Adaptive Technology in a Computing Curriculum

This chapter describes how adaptive technology (AT) for the disabled can enhance a computing curriculum. It argues that computer professionals will naturally have an increasing role in the support of AT, as a result of economic, legal and social pressures, and that as a consequence AT topics should be covered within a standard computing curriculum. Ideas for integrating AT topics into computing courses are presented, along with an outline of an advanced course on AT from a computer science perspective. A model AT laboratory for supporting these efforts is described. The author hopes that this chapter will encourage computing educators to use AT topics as examples within their courses, ultimately leading to a computing workforce that is ready, willing and able to provide fundamental AT services to those with disabilities.

Assessing Diversity Issues in Instructional Technology

Assessment is a major focus is higher education; IT faculties and departments are being asked to document quantitatively what students have learned in relation to goal-oriented expectations. Although “students will value diversity in the academy and the workplace” is a common course, general education or institutional goal, we often know little about how well students achieve this goal because we do not assess it. This chapter describes how to construct Student Learning Outcomes consistent with valuing diversity, how to design tests/assignments to see if student have achieved those outcomes and how to use that information to inform and enhance student learning in our IT courses, departments or institutions. The chapter reviews key assessment principles and practices. Then, we examine four strategies to document how students’ cognitive perceptions, attitudes, values and social actions in regard to diversity issues may be impacted and assessed. Assessment action scenarios elucidate the effective use of rubrics, Primary Trait Analysis, portfolios and affective behavioral checklists.

Dialectic Argumentation for Promoting Dialogue in IT Education

If a deep and meaningful understanding of Information Technology is to flourish, we need, as educators, to create an ethos in which students can express themselves in a risk-free environment. In order to promote higher-order thinking skills, we must move from the single-expert view to a more collaborative classroom. In information technology, there are controversies and different solutions to problems: Students need to be helped to understand the arguments from different points of view, and to see how they relate to each other. The development of technological literacy, as well as life skills, will be accelerated through the use of argumentation skills such as debating, justifying an opinion, weighing up conflicting points of view and analyzing disagreements. These skills that are inextricably linked to problem-solving skills, may be assessed in dynamic and exciting ways, such as observation, interaction, group work and challenge. Arguments may be grounded on common knowledge, personal knowledge, testimony, plausibility and necessary truth. These philosophies are essential to understanding both the made world and the new electronic age.

Working with Students in Math, Technology, and Sciences for Success

One teacher, one mentor, one department…these can make a difference in the success of anyone learning difficult material. This chapter highlights formal academic settings and workplace situations, explaining what one teacher, one company or one department has done to be pro-active in serving its learners.

Under-Representation of African American Women Pursuing Higher-Level Degrees in the Computer Science/Technology Fields

White males have dominated the computer sciences/technology disciplines since inception. Statistical data have shown that representation of female students in the computer sciences/technology fields has been consistently lower than for their male counterparts. Representation of African American students in these areas has been consistently low as well. There are relatively few African American women represented in the computer sciences/technology areas. The number of African American women pursuing a higher degree in these areas is almost non-existent. There aremany factors which may contribute to this trend. This paper will focus on some of the complexities involved in this problem. Using statistical data, the author will also cover the social/economic, educational and cultural barriers which have an effect on one of these underrepresented populations. In conjunction with this information, she will include some of her own experiences as a former student and as an educator.

