Welcome to Teaching Impacts of Technology; Global Society. My name is Dr. Simon and I'm a computer scientist, an educator and a professor in Education Studies Department here at UC San Diego. But before I tell you anymore about me or this class, let me introduce you to a colleague. This is Art Lopez and I got to know Art, I don't know, maybe around 10 years ago, because one of his students came up to him at the school where he teaches math and said, "Mr. Lopez, how comes we don't have any computer science classes like kids in other school districts do?" He thought, that's a really good question, I need to look into that. What that led to was a great collaboration where Art started working with us in our efforts to bring professional development to help teachers who've been trained in other subjects, learn to teach computer science in the ways that we think all kids need to know computer. Art has been pretty successful. Here in his district, Sweetwater Union High School District, which is just South of San Diego and just North of the border with Mexico. Ten years later, they now have computer science courses in every high school in the district. That is making an immense change in the lives of the students there in terms of their careers and how they understand that computer science and computing really impacts our lives every day. That got me really involved in this movement which is popular in the United States right now called CS For All, which is a picture of my laptop. It's pride of place, I only have one sticker there and I do believe like many people around the nation and around the world that computer science and computational thinking are things that every student, every kid, every citizen, needs to know in the same way that we believe they all need to know reading, writing, and arithmetic. But, it's a real challenge to get enough teachers prepared and capable of teaching the kids the computing that we need, and that is part of the goal of this class. In this course, we'll be particularly looking at the impacts of computing on our culture, our social interactions and safety law and ethics. You might be familiar with this purple diagram. It comes from a set of standards that were recently produced by an international association called csteachers.org. Now, we know that whatever country or state you're in and might have different standards, but a lot of them are related to these. So, we'll use those as grounding. But, how are we going to look at impacts of computing? We're going to be taking a very problem-based approach. I mean, we're talking about impacts of computing on our lives, so let's use our lives as a place to start. Our lives have become so much more connected by technology and that has made us be more understanding of ourselves as a global society. You might live in a society where you feel like everybody has got tons of technology around them or that they're doing things all differently now either in your classroom or at work because technology and Internet connectivity is ubiquitous. But, it could be different in different places depending on where you live. For example, phones and smartphones are getting everywhere, not only because they're becoming cheaper and everybody can buy them, but because those of us who live in first-world countries are throwing them away and they're making it to other areas of the world where technology wasn't as available before. Technology is being used in lots of places including third-world countries that you or your students might not be aware of. It's causing some great benefits to maybe doctors are able to do better diagnoses in areas without a lot of infrastructure or a lot of electricity. There's this issue of micro-finance of people being able to get access to loans even if they can't get access to a physical bank. That startups really are starting up everywhere. However, in a global society, one of the things that has become obvious is that, depending on where we live, we might have different levels of the ability to speak freely. This really has become a thing because, free speech is different now. We all now have the ability to get our ideas out there, whether that be on and Twitter or Facebook or whatever, but suddenly that brings out a lot of the differences in the levels of free speech in various parts of the world. That the same technology has also changed how revolutions happen. Men used to be with guns and weapons and now maybe it's with Twitter and Facebook. So, we'll take a look at that. This ubiquitous technology leads to ever more problems with digital security. We need to keep our devices secure including maybe when we take them with us and to other countries. What are the new ways that we can have that security available to us? We'll then dig underneath to some of the technologies that are important behind all of these ideas. For example, if your access to Twitter, Facebook or Google is blocked or limited in some way by the country you live in, maybe one way you can get around it is using a VPN or Virtual Private Network. If you're going to tweet a revolution, maybe something you need to care about is battery low and how do you extend it as much as possible. So, we will use that as an excuse honestly just to look a little bit into batteries in our technology. That will lead us to think about all the new devices that we now have in the world that want to be connected to the Internet. A recent change that happened in the structure of the design of the Internet moving us from something called IPv4 to IPv6. Don't worry if you know nothing about it, we will let you learn about it, but basically, we made this change so that we could accommodate many more devices being connected on the Internet. Downside of the connectivity all the time is that now the bad guys in various ways can try to attack us not with machetes and guns, but maybe by keeping us from being able to be connected. So, maybe you've heard of a DDOS attack maybe not. Distributed Denial of Service is what it stands for. We'll look into the basics of that that you might want to share with your students and that will lead us to just a little bit of understanding about Bitcoin, which you may have heard about it and it's a virtual currency. What are the pros and cons behind it and little bit about how it works. As we look into pedagogy, this course, we're going to look at the importance of formative feedback and of course as teachers, you do this all the time. This is your bread and butter. Giving students the formative feedback they need to so they can be successful in learning the standards they need. However, I'm going to talk with you a little bit, especially if you're becoming a new computer science teacher, about the real importance of formative feedback in computer science. Because, so many of our students may have had an experience with an instructor who led them in some way to think that maybe computer science wasn't for them. Therefore, for those students it's really important that we provide formative feedback to help them understand that everybody might be struggling in learning computing, but we can all do it. Finally, we have a couple of great activities I think you'll like doing yourself and using with your students. One of them is, we're going to explore this website where you can look at what are the top apps in various countries. So, it's great to have students take a step outside of their own comfort zone and look at what are the apps that people are using and other countries for various things, be that education or communication or travel or what not. Then finally, we'll look at TEDEd lesson. Maybe you've seen these maybe you haven't. It's a shorter version of Ted Talk type things, but specifically designed for K-12 education in general and with a lesson plan associated around it. We'll use a TEDEd lesson on self-driving cars, but in a different way than we had before and looking at the ethical decisions that are going to switch from being human ethical decisions to encoded decisions made by an algorithm. We'll have you guys create better formative assessment for this TEDEd lesson. So, if you're excited to learn and think about how we want to engage our students with learning about how technology is impacting our global society, I hope you'll join us in this class.
