Forty two years ago I wrote my first bit of software on a BBC Micro in the Code Club at Fitzmaurice Primary School. My bestie Branwen Munn and I were encouraged by our teacher, Mr. Jackson as we typed our first instructions which looked something like this:
10 PRINT "HAPPY CHRISTMAS" 20 GOTO 10 RUN
Variations of this BASIC loop introduced millions of school children like us to computing, especially those lucky enough to have access to a strange new machine called a COMPUTER which had just arrived in our school.
So it was great to sit down with one of the two main designers of the BBC Micro (Steve Furber) earlier this year and talk about his career in Computing over the last 50 years, as he retired from 33 years of service at the University of Manchester.
Some things we discussed when we spoke:
What he and many of his 36 PhD students struggled with most in their research. From his first (Nigel Paver) to his last: what advice would he offer his former self and fellow students?
Computing by post, with punched cards from the Manchester Grammar School in the sixties
How joining Cambridge University Gliding Club helped his interest in Computing take off
What he would do if he were appointed the new Vice Chancellor of the University of Manchester instead of Duncan Ivison?
Why 2001: A Space Odyssey is his favourite film, The Moody Blues are his favourite band and music is important to him
If you’ve any long journeys by planes, train & automobiles over the holidays, you can download and enjoy this extended episode telling some of Steve’s remarkable story. You can listen to the interview by searching for Coding Your Future on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts and at www.cdyf.me/steve
Wishing you a happy holiday and a prosperous new year.
Figure 1: Twelve student voices from the last twelve months, interviewed and broadcast in twelve podcast episodes. From top left, Raluca, Jason, Brian, Carmen, Sneha, Alice, Jason, Ivo, Ingy, Nadine, Pedro and Amish. Portraits re-used from LinkedIn and Github with students permission.
According to Stephen Fry, “education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars”. A more teacher-centric view of education would claim the opposite to be true, that education is primarily about what teachers teach their students, not what students teach other. Here’s how this old-school, chalk-and-talk view of education works: In lectures, seminars, labs and tutorials, teachers share their knowledge and expertise with students. While the Professors profess their monologues, the lecturers lecture, the educators educate, the teachers teach and the students study. Learners learn by watching, listening, reading and acting on the voices of their educators. Students are then examined, grades are given and that, in a nutshell, should be what the sum of education is. No?
The reality of course, is that education should be much more of a dialogue, a two-way conversation between students and teachers, rather than an expert-driven monologue to a passive audience. Both sides of this conversation need to be heard and in some cases, the student voices in these conversations can make valuable contributions, by co-creating curricula.
All too often the student voice gets drowned out in the busy noise of pedagogy. The demands of teaching in higher education mean that staff don’t always sufficient time and resources to listen, especially when teaching classes of hundreds of students with many ongoing conversations. In this blog post, I’ll explain how you can amplify some important student voices in these conversations using audio podcasting. I’ll describe some of the costs and benefits of recording and publishing these conversations so that more people can hear and learn from these voices, not just students but their employers and their educators too.
Student voices on employability
Student voices are particularly important when it comes to employability: enabling undergraduates to develop the professional skills that are essential to the workplace. I’ve been teaching professional skills and employability to Computer Science students for the last ten years at the University of Manchester. During this time, I’ve learned that there are many different voices and opinions that need to be heard. Which of these voices, written or spoken, do students pay attention to most? Is it:
❌ The voices of their employability tutors?
❌ The voices of their Professors and lecturers?
❌ The voices of their careers service consultants and advisors?
❌ The voices of employers and alumni?
❌ The voices of their friends and family?
These voices all have their own influence, but in my experience, there’s one voice that is listened to above all others when it comes to employability and that is:
✅ The voices of their fellow students
So, one way to improve teaching and learning, is to maximise opportunities for students to learn from each other through peer learning and peer instruction. To do this, educators need to create more and better spaces for students to talk about their learning with each other and then amplify their voices.
There are lots of different ways to do this, but one of the most important is through Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) at peersupport.manchester.ac.uk. These sessions allow more experienced students to pass on their knowledge to their less experienced, usually younger, peers. For example, the PASS scheme in Computer Science shown in figure 2, is run by my colleague Thomas Carroll. There is a focus on passing exams, but PASS is about much more than just improving students grades. It’s about students learning from and teaching each other as part of a student-led community.
