Hi Pete, I'm trying to do something like this on a broader or more general scale, aimed at faculty-staff development across the university, with a Networked New Media Faculty-Staff Development Seminar. Principal information here: http://gardnercampbell.wetpaint.com/page/Baylor_NMFS_F10. The portal aggregating network-wide content (primarily blogs) is here: http://www.netvibes.com/gardnercampbell#NMFS_F10. Our text is primarily "The New Media Reader" (MIT 2003). Had I world enough and time, I'd add many more essays from the NMR, Howard Rheingold's "Tools for Thought," and perhaps Bardini's "Bootstrapping" to the mix. Best regards, Gardner Dr. Gardner Campbell Director, Academy for Teaching and Learning Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Learning, Honors College Baylor University One Bear Place #97189 Waco, TX 76798-7189 254-710-4064 www.gardnercampbell.net ------------------------------ Message: 7 Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:18:59 -0400 From: "Pete[r] Landwehr" <plandweh@cs.cmu.edu> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] Non-Code-Centric Texts in Introductions To Computer Science? Message-ID: <AANLkTiks_jgCTEo3bEfQX9D4nqzZHn2ZOWN-09kJZEnM@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 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, pml