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"Computing"
- Dr Scott Turner, Senior Lecturer, Computing, School of Science and Technology
There has recently been quite a lot of excitement about the Raspberry Pi, and rightly so. At around £25 for a computer (you need to have a keyboard and TV) it has lots of features that make it interesting.
For me though its most interesting feature is it is a no-frills device that doesn’t look like the black box in the corner – it’s a circuit board with some chips and connections. Why is that interesting? Well, that’s what a computer essentially is. It is cheap enough that if it breaks it is not a serious problem, and in most cases people are unlikely to write something that will break the machine anyway.
There has, quite rightly, been a lot of excitement – because of the price, and for encouraging school children to learn to program. I agree with this whole-heartedly, but there is potentially a more interesting feature, what else can you do with it? Yes, you can word process, run video or connect to the internet, but what if you connected it to something else? What if you combined them together or connect cameras to them – what could you produce at a relatively low cost?
A low cost device that can be used to encourage ideas to be played with, where it doesn’t matter too much if it goes wrong – that is where the excitement should be. I do not know what is going to come out of it, but I am very interested to find out.
Dr Scott Turner, Senior Lecturer, Computing, School of Science and Technology
Recently there has been a lot of interest in the news on more programming and computing in schools (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16493929). I believe this is very likely to be seen positively by a lot of the computing profession. The British Computer Society (BCS) have been campaigning about computing being seen as a separate subject to information and communications technology (ICT), or computing – at the very least – as an option within ICT in the National Curriculum.
So what is the problem? Computing is more than ICT; there is a belief that people are being put off computing by the difference not being clearer. Common myths include:
- Everything has been done. This is not true, it’s an area where new things come along all the time. This is one of the exciting challenges of being a computing professional.
- It is all about using databases and spreadsheets . Using databases is important but so is the theory of them. Spreadsheets, in a computer science course, only play a very minor role and may not even be taught.
- It is all about business analysis. That is just one aspect, other aspects included but certainly not limited to are:
- Programming
- Games and other graphics. Who writes the software in the first place?
- Hardware. Someone has to write the programs that go into aircraft or cars.
- Mobile applications A growing area at the moment.
- Web based applications. Webpages can be produced without a lot of computing knowledge, but making the pages do some of the more ‘clever’ things does.
- Security. All those online transactions we all do, understanding where the loopholes are, programming tricks that hackers will or could try, takes some computing knowledge.
What role can universities play? Even before the recent news articles, universities have been actively going into and working with schools, trying to bring in a different perspective of computing. Examples from this University include.
- Junkbots: Using a real programming language to program Lego robots. This has been successfully carried out in primary and secondary schools reaching over 150 students.
- Be Switched On: An on-campus activity giving Year 12 and 13 examples of computing at university. Activities include programming robots or building 3D computer models.
- Women into computing: presenting an alternative face to computing by school students meeting female computing professionals and computing students.
It is in the best interest of universities to do this. Undergraduates who know something about programming and computing before they start would make the courses even more intellectually stimulating.
As an aside, personally I find ideas tried in outreach activities sometimes inform or lead to activities I do with undergraduates, as well as the other way around.
- Dr Scott Turner, Senior Lecturer, Computing, School of Science and Technology
At the moment there are number of organisations that have had significant investment to produce web-based material, but what happens when some of those organisations are closed? We are seeing cuts in funding or changes in governmental policy, which results in the closure of some of these organisations.
What happens to the web resources when the organisations are no longer in existence? There has often been public money used to develop these resources - from that perspective it would be a shame to lose them. Also, the resources might be needed or someone may actually want to take over the maintenance of the site at a later date. How do we make these sites more sustainable? Is there anyway we can move sites to somewhere that is free to host the webpages, and can be left there or modified when needed?
JISC, the UK’s expert on information and digital technologies for education and research, are currently funding three projects to look at this area through a programme called Sustaining at ‘risk’ online resources. One of these projects is being run at The University of Northampton, looking into rescuing one of the the recently closed East Midlands Universities Association’s online resources, which lists many of the knowledge transfer activities of East Midlands universities. The project looks at migrating the site to a free hosting option.
The sustainable maintenance of usually public funded web resources is one thing, but perhaps a feature that is not immediately clear is their value in their own right as a record. Even if these sites are never added to, maintaining them means a snapshot of the activities of partnerships, issues, the kind of activities carried out, is available for future use. Websites – when combined with blogs, social networking, and comments - are starting to be seen as a rich source of archive information; if you like, providing a digital legacy. A recent article by Sumit Paul Choudhury (New Scientist, 23rd April 2011) discussed this digital legacy from a point of view of personal websites, blogs and social networking. This also applies to the legacy of organisations and projects, providing more than just the content that is explicitly on the site, but perhaps details of how particular subjects were viewed or geographical areas of expertise at a particular point in time.
Will we seeing more people ‘digging’ through websites in the future, in the same way archaeologists dig in the ground?
