The dumbing down of computer literacy and decline of programming in education

All home computers used to be user-programmable

The need for a basic education in computer literacy
As well as career benefits to the individual, and skills benefits to the economy, computer programming (coding) also promotes clear logical thinking and is an instructive source of easily understood analogies for otherwise difficult topics in philosophy, including Buddhist philosophy. 

For example,  the key Buddhist concept of three levels of dependent existence can be understood in terms of algorithms, data structures and semantics, as well as the more traditional view as causality, mereology and mental designation. The use of the Church-Turing-Deutsch  principle to distinguish between the physical and non-physical aspects of the mind follows on from this.

Dumbing down
So it's a matter of concern that as computers become more pervasive, actual computer literacy has declined over the past ten or fifteen years due a process of dumbing down in schools and colleges.   Not only does this impact vocational skills, but lack of computer coding experience among younger people means that computer concepts can no longer be used to illustrate analogies in other fields of study.  Back in the mid-nineties, the growth in familiarity with computer programming was welcomed as a means of illustrating philosophical concepts.

Programming helps with understanding philosophy

Two examples of use of computer analogies in philosophy
In discussing the philosophical concept that conscious experience is a fundamental feature of the universe, irreducible to anything more basic, and that mentality is as fundamental as physicality, Copthorne Macdonald wrote in 1994: 

"The ancients were able to apprehend this perspective intuitively, but had difficulty expressing it clearly in words because they lacked certain key concepts that we now have. The present "information age" or postmodern refinement of the perspective had to wait until these concepts emerged and became part of our cultural vocabulary — concepts like medium and message, carrier and modulation, algorithm and information. It had to wait, for instance, until Claude Shannon (1948) demonstrated that the fuzzy concept of information could have a solid, quantifiable meaning. It had to wait until DNA research in the 1950s showed that organisms and other physical structures are in fact informational structures. It had to wait until the role of algorithms in information processing became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, and until ideas about parallel processing began to emerge in the 1980s."

Similarly, in 1996 Tom Etter discussing quantum mechanics as a branch of mereology, wrote

“Principia Mathematica” by Russell and Whitehead is one of the most famous books of the century, and one of the least read. In his autobiography Russell complains that only four people in the world had ever read his favorite part of the book, which is the part on the theory of relations. Though I am sure that this select company is larger today, it's still not very large. Fortunately for us, the relational ideas from Principia that we really need have found a happy home in the much more accessible language of relational databases.

What I shall present here parallels a much longer paper [Etter, 1996] which I wrote in the language of probability because I assumed that scientists are more at home with probability theory than with mathematical logic. But that was before I encountered relational databases. This happened serendipitously when the little journal I edit acquired Microsoft Access, in the hope of keeping better track of its subscribers. Browsing through the instruction book, I came across the word 'linking,' a crucial word in my long paper, and to my amazement found it had exactly the same meaning as I had given it there! I quickly realized that this harmony extended to many other relational concepts, and that with only a few strokes I could also define the concepts I was using from probability theory. To top it all off, database language is practically the mother tongue of today's young programmers, the fastest growing population on Earth!"

But both articles were written in the mid nineties, before...


The rot set in when coding was abandoned in favor of applications
Learning boring applications has replaced the mental challenge of coding.
 
The basic (or BASIC) problem is that young people are no longer taught to program computers, and indeed have few facilities to do so. Children are 'bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by bored teachers'  instead of being taught how to program.  

BASIC or nothing

The problem was first described in 2006 by David Brin in his excellent article 'Why Johnny can’t code': 

'BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.  For three years — ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade — he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We’ve searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC.

Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there’s still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.Only, quietly and without fanfare, or even any comment or notice by software pundits, we have drifted into a situation where almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast. Not even the one that was a software lingua franca on nearly all machines, only a decade or so ago. And that is not only a problem for Ben and me; it is a problem for our nation and civilization... Read more.



British government to re-introduce programing for kids
The results of a decade of dumbing down have also recently been noticed by the British educational establishment (better late than never).

Back to the future?

School Information and Computer Technology to be replaced by computer science programme
"The current information and communications technology (ICT) curriculum in England's schools is a "mess" and must be radically revamped, the education secretary has announced.

From September it will be replaced by a flexible curriculum in computer science and programming, designed with the help of universities and industry.Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum "demotivating and dull". He will begin a consultation next week on the new computing curriculum.