Figure 2: Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) allow more experienced students pass on their knowledge to their less experienced peers. First years have PASS1 (in yellow), run by second and third year students. Second years have PASS2 (in green), where students returning from internships and placements share their knowledge about job hunting and interviews. PASS3+ (in pink) is where our alumni can get involved. CC-BY-SA picture by yours truly
As well as helping students to pass academic exams, our PASS scheme also helps students to pass employers “exams”. This includes written exams such as job applications and oral exams such as interviews. This is a significant part of PASS2, where students returning from placements and internships share what they have learned with first and second year students.
Students are encouraged to take part in PASS, either as leaders, facilitators or participants, but the kinds of conversations that take place during these sessions often need to be amplified for those that aren’t in the room where it happens.
Over the last 12 months, I’ve been experimenting with using audio podcasts to record and publish some of these conversations as stories so they can heard by a wider audience. I’m calling them audio podcasts here to distinguish them from the video podcasts (lecture capture and catchup) you will find at mypodcasts.manchester.ac.uk. You can subscribe and listen to audio podcasts wherever you get your podcasts, details at the end of this post.
Figure 3: The Hearing your Future podcast is a cross between Desert Island Discs hosted by Lauren Laverne and The Life Scientific hosted by Jim Al-Khalili. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts. CC-BY-SA Portrait of Lauren Laverne by Jwslubbock on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/6z4z, CC-BY-SA portrait of Jim Al-Khalili by Debbie Rowe at the Royal Society on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/_w2fh, CC-BY-NDHearing your Future artwork by Visual Thinkery.
The essential ingredients of this podcast are:
Students: both graduands ready to graduate and recent graduates at the start of their career. Twelve students have been interviewed so far, with more episodes planned for the future.
An audio podcast host, I’m using one called liberated syndication at libsyn.com
Some open ended questions for students to answer
Figure 4: Any investment you make in recording technology will pay you back with higher-fidelity audio. This particular microphone, a Zoom H5, is handy because it can be used in a portable battery-powered mode or connected to a computer via USB. CC-BY-SA picture by yours truly.
The open-ended questions are key because I need to let students do most of the talking, acting as much more of a listener than a speaker. Think less Professor Monologue, the egocentric “sage-on-the-stage” who loves the sound of their own voice and more Professor Dialogue, the “guide-on-the-side” who facilitates discussion. [1] It sometimes takes effort for academics to suppress their public speaking instincts by talking less and listening more to what students have to say. Students are given five questions before the interview, with questions designed to encourage difficult conversations being optional. The five basic questions are:
🎸 What’s your story, (coding glory)?
✊🏽 Minority report (optional)
👑 You are the next vice chancellor (optional)
🍿 One tune, one book, one podast, one film
⏱ Time traveller, advice to your former self
Question one asks students to tell their story from why they studied computer science in the first place to where they are now. What obstacles have they faced in finding work and how did they overcome them? What has been their journey from student in year one to professional in year three or four? Every student has a different story to tell.
Question two asks students to reflect on their experience if they identify as a member of a minority group. What can employers and universities do to make campuses and workplaces more welcoming to members of their minority group? What has been their experience of being female, black, disabled or otherwise marginalised in computing? What can we do to make campuses more equal, diverse and inclusive spaces?
Question three asks students to imagine they are the next vice chancellor of the University of Manchester. Now that they are responsible for over 10,000 staff, 40,000 students and half a million alumni, what would they do to improve teaching and learning?
Question four is a personal one: students recommend a tune, a book, a podcast and a film and outline why these are important to them. Why do they recommend other students should watch, listen to or read them? This is the Desert Island Discs part, except we don’t cast students away to a remote island afterwards. It adds a personal touch to the stories students tell.
Finally, question five is another hypothetical one: given a time machine, if they could travel back to meet themselves in first year, what advice would they offer their former selves and fellow students about getting the most out of all the time and money they’ve invested in their University education?
I ask these simple, open-ended questions, sit back and enjoy listening to students answer them.
Everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio
As with radio broadcasting, there are costs and benefits of podcasting. The main cost is the time it takes to record, transcribe and edit each episode. Each interview takes an hour to record, more than an hour to transcribe and less than an hour to edit. These costs are relatively small, when you compare them to the cost of preparing a lecture (video lecture or live lecture), delivering a seminar, running a lab or facilitating a tutorial.
