NEW FACES IN THE COMPUTING LANDSCAPE
“NOT YOUR FATHER’S OLDSMOBILE!”
William Mitchell
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Little Rock, AR 72204
wmmitchell@ualr.edu
ABSTRACT
With the publication of Curriculum ’68 Computer Science asserted that it was distinct from Mathematics and was able to list enough computing topics to justify a unique undergraduate major. Curriculum 2001 describes Computer Science as an academic discipline thirty-three years later, but also to be described are distinct curricula in software engineering, computer engineering, and information systems. However, this is just the work of an ACM/IEEE Computer Society Task Force. There are now other branches of academe offering computing degrees. This paper looks at the proliferation of computing majors and the professional organizations behind them. It also looks at how new colleges, called IT colleges, are in some universities trying to bring all the different computing majors under one roof (or Dean). Finally, the author offers some suggestions to the majority of faculty who work in higher education institutions that try to squeeze computing into one or two majors.
NEW COMPUTING MAJORS
By 1981 undergraduate computing had already divided into Computer Engineering (IEEE ’76 report) , Computer Science (ACM Curriculum ’78), and Computer Information Systems (IS (Curriulum Recommendations Report, Couger ’73 (updated by Nunamaker, ’82), augmented by the DPMA Curriculum ‘81). Another variety of computing, data processing, was taught in community colleges at the certificate and associate degree level. It was customary to depict computing as a bar with hardware (engineering) at one end, software (computer science) in the middle, and applications (CIS) at the other end. The DPMA curriculum model decreed that CIS should be offered in a business context, but there were already hundreds of computing programs that focused on programming and applications development much more than on the design of systems software. Some of these called themselves Applied Computer Science.
Today computing cannot be represented on a bar because there are now a greater variety of computing devices that must be designed, programmed and incorporated into vastly more heterogeneous contexts. Today computers are in cars, cameras, and credit cards, and these computers communicate with other devices on demand. Curricula are needed to train designers of computing devices from the size of a pinhead to massively parallel and networked devices. Curricula are needed to prepare those who will install and maintain these machines and their communication infrastructures. Curricula are needed to prepare those who will exploit this diversity of computing devices and bend their capabilities to meet user needs and wants. Beyond the present need is the need for people prepared to devise new contexts for computation and new techniques to make these computations feasible. Peter Denning [1] has suggest that students should be prepared for professions, that is to practice a particular variety of computing expertise with a specific focus. He suggests that the IT profession is composed of those whose focus is a specific IT discipline, AND those whose focus is a discipline that is IT-intensive, AND those whose job is IT-supportive (Table 1. shows his characterization of computing). The only advantage of so characterizing computer professionals is that it emphasizes that each focus might require a specific curriculum, some concepts and techniques that differentiates that focus (discipline) from its fellows.
Table 1. Denning’s IT disciplines
Denning has specifically criticized Computer Science as a discipline that is overly focused on theory and formal generalization. His critique is perhaps more valid about CS textbooks and those CS programs located in doctoral institutions than about the average undergraduate computer science program, but it does expose the discipline’s bias toward a mathematical representation of computing. Computer Science has stubbornly fought to focus on something other than programming, to focus on its science rather than its obvious applications. It has been the task of undergraduate CS instructors to distract freshmen from their interest in “doing things” on the computer and re-direct them to see that there is a science to be learned before dependable artifacts can be crafted. For three decades students have poured out of high school with the advice that computing skills were the key to the future, and they have signed up for degrees with the word “computer” in them. When there seemed to be just three major flavors of computing degrees in the 1980s, an explanation was given to justify both the difference in curricula requirements and the difference in career preparation. This is how Information Systems [2] explained itself:
There is a close relationship between Information Systems and Computer Science. In some schools, students in both areas may take common courses. However, Information Systems is unique in that its context is an organization and its information systems. This leads to important differences with Computer Science in the context of the work to be performed, the types of problems to be solved, the types of systems to be designed and managed, and the way the technology is employed. Information Systems concentrates on the organizational mission and objectives and the application of information technology to further these goals. Information Systems and Computer Science are distinct areas of study, but they both require a common subset of technical knowledge.
