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ACE2008 Keynote speaker

Raymond Lister, University of Technology, Sydney

After the Gold Rush: Toward Sustainable Scholarship in Computing

In just thirty years, we have gone from punched cards to Second Life. But, as the NSF recently noted, "undergraduate computing education today often looks much as it did several decades ago". Consequently, today's "Nintendo Generation" have voted with their feet. We bore them. The contrast between the changes wrought via computer research over the last 30 years, and the failure of computer education to adapt to those changes, is because computing academics lead a double life. In our research lives we see ourselves as part of a community that reaches beyond our own university. We read literature, we attend conferences, we publish, and the cycle repeats, with community members building upon each other's work. But in our teaching lives we rarely discuss teaching beyond our own university, we are not guided by any teaching literature; instead we simply follow our instincts.

Academics in computing, or in any other discipline, can approach their teaching as research into how novices become experts. Several recent multi-institutional research collaborations have studied the development of novice programmers. This talk will describe some of the results from those collaborations, and reflect upon the mechanisms that made those collaborations work and their consequences for teaching programming.

The separation of our teaching and research lives diminishes not just our teaching but also our research. The modern practice of stripping away all "distractions" to maximise research output is like the practice of stripping away rainforest to grow beef - both practices appear to work, for a little while, but not indefinitely. Twenty-first century academia needs to bring teaching and research together, to form a scholarship of computing that is an integrated, sustainable, ecological whole.

The speaker

Raymond Lister's primary research interest is Computer Science Education. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers in that area, and also writes a regular column on education research for the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. He is a past program chair of the Australasian Computing Education Conference, and in 2001 convened the first Sydney Region IT Education Conventicle - an idea which has since spread to Melbourne and Queensland. He has edited two special issues of "Computer Science Education", a journal ranked A+ by CORE. He has co-led two ITiCSE working groups, and other multi-institutional collaborations, such as BRACE, BRACElet and PhiCER. In 2007, he received, in conjunction with Jenny Edwards, a Carrick Institute Associate fellowship, one of only eight such fellowships awarded in 2007 to Australian academics across all disciplines.