Samuel Gerald Collins

A model for piloting pathways for computational thinking in a general education curriculum

Computational thinking has been identified as a necessary fundamental skill for all students. University curricula, however, are currently not designed to provide such knowledge to a broad student population. In this paper, we report on our experiences in the development of a model for incorporating computational thinking into the undergraduate, general education curriculum at Towson University. We discuss the model in terms of eliciting faculty interest, institutional support, and positive student response. In the first two years of this NSF-funded three-year project, we have developed, piloted and assessed five computational thinking general education courses - an Everyday Computational Thinking course, and four discipline-specific computational thinking general education courses. Initial assessments show promising and significant student, instructor and administration interest in computational thinking as a basis in courses covering multiple disciplines within the general education curriculum.

‘Who's this Tong‐il?’: English, culture and ambivalence in South Korea

Many supporters and critics of a ‘global English’ assume that English is (initially) ‘outside’ of cultures in what Braj Kachru calls the ‘Expanding Circle’. But this ignores the ways English has been culturally and historically constituted in countries where it is still a ‘foreign’ language. In South Korea, English education—as an institution—has been part of Korean life since the 1880s. During that time, English has acquired a variety of contradictory cultural meanings related to the colonial and postcolonial experiences of South Korean people. For example, although introduced as part of the late‐nineteenth century ‘enlightenment’ of Korean society, English became associated during the Korean War with conservatism and the US military government. More recent beliefs surrounding English suggest a combination of liberatory possibility and imperialism. Through an examination of historical sources, literature and ethnographic interviews undertaken from 1999 to 2001, I describe some of these shifting meanings as relevant not only for our understanding of English in South Korea but for world Englishes as a whole. ‘Global English’, I suggest, must be understood as both global and local.

Handbook of Research on Agent-Based Societies: Social and Cultural Interactions

In a given environment, agents interact with each other, imitating, communicating, exchanging, and competing. Based on these heterogeneous modalities of interaction, a variety of socialities may emerge including language and communication, identities, economies, and cultures. The Handbook of Research on Agent-Based Societies: Social and Cultural Interactions addresses the emergence of societal phenomena in the interactions of systems of agents. Comprising authoritative chapters by numerous international authors, this reference book goes well beyond describing the next generation of multi-agent systems in simulations and system engineering and analyzes existing systems to stimulate the development of new ones. It features: 23 authoritative contributions by over 40 of the worlds leading experts on agent-based societies from 7 countriesComprehensive coverage of each specific topic, highlighting recent trends and describing the latest advances in the fieldMore than 830 references to existing literature and research on agent-based societiesAnd a compendium of over 260 key terms with detailed definitions. It is organized by topic and indexed, making it a convenient method of reference for all IT/IS scholars and professionals. It includes cross-referencing of key terms, figures, and information pertinent to agent-based societies.

Ethnographic Apps/Apps as Ethnography

Today, people nearly everywhere are experiencing multiple events through the medium of mobile apps: Social networking platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, are now accessed through smartphones by most users; popular service apps like Yelp are used for finding restaurants and services; geolocation apps for way finding, such as Google Maps, plot drives, commutes by public transportation and even walks around the block; and there are tons of personal health and fitness trackers that count everything from steps to calorie intake. For anthropologists, mobile apps provide the opportunity for an enhanced methodological approach that provides new possibilities to engage with the people they study, heighten their reflexive capacities and link to new forms of data. While many approach these possibilities with trepidation, our collective sentiment is that these new forms of communication provide more promise than pitfalls for anthropology. The use of apps is transforming human experience. Mobile apps are part of everyday life around the world, including the lives and livelihoods of anthropologists. Anthropologists aren’t just “using” apps; they’re also being “used” by them, in that the structures of app platforms affect what anthropologists know and how they know it. Just as the individuals that anthropologists study are producing the digital labor and content that drives apps, anthropologists, in turn, are supplying the same amount of material and utilization. In this sense, when it comes to mobile apps, we are part of the same public sphere as the populations with whom we work. Apps can also provide many anthropological insights. Each mobile app platform tells researchers not only what people who use them think is important, but also the way different media and different functions are expected to link together in user practice. In other words, apps can tell users and developers how they should be moving around in the world and what they should pay attention to and capture as media, and simultaneously provide conduits for sharing all of this information and collective experience. Increasingly, anthropologists are returning from field research with diverse media: recordings, notes, photos, digital records and all sorts of cultural items. Mobile apps suggest ways of integrating the work anthropologists do to communicate with other anthropologists with this material from field research. They also provide a possible way for anthropological research to become increasingly relevant and accessible to wider publics. Anthropologists can and should use their knowledge,