Information
Systems (as taught in Business programs, often with the prefix “Computer”
[CIS]) or Applied Computer Science (sometimes labeled just as CS but with a
clear applications focus) programs catered to students seeking
baccalaureate-level job credentials.
Computer Engineering is a popular off-shoot of Electrical Engineering,
but it is still an Engineering program whose associated mathematics and science
requirements discouraged amateur software enthusiasts. Accreditation standards formalized computer science further by enumerating the topics that must be included in the
curriculum, seeking in that list a deep introduction to “fundamentals” that
bore no obvious connection with what was occurring in the industry. But what seemed good for academic computer
science turned out not to be palatable to aspiring IT workers and the rapidly
specializing IT industry. A huge alternative computing education system has
emerged to prepare the solvers of the specific problems faced today, such as
the virtual reality industry (gaming and film as well as visualization), the
bioinformatics industry, the systems security industry, the e-commerce
industry, etc., the IT intensive professions in Denning’s list.
Higher education has begun to respond. An examination of what four-year computing degrees are being offered today at brick and mortar universities, reveals that while there have always been a wide diversity of degree titles used to describe the basic three flavors of computing, there are today some new degree programs with greatly different content and focus. Computer Science and Information Systems are usually represented on every campus, but now Software Engineering , Telecommunications or Network Technologies, Informatics, Information Science, and Information Technology degrees are present(see Table 2). These are all technical degrees offered as an alternative to one of the traditional three (sometimes by the same department) and are predominantly available either in large institutions that have created new academic units to host interdisciplinary IT specializations, or in technical institutions that have proliferated their technical degrees. There is a good deal of content variability as well as overlap with CS in most of these new programs, a consequence of their entrepreneurial origins (only Software Engineering has a national curriculum model). Information Technology tends towards web applications or networking. Information Science and Informatics tend to incorporate a user component focused on user/system issues. All seem to corroborate Denning’s thesis that traditional formalizations of computing are too confining: “There's no way traditional computer science can prepare people for all these professional specialties. Computer science has become one of many IT specialties, with a kind of special status that comes to the parents of a large family. I've had to break out of an old mold of believing that only a degree-carrying computer scientist can be a full member of the IT profession.” [3]
The struggle between a professional view and an academic view of computing has been going on within computer science with respect to software engineering almost from the beginning. It has taken thirty years for academe to accept the critical importance of integrating the understanding of human and economic factors with the technology of software production. Academic disciplines study phenomena and it seemed so right that computer science be the discipline that studied the phenomena surrounding computing devices. Computer Science had to work hard to keep that focus because of the continual temptation to digress into the role of computing in society, the much broader phenomena surrounding the use of computing devices. Whatever the degree of success that Computer Science has enjoyed, the arrival of the Information Age has now forced attention to that new broad field of study, which for want of a better name has been termed Information Technology. It is the task of the 21st century to elaborate this new discipline.
New Degree Titles |
Universities currently offering |
|
Software Engineering |
UT Dallas, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Rochester Institute of Technology, Southern Polytechnic State University, Auburn University, Milwaukee School of Engineering, MonmouthUniversity, Drexel University, Mississippi State University |
|
Telecommunications or Network Technologies |
SUNY Institute of Technology, University of Denver, DePaul University, Roosevelt University |
|
Informatics |
Baylor, University of Washington, Indiana University |
|
Information Science |
Pittsburgh, UALR, SUNY Oswego, Christopher Newport University, UNC-Chapel Hill, Radford University, Northeastern University, Temple University, Villanova University |
|
Information Technology |
George Mason University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Armstrong Atlantic State University, NJ Institute of Technology, Penn St University, UMKC, University of Miami, Southern Polytechnic State University,Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
|
|
|
Table 2. New IT degree categories
Since the uses of computing are pervasive, the phenomena of this use likewise transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. IT is a multi-disciplinary discipline. In a recent attempt to characterize the new discipline Larry Finkelstein and Carole Hafner at Northeastern University proposed a new continuum stretching not from hardware to applications, but “from fundamental computing principles (far left), to the impact of technology on society (far right). In the center are the information design sub-disciplines, where cognitive/social constraints meet the technical constraints of computing. Although most topics, e.g., user interface design, can be represented as an interval on the continuum, some areas, such as security, are concerned with issues that span the continuum, from the performance of encryption algorithms to the laws that govern privacy rights. (Figure 1)” [4].
