Hi Peter, I think that there are actually quite a lot of books out there that may capture the interest of CS people without being centered on code or engineering practices. I'd suggest the following classics: "Winograd & Flores: Understanding Computers and Cogition" "Agre: Computation and Human Experience" "Brown & Duguid: The Social Life of Information" A good place to lookfor more may be: http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/ I also think that the historical approach to computing has the potential to provide a wider perspective to your students. "Edwards: The Closed World" is quite fascinating and "Campbell-Kelly & Aspray: Computer. A History of the Information Machine" is still the best general history of computing I've read. cheers and good luck for tickling that inner humanist in your codesquad... B. -- Bernhard Rieder Laboratoire Paragraphe Université de Paris VIII bernhard.rieder@univ-paris8.fr http://bernhard.rieder.fr http://thepoliticsofsystems.net On 9/27/10 6:18 , Pete[r] Landwehr wrote:
Hey list,
I have an open ended question for this list that is intended to be a bit selfish and (hopefully) a bit beneficial for everyone else. Recently, I read Weizenbaum's Computing Power And Human Reason, in which he makes arguments about the things that AI should& shouldn't address. (It's a bit dated.) In it, he makes a point that because he is trained as a computer scientist he considers himself a poorly educated entrant to the debate,& later suggests that an introduction to computer science should be more than an introduction to programming, but also into some of the theory behind the field. (By "theory", I mean the conceptual ideas behind computing, not discrete mathematics.) As a computer scientist whose introduction to computer science was essentially an introduction to programming along with some key algorithms in the field and a few good software engineering practices, I found his argument appealing.
As such, I'd like to ask the list -both computer scientists and non- what (if any) texts would you like undergraduate computer scientists to be exposed to that are _not_ solely focused on good practices in C++/Java/<Language of Choice> programming? Baudrillard's Simulacra And Simulations? Lessig's Code v. 2? Simon's The Sciences Of The Artificial? Some linguistics text by Chomsky? Or is this whole idea dumb& everything is totally hunky-dory?
Best,
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