He said this would create young people "able to work at the forefront of technological change".

The education secretary said the inadequate grounding in computing offered by the current curriculum was in danger of damaging Britain's economic prospects. He called for a revival of the legacy of British computer pioneer Alan Turing whose work in the 1930s laid the foundation of the modern computing industry.

"Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word or Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations," he said.

Computer games entrepreneur Ian Livingstone, an adviser to Mr Gove, envisages a new curriculum that could have 16-year-olds creating their own apps for smartphones and 18-year-olds able to write their own simple programming language.

'Slaves to the interface'

Mr Livingstone, co-author of last year's Next Gen report which highlighted the poor quality of computer teaching in schools, told BBC news: "The current lessons are essentially irrelevant to today's generation of children who can learn PowerPoint in a week.It's a travesty given our heritage as the most creative nation in the world. Children are being forced to learn how to use applications, rather than to make them. They are becoming slaves to the user interface and are totally bored by it," he said....


In America, the problem is also at last being officially recognised:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg takes coding course   
The mayor is joining more than 180,000 people currently taking part in Code Year, a campaign to encourage more people to programme.

"My New Year's resolution is to learn to code with Codecademy in 2012!" he wrote on Twitter. Participants in the course receive an interactive lesson each week, via email. The campaign promises that participants will be "building apps and websites before you know it"...

It is not clear what Mr Bloomberg hopes to do with his new computer skills, but his decision to learn comes at a time of renewed interest in encouraging people to programme. In October, the Next Gen report into the teaching of computing in UK schools was published. Co-author Alex Hope told the BBC that coding should be "the new Latin".

Back in the dim and distant past, Latin, with its rigorous grammar, was taught as a method of developing clarity of thought and expression.   The mental discipline of programming has similar general benefits that extend beyond vocational and technical skills. 

RASPBERRY PI
A basic education in computer literacy

Raspberry Pi to bring low-cost coding to every child
Can a £15 ($25) computer solve the programming gap?
BBC Video about new low-cost programming gadget

Background to Raspberry Pi

'The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton was lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University. Eben had noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year when he came to interview them. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant now had experience only with web design, and sometimes not even with that. Fewer people were applying to the course every year. Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers.

Eben and colleagues from the university like Rob Mullins and Alan Mycroft (both now trustees of the Raspberry Pi Foundation) batted around ideas about what had happened in schools to cause this change. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.

There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment.

Over the next few years, Eben, having left the university for industry, worked on building prototypes of what has now become the Raspberry Pi in his spare time.

Raspberry Pi

By 2008, processors designed for mobile devices were becoming more affordable, and powerful enough to provide excellent multimedia (a Raspberry Pi can play Blu-Ray-quality video), a feature we felt makes the board desirable to kids who aren’t initially interested in a raw programming device. The project started to look very realisable. Eben came together with a group of friends and old colleagues with a wide-ranging group of skills, some of whom were already wrestling with the problem of what to do about producing new young programmers. These people became the Raspberry Pi board of trustees: David Braben, a star game designer and Cambridgeshire entrepreneur with a book of contacts as long as your arm; Jack Lang, a local academic and business angel who worked on the original BBC Micro project; Pete Lomas, MD of a hardware design and manufacture company where our earliest boards have been designed and built; and Professor Alan Mycroft and Dr Rob Mullins from the Cambridge University Computer Lab, who have provided a lot of the educational direction of the project.    More 

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Raspberry Pi update 29-FEB-2012

"...The first thousands on release today were funded largely out of the pockets of Dr Upton and his five fellow foundation scientists.

Now they will receive royalties on every Pi sold, and will be able to focus on their main concern - improving what is widely seen as the woeful state of Britain's computer science curriculum.

That was underlined last summer by American Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who said that, as the country that invented the computer, the UK was "throwing away its great computer heritage" by failing to teach programming in schools.

Robert Mullins, Eben Upton, David Braben The Pi has changed in development, as the members of Raspberry Pi Foundation demonstrate.

"I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools," he said.

"Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made."

Dr Upton believes the Pi could provide part of the solution: "We just want to get kids programming. The goal here is to increase the number of children to apply to university to do computer science and to increase the range of things they know how to do when they arrive."

