diSessa talks about computational
literacy being infrastructural or essential to society, which is similar to the
way Wing talks about CT as being as important as reading, writing, and
arithmetic. They're both emphasizing how thinking like a computer scientist is increasingly important to much of society.
diSessa says the second pillar of literacy is cognitive or mental, which in a way includes computational thinking in terms of
thinking with logic and the concepts of computer science. And the third pillar
being social is similar to computational participation and the importance of
the social and community aspects of CT from Kafai.
What’s important to diSessa is that to be a literacy, it becomes infrastructural and changes the way we think and solve problems and
make sense of the world. But that also seems to be what’s important about
computational thinking. Like I said above, maybe CT is the second pillar of
diSessa’s literacy, focusing on the concepts, practices, and dispositions. But if you expand that to include the role of participation in communities, society, and culture, it seems to include more of the third pillar and aspects of computational participation.
I quite like this view! In my post, the biggest difference I mention is diSessa's reliance on the computer or programming for computational literacy, but if I were to think about CT as the second pillar and relate the importance of the computer to all three pillars - it is understandable why there was such discussion on material intelligence. Now it has me thinking - we haven't discussed a way to assess or best-practices for implementing CT in a curriculum and now it is growing. If it were a standards based approach, would assessments need to include syntax, CT, and computational participation? Is one more important than another?
ReplyDeleteI agree too! To piggyback from Nicole, I'm not convinced we are able to assess the social pillar at all. If we can't assess it, how do we know that we are achieving it? And not to beat a dead horse, but what is the point of implementing a program of instruction to students that we are unable to assess?
ReplyDeleteAmanda, I think it is interesting to think about CT as a pillar of CL. I had read it differently - that CL leads to CT.
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