There are many benefits that this investment in podcasting buys. From a teaching point of view, I’ve learnt more about the harsh realities of job hunting faced by Generation Z. It also gives me seriously useful content in the form of case studies. So when I’m talking to students about the need for resilience in their job search I can tell Brian’s story, about finding a placement very late in the year (August) on LinkedIn. Don’t give up, it worked for Brian, maybe it will work for you too.
When discussing the importance of starting early, in first year, I can tell Alice’s story about how spring insights in her first year gave her some valuable experience to help her subsequent job applications stand out in second year and beyond. Start early, it worked for Alice, maybe it will work for you.
When discussing the inevitable rejection that comes with job applications, I can tell Amish’s story about being rejected by all five big tech companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) before landing a role he enjoyed with Bloomberg. Learn to live with rejection, it’s a normal part of job hunting but it will most likely work out for you in the end.
When talking about not overlooking smaller employers, I can tell Raluca’s story about how she worked for a local company called Koder.ly in Oldham at the end of her first year, then moved onto CERN for her placement year and subsequent graduate role. You can start small, think big and remember that experience matters.
When discussing the importance of networking, I can tell Jonathan’s story about how he grew his professional network and found hidden vacancies by attending local tech meetups in Manchester. It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know.
These are just five short stories, from the twelve longer stories that students have shared with me. Recording them as podcasts has enabled me to amplify the student voice for more people to hear.
Another benefit of the podcast is, it has strengthened our community of students, alumni and employers. With permission, students have shared their LinkedIn profiles to facilitate digital networking. This means that students can find out about and connect with peers they might never otherwise have spoken to. It has also helped staff and employers understand better what challenges students face in an increasingly competitive job market.
So, what started as an experimental side project, has now become a key part of my teaching toolkit. It’s also has been rewarding to listen to and record students stories in an audio podcast format.
Conclusions: a good face for radio?
Podcasting is a low cost tool with many benefits for teachers and learners alike. Audio is fantastic medium for recording conversations and stories, especially if (like me), you have a “good face for radio”. [2] Most students are much more comfortable talking to a microphone than a video camera, because having a natter over a brew is a very natural format. Podcasting forces me to spend more time thinking about dialogue and less time making flashy animations and graphically-driven PowerPoint monologues. In this case, it’s enabled me to focus on what students are teaching other, rather than what I think they need to learn, so I can improve the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) for my courses.
The student voices I’ve chosen to amplify have been deliberately “cherry picked” so I can’t pretend that their voices are representative of the entire study body. However, recording a few key voices documents how students learn professional skills for the workplace in a way that other students can learn from. A lot of higher education focuses on a narrow set of academic and technical skills, alongside fundamental knowledge. These are important, but a rounded education should develop a much broader set of softer personal and social skills that are just as important to talk about and recognise as the hard technical skills. Education is the sum of all these skills and knowledge, students play as important a role in teaching each other as their teachers do, shown in figure 5.
In the future, I plan to keep recording and broadcasting student voices to broaden the set of interviewees to include alumni who graduated further back in time. I welcome any comments on how these interviews can be improved in the future. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts:
As Stephen Fry points out, students play a crucial and often overlooked role in the education of their peers. Their voices need to be heard by a wider audience, not just their fellow students but their employers and educators too. Audio podcasting is a good way to amplify their voices. If you are a former student of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and would like to amplify your story about your personal journey from student to professional (and beyond), get in touch.
Figure 5: What is education the sum of? What students teach each other! Fry describes his student-centred view of education in The Fry Chronicles. [3] Public domain portrait of Stephen Fry by the US Embassy in London w.wiki/4wrn adapted using the Wikipedia App
References
King, Alison (1993) From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side, College Teaching, Vol. 41, No. 1 , pp. 30-35, DOI: 10.1080/87567555.1993.9926781
A video of the presentation given at the #ITLConf23 conference in Manchester at the Pendulum Hotel, 6th July 2023, see doi.org/kk47 (Please excuse the audio errors and background noise in this recording, artefacts created by the software and microphone which I’m still learning to configure properly)
Thanks Judy Williams, Jennie Blake, Hannah Cobb, Holly Dewsnip-Lloyd, Lisa McDonagh, Freya Corrywright, Beth Rotherham, Emma Sanders, Patricia Clift Martin and everyone at the Institute for Teaching and Learning (ITL) for organising the conference where this talk was first presented.