Here at Chesterton Community College Mr Schmidt's criticism might be seen as unfair, because ICT head Paul Wilson is not a typical example of an information and communications technology teacher.

Unlike many of his colleagues in the field he knows how to code, and once did it for a living. He also runs a popular programming club after school.
Continue reading the main story

But even he admits the current ICT school curriculum means most of his lesson time is spent in learning how to use software rather than teaching his pupils how to write the code that makes that software work.

He estimates just a tiny fraction of the students he teaches will go on to study computer science at a higher level.

His hunch is backed up by research carried out by the Royal Society which last month pinpointed a 60% decline in the number of British students achieving an A-level in computing since 2003...."

- Sean Robsville 

BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

Mereology and Buddhism: Mereological Dependence in Buddhist Philosophy

I was reading Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka  by Jan Westerhoff, when I came across the following sentence on page 27:

‘It is interesting to note that in the later dGe lugs commentarial tradition, three varieties of existential dependence are distinguished: causal dependence, when an object depends for its existence on its causes and conditions; mereological  dependence, when an object depends on its parts; and conceptual dependence, postulating the dependence of an object on a basis of designation, a designating mind, and a term used to designate the object.’

Mereological  dependence

Mereological?
Now there’s a word I’d never come across before.  So I looked it up in  Wiki…
‘In philosophy and mathematical logic, mereology (from the Greek μέρος, root: μερε(σ)-, "part" and the suffix -logy "study, discussion, science") treats parts and the wholes they form…
…Standard university texts on logic and mathematics are silent about mereology, which has undoubtedly contributed to its obscurity.’    That probably explains why I had never heard of it before.

As Tom Etter puts it:
“Mereology? What on Earth is that?” you ask. Well you may ask, since you won't find the word in the American Heritage dictionary, nor even in the 8-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, if you look in the more enlightened Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, you'll discover that mereology is “the mathematical theory of parts and wholes.” A very useful word, wouldn't you say? How have we managed all these years to get along without it?' 

Googling around, I found an article by Greg Goode  that explains mereological dependency as follows:
‘The way a thing depends on its pieces and parts. In Western philosophical terms, this might be referred to as mereological dependency. The pieces and parts of an object are sometimes called its "basis of designation." According to the emptiness teachings, we would see roots, a stalk, branches and leaves, and based on this, designate the object as a "tree." These various parts are the tree's basis of designation. Being a tree is dependent upon the basis of designation. The tree cannot be said to exist if its basis of designation did not exist. 

For example, if you have a car in the parking lot over a long period of time, and vandals come and steal pieces here and there over several months, there will come a certain point at which there won't be enough parts for you to call it a car. This is how the car depends upon its pieces and parts, or its basis of designation. Even though this seems reasonable if we think about it like this, it's nevertheless easy to think that the true car exists in a way apart from the basis of designation, as though there were a "true car" that existed in an ideal realm of some sort. This sense that the car exists without depending on its basis of designation is the sense of the inherent existence of the car. This is more subtle than "Meeting"-style dependence.'


Top-down implies bottom-up
In Engaging Buddhism page 33, Jay Garfield points out that in Buddhist philosophy mereological dependency works both ways.

"As a consequence of the rejection of the ultimate existence of infinitesimal parts, the dependence relation between parts and wholes came to be recognized as a two-way street. Given that there is no ultimate decomposition of wholes into parts, the identification of any part as a part came to be seen as a matter of decompositional interest, just as the identification of a condition as an explanans is seen as dependent upon explanatory interests.

For something to exist as a part of a whole, on this view, is to be dependent on the whole in two respects. First, if the whole does not exist, the part does not exist as the kind of thing it is when it figures in the whole.
To take Wittgenstein's example in Philosophical Investigations, a brake lever is only a brake lever, and not simply a metal rod, in the context of a car in which it so functions (§6).

A biological organ, such as a heart, depends on an entire organism to develop, to function and to be an organ at all.

Second, decomposition can be accomplished in many ways. We might say that a memory chip is a part of a computer if we are decomposing it functionally, and that the parts of the chip are circuits, and so on. On the other hand, we might decompose the computer into adjacent 1 mm cubes, in which case the chip might turn out to be involved in several different parts, and not to be a part itself. If the whole in question is a solid volume, the cubes are parts; if it is a computer, the chip is a part, and 1 mm cubes are irrelevant. So, just as wholes depend on their parts, parts depend on their wholes."

