Daily - Computational Literacy

Over the past several weeks we have read many articles on computational thinking (CT) and even in class last week tried to make sense of what that term really meant. I think that the Grover and Pea synthesis of Computational Thinking and the diSessa theory of Computational literacy are the most contrasting ideas we are read about so far. While both argue that these things are really good, and important for us as a people to learn about for the future, that’s where I think the similarities stop. After class last week, I got the sense that CT was almost inclusive to a fault:  excluding emotions, almost anything and everything could be considered CT. I further understood Grover and Pea to be renaming and reattributing skills and processes already in existence to the CT bandwagon. Conversely, I understood diSessa to hold a much higher standard for Computational Literacy. She states, “A computational literacy will allow civilization to think and do things that will be new to us in the same way that the modern literate society would be almost incomprehensible to preliterate cultures.” (1999, pg 5.)

She also emphasizes the social aspect of literacy, even granting it space as one of her “Three Pillars of Literacy.” Grover and Pea did not mention other people in any of their elements of CT at all. The other difference I noticed is that diSessa is very concerned with future literacies and capabilities, as though for something to be a literacy, it must hold transformative power to take us as a literate society to a new, further place. If a material intelligence did not hold this transformative power, then it would not be a literacy. Arguably, computers have the potential to hold such power, but whether they will be used to broaden our thinking and doing to an extent unrecognizable today has yet to be seen.