As far as I know, this is the first time a conference of this size has been run at the University of Manchester, a beta release, version 1.0 if you like. There’s some significant ways it could be improved when it returns next year. Here’s three improvements that I’d like to see in the next release, version 2.0:
A more findable web presence and citable conference proceedings: The conference which provided a good venue for practitioners to publish their work on teaching, get feedback on it and credit for it. The proceedings are available on documents.manchester.ac.uk but they are difficult to find and cite properly. To give authors due credit for their work, the conference needs to have a proper proceedings that can be cited. I’ve been involved in organising two similar teaching conferences in the UK: CEP and UKICER. Both of these events have citable proceedings, each paper has its own URL and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) so their authors can be cited and credited properly, see doi.org/kjdn and doi.org/jbgm for examples. Having a proceedings means appointing a program committee who get academic credit for peer reviewing the submissions. Yes, doing all this takes time and money, but also incentivises high quality submissions which their authors (and reviewers) can get due credit for. Proceedings will show up in search engine results and get citations. At the time of writing, the only relevant result that appears when you Google for “teaching and learning conference manchester” is the call for papers from April (the month not the dean), everything else about the conference is currently invisible. As far as the internet is concerned, the conference never happened.
Better publicity: When I mentioned the conference to my colleagues, lots of them hadn’t heard about it, including many teaching focussed staff. Opportunities for teachers to get together and talk about the art (and science) of pedagogy are few and far between, so we need to let more people know that these kinds of events are happening. The announcement should go out far and wide, repeatedly but it wasn’t included in (for example) the weekly teaching academy update from Andy Weightman, see here for example.
A bigger venue: The lack of publicity meant that some of my colleagues found out about the event late. When they tried to register they were told it was full and were turned away. Since its takes such a lot of effort to organise a conference of this size (with six parallel tracks!), it doesn’t make sense to turn late registrants away so, next year, we’re going to need a bigger boat venue to match the better publicity.
So thanks again to all the organisers, I look forward to attending an even bigger and better Teaching & Learning conference in 2024.
There’s a community of people here who use the R language to get stuff done known as the R Usergroup Manchester (RUM). We meet monthly to learn from each other. At the last meetup on 29th June, I gave a joint talk with Stavrina Dimosthenous about quarto.org and its predecessor bookdown.org. Following Stravrina’s quick introduction to Quarto, I gave a lightning talk about some of the pros and cons of using bookdown to write books.
Since the talk was recorded, I’ve posted the video below, which is a lo-fi Microsoft Teams recording, which doesn’t include any of the Q&A that followed.
TL:DR; Bookdown and quarto are useful and very well documented tools for publishing books that can help you overcome some of the (many) limitations of Learning Management Systems like Blackboard. If you’re writing anything book shaped in your teaching (or elsewhere) I reckon that bookdown/quarto are good tools that are worth learning as they’ll help you to get stuff done.
Thanks Kamilla Kopec-Harding for organising and hosting the talks, a promotional poster for which, you can see below. 🙏
References
Wickham, Hadley, and Garrett Grolemund. 2017. R for Data Science. O’Reilly UK Ltd. r4ds.had.co.nz.
Xie, Yihui. 2017. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown.
Xie, Yihui, Christophe Dervieux, and Emily Riederer. 2020. R Markdown Cookbook. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook.
