DEVELOPMENTS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION
IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD
T. Alanko
University of Helsinki,Finland
The new environment
The last ten to fifteen years have witnessed a tremendous change in the way we meet the world. The internet enables communication and the www enables everyone to utilize globally accessible information and services. These developments have two big implications: on the one hand the world has become small («it is on your desk»), on the other hand your neighborhood has expanded to cover anyone working in your area or sharing your interests.
Challenges to information technology and computer science
Developing new applications and services is under ongoing change. Software production has become a highly distributed business: individual components are designed and implemented at different times, in different places, and by independent producers. Even centralized projects increasingly rely on subcontracting from all over the world.An essential prerequisite for success for this kind of activity is a rather homogeneous background of all those involved: the knowledge base, the skills and working methods, and even some cultural values.
Globalization also affects computer science. For one thing, the new environment poses new research challenges. For another thing, for any research areas the globalizing world enables finding of interested partners. In both cases, world-wide interaction tends to homogenize the research paradigms and even the areas which are «currently interesting».
Challenges to the academic world
Over the last forty years, the major scientific and professional societies engaged in information technology and computer science have developed computer curriculum guidelines for universities. The current report, Computer Curricula 2004, is produced by a joint task force, and it consists of five discipline-specific volumes, the most interesting of which is the Computer Science Curriculum CS2001.
The general goal is to give a general frame for CS education all over the world. The ultimate goal might be some consensus about what CS is. However, from a more practical point of view it greatly benefits the profession of information technology, enables sharing of educational material, and facilitates the mobility of professors and students. The curriculum CS2001 specifies the (current) main areas of CS, the important topics to be included, and the main learning objectives. However, the CS2001 is not expected to be used as a list of requirements, it presents a checklist of important aspects.
New working methods enabled by the new infrastructure
Internet and the www interface offer new and important ways for world-wide cooperation. First of all, it gives access to various kinds of educational material and to important sources of original information. Secondly, it offers a platform for different kinds of communication; this platform can be used either for cheap and fast personal communication between people or for a more slowly paced asynchronous exchange of ideas and materials.
This kind of platform offers new opportunities for cooperative educational activities. One approach is distant teaching, which offers some independence of time and place. An example is the Finnish «Open Source Courseware» project, which exploits lecturing over the network, local face-to-face teaching, tight cooperation between the teaching staff of the course, and sharing of all materials. Another experiment was DaCoPAn, a software project involving two tightly cooperating student groups in two different countries (at the universities of Petrozavodsk and Helsinki).
Benefits and costs
There is some obvious potential in network-based cooperation between universities. An essentially larger selection of elective courses can be offered to students. A relatively small department may get «a bigger staff», either using «remote teachers» or getting support for its own younger members of staff(«courseware» and/or human support from more mature personnel). However, this type of education is not necessarily cheap, it only shares various resources in a different way.
In intercultural cooperation there are also some rather subtle aspects of communication: the semantics of language, ways to express agreements and disagreements, methods to reach consensus, for example.
Long term impacts
World-wide cooperation leads to a more homogenized education. This has some obvious benefits, but also some threats should perhaps be considered. The benefits cover an increased general quality of education, a more rapid distribution of new ideas, and a large shared intellectual knowledge base. The flow of impulses becomes more extensive, and this is expected to generate new ideas and new developments at a more rapid pace.
On the other hand, there are also some potential threats. Global cooperation, sharing materials and views, and a «generally accepted» consensus about what is essential, may lead into too rigid a system, which could be quite hard to change, and as such it would rather be an obstacle to rapid progress in CS. At the time being this does not seem a probable vision; on the contrary, people involved in research and education seem to value all possible innovation and they are eager to follow all new ideas. Even the CS curriculum has been renovated once in a decade. Sharing the fundamental base of knowledge and cooperating in mature areas might free intellectual resources for more challenging research and development.