Reconnecting to the Patterns That Connect

Wait: this isn’t what she studied. Did she miss the lecture on this? Anyway—she knows she’s unlikely to find the answer in a textbook. And that was the point. Most people identify Gregory Bateson as the husband of Margaret Mead, the co-author of their visual and ethnographic masterpiece, Balinese Character, a revolutionary film documenting Balinese movement. Others remember Bateson’s discussions of schismogenesis in Naven, his ethnography of the Iatmul, a group of people living in the East Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. Some might remember that these interests led him to theorize about cybernetics and systems, which, in turn, steered him to wide-ranging insights about the relationships of people to each other and to their varied ecologies. But he was, particularly in the last two decades of his life, a teacher—in the most profound sense of the term. He taught at UC–Santa Cruz in the History of Consciousness program from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, and he was briefly a regent of the University of California system. And he lectured widely—at many institutions that really came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s—Esalen Institute (Big Sur, California), the Lindisfarne Association (Crestone, Colorado), Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado). During these years, he touched many, many lives. My own, perfunctory research has revealed dozens of Gregory Bateson stories, each singular encounter as revealing about Bateson’s thought as it is about the mind of the student. In “An Ecology of Mind: Remember the Future,” Gregory Bateson’s daughter (her mother is Lois Camack), the filmmaker and author Nora Bateson, traces Bateson’s teachings through the metaphor of her own childhood rambles with her father through the forests and shorelines of coastal California. Nora Bateson tells us early on that “This is a film about the way Gregory Bateson thought,” and, fittingly this is not a Wiki pedia entry on Bateson, but a circular (and recursive) process of connection and reflection through archival footage, interviews and slightly puzzling, animated asides. Loosely dividing the film into the keywords that Bateson would conjure during various moments in his life—“Relationships,” “Cy-

New Robot Revolution, Multi-Agency and the Machinic: Review of Gerald Raunig's A Thousand Machines

First, a couple of anecdotes: While I was working on a class lecture a few days ago in my office, a “flash mob” showed up on the quadrangle in front of my window and danced to their iPods for a while before dispersing. Flash mobs were (briefly) a concern for police and other authorities in places like Minsk (Shirky, 2008, p. 165), Philadelphia (Urbina, 2010) and elsewhere, where the alarmingly sudden presence of people loosely coupled through their text messaging or blogging triggered fears of anarchy. But, watching them dance, I remembered another, similar term: flash crowds—the sudden surge of internet traffic associated with, for example, a denial-of-service attack. The similarity is not just incidental—they appear to both derive, New Robot Revolution, Multi-Agency and the Machinic: Review of Gerald Raunig’s A Thousand Machines

Cognitive Robotics and Multiagency in a Fuzzy Modeling Framework

Fuzzy algebraic structures are a useful and flexible tool for modeling cognitive agents and their societies. In this article we propose a fuzzy algebraic framework where the valuating sets are other than the unit interval lattices, partially ordered sets or relational structures. This provides for a flexible organization of the information gathered by the agent via interactions with the environment and/or other agents and enables its selected use when different drives are active. Agents Petitage, ANNA, POPSICLE and Izbushka, which are instantiations of our model, are also given in order to illustrate the use of this framework, as well as its possible extensions.

AAAI Fall Symposium reports

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2007 Fall Symposium Series on Friday through Sunday, November 9–11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) AI and Consciousness: Theoretical Foundations and Current Approaches, (2) Artificial Intelligence for Prognostics, (3) Cognitive Approaches to Natural Language Processing, (4) Computational Approaches to Representation Change during Learning and Development, (5) Emergent Agents and Socialities: Social and Organizational Aspects of Intelligence, (6) Intelligent Narrative Technologies, and (7) Regarding the “Intelligence” in Distributed Intelligent Systems.