 

Mere Mereology isn't enough

On further reflection I realised that I had in fact come across the Greek root  ‘meros’ ('part') before  -  back in the dim and distant past of school organic chemistry lessons...

From Wiki: ‘In chemistry, isomers (from Greek ἰσομερής, isomerès; isos = "equal", méros = "part") are compounds with the same molecular formula but different structural formulas. Isomers do not necessarily share similar properties, unless they also have the same functional groups. There are many different classes of isomers, like stereoisomers, enantiomers, geometrical isomers, etc. There are two main forms of isomerism: structural isomerism and stereoisomerism (spatial isomerism).’  

Isomers

So, we can have objects composed of exactly the same parts - molecules made of identical numbers of identical atoms -  but whose properties differ physically, chemically and biologically.  Even subtle differences of orientation such as mirror-imaging of atoms within molecules can drastically change their biological activities.

Optical isomers

Alternative terms to ‘Mereology’
This raises the question of whether the term ‘mereology’ is altogether adequate as a description of this second level of existential dependence.   Some notion of structure and arrangement, in addition to a simple list of parts, is required.  If you randomly throw together all the components in the designer’s bill of materials for a car you won’t get a working vehicle...

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, in Joyful Path of Good Fortune pages 348 to 349, when discussing the three levels of existential dependence includes ‘parts’ to mean ‘aspects, divisions and directions’.    Tom Etter in ‘Quantum Mechanics as a Branch of Mereology’ extends the scope of mereology beyond its standard definitions to include the ‘mereology of relations’ – in other words all those concepts handled by Relational Databases, for example entity/attributes and substructures.

New terminology needed?
So is there a more suitable single word in English than mereology to describe this second level of existential dependence?

The word would not only have to include the relations of parts to whole, and whole to parts, but also include the following relations:

- orientation
- composition
- connection
- arrangement
- configuration
- topology
- combination
- layout
- attributes
- properties
- structure and substructure

To anyone who works with with relational databases, especially as used for product specifications, the all-inclusive concept is familiar. It’s just that there isn’t a word for it in English.  (Maybe the Sanskrit term rupa comes closer).

Anyone got any ideas?

- Sean Robsville

BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

Qualia in Meditation - Analytical and Placement Meditation

Here are brief excerpts from The New Meditation Handbook by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, regarding the relationship between procedural (analytical) and qualitative (placement) thought-processes in meditation.  Note how the procedural mental process is used to generate a qualitative state of mind.  The qualitative mental feeling of compassion is what is known in Western philosophy as a 'quale' (singular of qualia).   It is an internal subjective state generated from the observation or recollection of external events.


Analytical meditation
'The purpose of contemplation, or analytical meditation, is to bring to mind the object of placement meditation. We do this by considering various lines of reasoning, contemplating analogies, and reflecting on the meaning of the instructions. It is helpful to memorize the contemplations given in each section so that we can meditate without having to look at the text. The contemplations given here are intended only as guidelines. We should supplement and enrich them with whatever reasons and examples we find helpful.'

Placement meditation
'When, through our contemplations, the object appears clearly, we leave our analytical meditation and concentrate on the object single-pointedly. This single-pointed concentration is the actual meditation.
When we first start to meditate, our concentration is poor; we are easily distracted and often. lose our object of meditation. Therefore, to begin with, we shall probably need to alternate between contemplation and placement meditation many times in each session. 

For example, if we are meditating on compassion, we begin by contemplating the various sufferings experienced by living beings until a strong feeling of compassion arises in our heart. When this feeling arises, we meditate on it single-pointedly. If the feeling fades, or if our mind wanders to another object, we should return to analytical meditation to bring the feeling back to mind. When the feeling of compassion has been restored, we once again leave our analytical meditation and hold the feeling with single-pointed concentration.'   For an excellent explanation of this process see here.


Both contemplation and meditation serve to acquaint our mind with virtuous objects. The more familiar we are with such objects, the more peaceful our mind becomes. By training in meditation, and living in accordance with the insights and resolutions developed during meditation, eventually we shall be able to maintain a peaceful mind continuously, throughout our life. More detailed instructions on the contemplations and on meditation in general can be found in Transform Your Life and Joyful Path of Good Fortune.'


- Sean Robsville

BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY