1. Procedural Literacy LCC 2700: Intro to Computational Media

2. What is literacy? “Literate” < “letters” Literacy as the ability to read and write

3. What are literacies? “Multiliteracies” or “Multimodal literacies” The New London Group: “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies” (1996) Literacy is changing Cultural and linguistic diversity and “multiple Englishes” New technologies are multimodal: written, visual, spatial patterns

4. Procedural Literacy Partakes in the concept of multiliteracies, but also predates it A.J. Perlis, 1961: “the purpose of my proposed first course in programming… is not to teach people how to program a specific computer, nor is it to teach some new languages. The purpose of a course in programming is to teach people how to construct and analyze processes.”

5. Literate how? How does learning take place? What does it mean to learn? Approaches

6. Behaviorism Behaviorists (e.g. Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner) Learning is about reinforcement Organisms (behaviorists generally group humans among animals of all sorts) respond to positive and negative incentives When organisms find themselves in similar situations with similar incentives, they will respond in similar ways. Transfer of learning-a pervasive and problematic concept in educational theory-takes place via repetition and reinforcement

7. Behaviorism Behaviorists are often accused of ignoring the private, mental processes inherent in individual human beings The attempt to establish and support a materialist, empiricist understanding of learning leaves no room for human subjectivity General belief that psychology is a “natural science” based in empirical observation, like the natural sciences (so introspection is not important)

8. Constructivism Contructivists (e.g. Jean Piaget, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky) Understanding of learning became more connected to theories of mind Corrective for the scientism of behaviorism Piaget: scientific constructivism, cognitive “development stages” Vygotsky: social constructivism, role of social interaction in cognitive development

9. Classrooms Behaviorist havens Students practice within question/answer frames that reinforce subject-matter knowledge Immediate feedback and reprimand Reinforced behavior will reoccur One type of positively-reinforced behavior is adequate. Teacher-directed rote learning

10. Precedents Friedrich Fröbel, the inventor of kindergarten (1826) “The purpose of education is to encourage and guide man as a conscious, thinking and perceiving being in such a way that he becomes a pure and perfect representation of that divine inner law through his own personal choice.” Play, materials, and activities as a means to encourage creativity and, thereby, fulfillment Personal experience yields an understanding of the world

11. Precedents Maria Montessori, the Montessori Method (1912) Focused first on the senses, then on the intellect Based largely on her experiences teaching mentally disabled children Unlike Fröbel, Montessori encouraged more “practical” learning, based around material exercises

12. Constructivism Some object (J.K. Doyle) the correlation between constructivist- style embodied thinking has been convincingly tied to actual future behavior Anecdote and bias, no scientific evidence, so not generalizable as an educational practice Overfocuses on individual experience, at the cost of specificity

13. Constructionism Seymour Papert’s revision of Piaget (with whom he studied) Focuses on the active creation (construction) of things in the material world Refocuses education on the practice of individualized cognitive development as a goal in itself, a goal not always reconnected with subject-specific learning outcomes

14. Back to Procedural Literacy Papert developed Logo in the 1960s at MIT, a language designed to teach children to program Constructionist practice of actively making things tied to motivational activities Logo’s Turtle Mindstorms (later adopted by Lego for its line of constructionist robotic toys)

16. Alan Kay at Xerox PARC SmallTalk A computer language simple enough for children Message-based, Object oriented (in Kay’s meaning) SmallTalk -> Objective C = NextStep = WWW = OS X

17. Procedural Literacy The ability to read and write processes But not just for utility, for work Procedurality as aesthetics Procedurality as an interplay between cultural meaning- making and (technically) mediated expression

18. Does Procedural Authorship = Coding? Janet Murray on “Authoring tools” Avoid programming? Do we avoid programming when we don’t write code like: #include extern int main( int argc, char *argv[] ) { printf( "Hello, world.\n" ); return( 0 ); }

19. Why do we learn to read or write? To successfully get through school? To use streets signs and grocery stores? To operate the cash register at McDonalds? To understand the meaning of the culture we inhabit? To evaluate, critique, and change our world?

20. Why do we learn to program? Procedural literacy has been loosely coupled to programming literacy The value of knowing how to program has been taken for granted based on the increasing importance of computers What we do once we know how to program, what do we do with that knowledge?

21. A comparison The “Trivium” and “Quadrivium”, principles from medieval education –Borrowed from Aristotle, ca. 5-6c AD Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric Medieval -- connected to the church and to a renewed interest in ancient works –Focus, for example, on Latin

22. Dorothy Sayers on Latin I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.

23. Dorothy Sayers on Latin I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents. Focus on the use of language for understanding culture

24. Jesse Wise and Susan Wise Bauer on Latin Latin trains the mind to think in an orderly fashion. Latin... is the most systematic language around. The discipline of assembling the endings and arranging syntax... According to sets of rules is the mental equivalent of a daily two-mile jog. And because Latin demands precision, the Latin-trained mind becomes accustomed to paying attention to detail. Replace Latin with C or Java or Smalltalk or Python or LISP?

25. Reconnecting procedural literacy with culture The precedents we already discussed, such as found art, cut-ups, etc. Understanding the world as sets of processes –Signs and flirtations –Character behavior –Spatial models –Representations Inscribing perspectives on those topics in computational media

26. A Critique Sherry Turkle We used to have to dig under the hood and figure out how machines worked The GUI killed this and destroyed budding procedural literacy

29. http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/

32. Quartz Composer Samples