The textbook has long been a mainstay of education. Although online textbooks can give students easy (and sometimes free) access to increasingly interactive resources, authors have a bewildering array of tools and publishing models to select from. The likes of asciidoctor.org, bookdown.org, leanpub.com, pretextbook.org, quarto.org, runestone.academy, zybooks.com, and many others allow instructors to publish course material freed from the constraints of printed paper, monolithic Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Join us on Monday 12th of June at 2pm BST (UTC+1) to discuss a paper describing one example: Dive Into Systems an undergraduate textbook on computer systems. We’ll be joined by one of the co-authors of the paper [1] (and corresponding textbook) Suzanne Matthews, Tia Newhall and Kevin C. Webb from the United States Military Academy at Westpoint, New York and Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. From the abstract of their paper:
This paper presents our experiences, motivations, and goals for developing Dive into Systems, a new, free, online textbook that introduces computer systems, computer organisation, and parallel computing. Our book’s topic coverage is designed to give readers a gentle and broad introduction to these important topics. It teaches the fundamentals of computer systems and architecture, introduces skills for writing efficient programs, and provides necessary background to prepare students for advanced study in computer systems topics. Our book assumes only a CS1 background of the reader and is designed to be useful to a range of courses as a primary textbook for courses that introduce computer systems topics or as an auxiliary textbook to provide systems background in other courses. Results of an evaluation from students and faculty at 18 institutions who used a beta release of our book show overwhelmingly strong support for its coverage of computer systems topics, its readability, and its availability. Chapters are reviewed and edited by external volunteers from the CS education community. Their feedback, as well as that of student and faculty users, is continuously incorporated into its online content at diveintosystems.org/book
Suzanne J. Matthews, Tia Newhall and Kevin C. Webb (2021) Dive into Systems: A Free, Online Textbook for Introducing Computer Systems SIGCSE ’21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Pages 1110–1116 DOI: 10.1145/3408877.3432514
Maybe you wrote that code and maybe you didn’t. If Artificial Intelligence helped you, such as the OpenAI Codex in GitHub Copilot, how did it solve your problem? How much did AI help or hinder your solution? Join us to discuss a paper by Michel Wermelinger from the Open University published in the SIGCSE technical symposium earlier this month in Toronto on this very topic. [1] We’ll be joined by Michel who will present a lightning talk to kick-off our discussion. Here’s the abstract of his paper:
The teaching and assessment of introductory programming involves writing code that solves a problem described by text. Previous research found that OpenAI’s Codex, a natural language machine learning model trained on billions of lines of code, performs well on many programming problems, often generating correct and readable Python code. GitHub’s version of Codex, Copilot, is freely available to students. This raises pedagogic and academic integrity concerns. Educators need to know what Copilot is capable of, in order to adapt their teaching to AI-powered programming assistants. Previous research evaluated the most performant Codex model quantitatively, e.g. how many problems have at least one correct suggestion that passes all tests. Here I evaluate Copilot instead, to see if and how it differs from Codex, and look qualitatively at the generated suggestions, to understand the limitations of Copilot. I also report on the experience of using Copilot for other activities asked of students in programming courses: explaining code, generating tests and fixing bugs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the observed capabilities for the teaching of programming.
Michel Wermelinger (2023) Using GitHub Copilot to Solve Simple Programming Problems in Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Pages SIGCSE 2023 page 172–178 DOI: 10.1145/3545945.3569830
It’s all very well getting an AI to write your code for you but reading code and writing code is not the same as understanding code. So what is going on in novices brains when they learn to actually understand the code they are reading and writing? Join us on Monday 6th March at 2pm GMT to discuss a paper by Quintin Cutts and Maria Kallia from the University of Glasgow on this very topic [1], from the abstract:
An approach to code comprehension in an introductory programming class is presented, drawing on the Text Surface, Functional and Machine aspects of Schulte’s Block Model, and emphasising programming as a modelling activity involving problem and machine domains. To visually connect the domains and a program, a key diagram conceptualising the three aspects lies at the approach’s heart, alongside instructional exposition and exercises, which are all presented. Students find the approach challenging initially, but most recognise its value later, and identify, unexpectedly, the value of the approach for problem decomposition, planning and coding.
We’ll be joined by one of the co-authors (Quintin Cutts), who’ll give us a lightning talk summary of the paper to kick-off our journal club discussion.
Quintin Cutts and Maria Kallia (2023) Introducing Modelling and Code Comprehension from the First Days of an Introductory Programming Class in CEP ’23: Proceedings of 7th Conference on Computing Education Practice Pages 21–24 DOI:10.1145/3573260.3573266
Computing is widely taught in schools in the UK and Ireland, but how does the subject vary across primary and secondary education in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland? Join us to discuss via a paper published at UKICER.com by Sue Sentance, Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker. [1] From the abstract:
Many countries have increased their focus on computing in primary and secondary education in recent years and the UK and Ireland are no exception. The four nations of the UK have distinct and separate education systems, with England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland offering different national curricula, qualifications, and teacher education opportunities; this is the same for the Republic of Ireland. This paper describes computing education in these five jurisdictions and reports on the results of a survey conducted with computing teachers. A validated instrument was localised and used for this study, with 512 completed responses received from teachers across all five countries The results demonstrate distinct differences in the experiences of the computing teachers surveyed that align with the policy and provision for computing education in the UK and Ireland. This paper increases our understanding of the differences in computing education provision in schools across the UK and Ireland, and will be relevant to all those working to understand policy around computing education in school.
