull, fiddly and technically intricate
task - this is where you need your craftsmen.
-- 
   Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
   JANET:  gilbert@uk.ac.hw.aimmi    ARPA:   gilbert%aimmi.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
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