Training Faculty for Diversity Infusion in the IT Curriculum

In this chapter we offer a flexible training environment and strategies for diversity infusion in the Information Technology curriculum. The chapter overviews “My First Diversity Workbook,” and the ways in which it may be used in diversity training for faculty. The major part of such workshops consists of four parts. In the first part, the trainer talks about his or her positive experiences of diversity infusion in the curriculum, and serves as a motivational component of the training. The second and third components explain how to get inspired for micro and macro infusion of topics in the curriculum from the outside and the inside. By using external examples and facts, or internal experiences and introspections, the instructors may successfully diversify a unit lesson or the whole curriculum. In the fourth component, the trainer talks about continuing to share classroom experiences after the workshop is done—usually online, within the framework of an e-group. We describe fitting these four components into two different contexts, and outline in detail the schedule and experiences of participants from those two workshops, custom-tailored to the needs of the institution that the training was designed for. These workshop patterns are fully replicable. The chapter not only describes the author’s strategies in covering the topics, but also provides a selection of sources that the trainer and the participants may use when replicating or modifying these trainings.

Gender and Programming

This chapter seeks to examine a theory of gendered styles of programming which is predicated on differences in attitudes toward abstraction and black boxes. It critically explores the theoretical questions and issues raised and summarizes the design of an empirical, quantitative means of testing gender-based attitudes to black boxes, alongside and triangulated with ethnographic research into the experiences and attitudes of female students in relation to programming. The paradigm-shift represented by object-oriented programming is given particular consideration because of the claims made on its behalf within this debate, and as a special case of abstraction. The chapter concludes that there is no gendered difference in attitudes toward black boxes in programming, and that the reasons for female under-representation in computing lie elsewhere.

The Open Ended Group Project

Modern societies are now beginning to accept that their citizens are diverse but, arguably, have not yet faced up to the challenges of diversity. Schools and universities thus have a role to play in equipping students for the diverse society in which they will live and work. IT students in particular need to appreciate the diversity of society as they specify, design, build and evaluate systems for a wide range of people. This chapter examines the concept of the Open Ended Group Project (OEGP) and uses examples to demonstrate that OEGP forms an effective technique for encouraging students to work together in diverse teams. The appropriateness of OEGP as a means of addressing diversity in the curriculum is examined, and it is concluded that OEGP offers a suitable means of enabling students to develop strategies for accommodating diversity in both their future working life and the wider society.

Attack of the Rainbow Bots

Many in IT education—following on more than twenty years of multicultural critique and theory—have integrated “diversity” into their curricula. But while this is certainly laudable, there is an irony to the course “multiculturalism” has taken in the sciences in general. By submitting to a canon originating in the humanities and social sciences—no matter how progressive or well-intentioned—much of the transgressive and revolutionary character of multicultural pedagogies is lost in translation, and the insights of radical theorists become, simply, one more module to graft onto existing curricula or, at the very least, another source of authority joining or supplanting existing canons. In this essay, we feel that introducing diversity into IT means generating this body of creative critique from within IT itself, in the same way multiculturalism originated in the critical, transgressive spaces between literature, cultural studies, anthropology and pedagogy. The following traces our efforts to develop isomorphic critiques from recent insights into multi-agent systems using a JAVA-based, software agent we’ve developed called “Izbushka.”

Dimensions of Sustainable Diversity in IT

This chapter acknowledges that diversity issues in the IT field go beyond racial and ethnic measures to include disability and age, to name but two of the numerous possibilities, and a global playing field. While the chapter examines the different forces that affect the career aspirations and opportunities of individuals of color, women, the disabled and the young as they make decisions relating to the IT field, it is not fundamentally driven by data, but by a need to develop and expand a definition and the dimensions of diversity. In doing so, we hope to provoke readers to view the issue of diversity and IT from a number of perspectives. We assert that diversity should be viewed globally with the understanding that the globalization process has begun to change the dynamics of the diversification phenomenon. Finally, in an effort to show the impact of career aspirations and what may influence the development of such aspirations among minority and nontraditional students, we report the findings of some studies that have recently been conducted. This study looks at the experiences, opportunities, attitudes and aspirations with respect to mathematics, science, computer science and information technology of underrepresented students in the federally funded Upward Bound and Math/Science Upward Bound programs. We conclude with a brief discussion of the role of social and cultural creativity and innovation, arguing that these are essential components of a notion of sustainable diversity.