(we’ll be joined by the co-authors of the paper: Sue Sentance and Diana Kirby from the University of Cambridge and the Raspberry Pi Foundation with a lightning talk summary to start our discussion)
Sue Sentance, Diana Kirby, Keith Quille, Elizabeth Cole, Tom Crick and Nicola Looker (2022) Computing in School in the UK & Ireland: A Comparative Study UKICER ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research 5 pp 1–7 DOI: 10.1145/3555009.3555015
Java is widely used as a teaching language in Universities around the world, but what wider problems does it present for novice programmers? Join us to discuss via a paper published in TOCE by Neil Brown, Pierre Weill-Tessier, Maksymilian Sekula, Alexandra-Lucia Costache and Michael Kölling. [1] From the abstract:
Objectives: Java is a popular programming language for use in computing education, but it is difficult to get a wide picture of the issues that it presents for novices, and most studies look only at the types or frequency of errors. In this observational study we aim to learn how novices use different features of the Java language. Participants: Users of the BlueJ development environment have been invited to opt-in to anonymously record their activity data for the past eight years. This dataset is called Blackbox, which was used as the basis for this study. BlueJ users are mostly novice programmers, predominantly male, with a median age of 16. Our data subset featured approximately 225,000 participants from around the world. Study Methods: We performed a secondary data analysis that used data from the Blackbox dataset. We examined over 320,000 Java projects collected over the course of eight years, and used source code analysis to investigate the prevalence of various specifically-selected Java programming usage patterns. As this was an observational study without specific hypotheses, we did not use significance tests; instead we present the results themselves with commentary, having applied seasonal trend decomposition to the data. Findings: We found many long-term trends in the data over the course of the eight years, most of which were monotonic. There was a notable reduction in the use of the main method (common in Java but unnecessary in BlueJ), and a general reduction in the complexity of the projects. We find that there are only a small number of frequently used types: int, String, double and boolean, but also a wide range of other infrequently used types. Conclusions: We find that programming usage patterns gradually change over a long period of time (a period where the Java language was not seeing major changes), once seasonal patterns are accounted for. Any changes are likely driven by instructors and the changing demographics of programming novices. The novices use a relatively restricted subset of Java, which implies that designers of languages specifically targeted at novices can satisfy their needs with a smaller set of language constructs and features. We provide detailed recommendations for the designers of educational programming languages and supporting development tools.
Neil C. C. Brown, Pierre Weill-Tessier, Maksymilian Sekula, Alexandra-Lucia Costache and Michael Kölling (2022) Novice use of the Java programming language ACM Transactions on Computing Education DOI:10.1145/3551393
Public domain portrait of Stephen Fry by the US Embassy in London on Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/4wrn
It’s easy to undervalue the importance of natural languages like English because we use them everyday. Scientists and engineers can be particularly bad at this, often overlooking the importance of written and spoken language. It probably doesn’t help that in the UK, and many other countries, many students choose either an exclusively scientific-mathematical path OR an arty-humanities path through their education, especially in the latter stages. This means that the two cultures of humanities and science are thriving, but still living in separate houses like an estranged and bickering couple. In the worst case scenario, two cultures in society produces graduate scientists and engineers with weaker communication and literacy, and articulate humanities graduates with weaker technical & numeracy skills.
Over on BBC4, Alan Yentob is having conversations with prominent artistes. [1] The first episode in the series is with writer, presenter, comedian and actor Stephen Fry. As a self-confessed Fry-fanboi, I enjoyed his description of the joy of using language:
YENTOB: Why do you need all that stuff?
FRY: I think what underlies 90%, if not more, is language, is a real profound love and excitement at the process of putting one word after another and what happens when you do it.
Not just the meanings that are conveyed and the moods you can create with language, but even the text of it, the tip of the tongue hitting the back of the teeth, the rhythm, the swing, the swoop, the flow, the joy, the sound and sex of language. People have that with music. We all have it with music. Music is often described as being beyond language, and indeed it is and I’m the first to say how profound I think music is.
But everybody has language, and yet almost nobody has such a realisation of what a beautiful thing it can be. I mean one of the thrills that’s happened in music in the last 20 or so years, I suppose, is rap and hip-hop and poetry slamming and things like that because then it’s taken away from the normal people who are people like me, who, as it were, have an educated sense of language and its returned to where language belongs.
And so the wildness and freedom of using language with joy and pleasure and realising we’re all the equivalent of grade eight musicians, or painters, only with language.
O'Really? 