Awesome, look forward to reading it.
Learning to program is definitely one way to develop the 'computational
thinking' mindset, and the way that most of us who have it have
developed it. But I worry that depending on HOW you learn to program,
it doesn't _neccesarily_ result in developing the computational thinking
mindset in a very efficient way. Good computer science programs in
universities (and they aren't all good) develop it in their students.
But just learning to hack and script the way many of us do on the job is
not neccesarily, IMO, going to lead to 'computational thinking' mindset,
or at least it will take a LOT longer to develop it as a byproduct of
unfocused experiments with programming than it would from a good
curriculum targetted at computational thinking -- which woudln't
neccesarily require learning to program at all.
But such a curriculum does not seem to exist yet. Maybe Jeannette Wing
will develop one! Probably not though. Maybe some enterprising
consultant or MLIS faculty member can get a grant to develop a free
online course, "computational thinking for catalogers". One can dream.
Jonathan
Christine Schwartz wrote:
> Jonathan,
>
> I recently wrote an essay for a book (hope it gets published) on the
> transition from cataloger to metadata librarian. And one of the reason I
> give for why it's good for catalogers to learn how to program is that it's a
> way to acquire the mindset, i.e., computational thinking, that's needed for
> working with digital resources and metadata. You and Jeannette Wing are
> cited in the essay.
>
> I often struggle to put my finger on the difference between cataloging and
> metadata creation, but it definitely requires a mental shift, a change in
> the way we think about data.
>
> Chris
>
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind_at_jhu.edu> wrote:
>
>
>> What some of us have talked about for a while is that what catalogers and
>> metadata engineers need to know is NOT how to program, but something about
>> what some people call "computational thinking" -- how to arrange a problem
>> so it can be solved by software, how to recognize what sort of problems can
>> be solved by software and what sorts are more difficult or impossible.
>>
>> But I have yet to find a good "curriculum" for that. It's taught in a good
>> computer science program along with learning how to program, but it ought to
>> be possible, Jeannette Wing and the other "comptuational thinking"
>> enthusiasts think, to teach it apart from programming entirely too. But I
>> don't know if there's a good curriculum available.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>>
>> Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Apr 19, 2010, at 1:20 PM, Christine Schwartz wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I agree with MJ that studying XML is a good place to start. Practically
>>>> all
>>>> the library metadata schemes use XML, so if you're going to transition
>>>> into
>>>> a cataloger/metadata librarian you need to know XML.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> I wrote an XML tutorial/workshop that may be of interest to the group.
>>> From the introduction:
>>>
>>> XML is about distributing data and information
>>> unambiguously. Through this hands-on workshop you will
>>> learn: 1) what XML is, and 2) how it can be used to build
>>> library collections and faciliate library services in our
>>> globally networked environment.
>>>
>>> http://infomotions.com/musings/xml-in-libraries/
>>>
>>> The tutorial/workshop comes with a bevy of examples, scripts, stylesheets,
>>> and sample data.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 19 2010 - 15:12:06 EDT