In April 2001 the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded a six-month internal study to recommend to the Provost how the University should respond to the emerging IT discipline they defined as follows:
Information science and technology is inherently multidisciplinary. IST curriculum, research, and development span the range of designing and creating computing devices, systems software, and computer applications in a wide variety of fields. It also explores how people interact with computing and communication systems, as well as how computer systems can model human behavior and a broad range of scientific and societal phenomena. Its foundations also include theoretical understanding of the capabilities of computation, and the design and analysis of algorithms. [5]
NEW VIEWS ON EDUCATING AN IT WORKFORCE
The University of Colorado is not alone in devoting high-level attention to the IT discipline for their committee was able to analyze dozens of institutions (many listed in Table 2) that had already begun the process of pursuing the new discipline and confronting it multi-disciplinary nature. “The overarching theme of the report’s discussion about information science and technology opportunities and structural possibilities is the need for boldness and agility. The campus must be agile, flexible, and responsive to changing technological environments, and to subsequent changing needs or foci in IST-related curriculum and research. It must be structured to facilitate and reward the risk-taking and multidisciplinary collaboration that the development of such new programs will require.”[5]
Deans from many like-minded institutions had organized in June 2000, under the sponsorship of the Computer Research Association to share insight and experiences in their efforts to address the technical workforce crises that rose to national attention during the dot.com boom (see Table 3 [6]). At issue in this group is how to structure an IT-focused unit that crosses department and college boundaries, how to attract and promote faculty in a multidisciplinary environment, how to present new degree programs to faculty councils, prospective students, and employers (who have provided a warm reception), and how to fund all of these activities. Some of IT Deans represent graduate-only units because they are easily formed as institutes or centers to do research in IT areas. The majority of the IT units have been created by reorganizing departments and programs within the university to bring together those with an IT focus. Indiana University is unusual in that it was created as the first new school at IU in 28 years and given the mission to offer BS, MS, and PhD programs in Informatics. It has begun with jointly-appointed faculty while it hires its own, and with instruction offered by other units while it readies its own curriculum. Funding has come from a legislative appropriation along with considerable support from local industry and foundations.
At Indiana [7] “Informatics is a new field of study that gives students the skills to apply information technology to another field — from health care to journalism to biology to economics.
Informatics is...
§ understanding the impact technology has on people.
§ the development of new uses for technology.
§ the application of information technology in the context of another field”
The Cybercollege of Arkansas at UALR was similarly funded by a legislative appropriation, but it was configured with four legacy departments from the College of Science and Technology, including Computer Science, and created two new departments: Systems Engineering and Information Science.[8] Radford University plucked departments from several colleges to form its IT unit.[9] It was no surprise to find in small survey of IT Colleges [10] that the subject areas covered in the colleges comprise the same mixture of topics offered at universities a decade ago, but now they are clustered into a single academic unit (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Subject areas Covered by IT program (survey of 19 schools).
HOW WILL COMPUTER EDUCATION BE AFFECTED?
Computer Science will not wither, but it will be changed. Programs housed in small institutions with Liberal Arts traditions have battled the tendency of computer science toward theory for years and they will now have the justification to present computer applications technology in a more humanistic context, whether or not they opt to change the degree name. Most computing programs in this environment have been market driven and have actually been presenting the new IT view of computing to their students.
|
Albany-SUNY Brigham Young Buffalo-SUNY Carnegie Mellon Central Florida Colorado at Boulder Cornell Dalhousie DePaul Drexel Florida State George Mason
|
Georgia Southern Georgia Tech Hawaii at Manoa Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Illinois State Indiana Iowa Long Island Michigan Nebraska-Omaha Nevada-Las Vegas
|
New Jersey Institute of Technology North Carolina-Charlotte Northeastern Pace Penn State Pittsburgh Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
|
Rochester Institute of Technology South Alabama Tokyo University of Technology United Arab Emirates UALR UC-Berkeley UC-Irvine UC-Santa Cruz Utah Virginia Tech Washington West Florida |
Table 3. Universities with IT colleges
Computing faculty in large institutions will be asked to seriously consider reorganizing themselves as IT units. The University of Colorado study analyzes four different feasible structures for the IT unit and lists their strengths and weaknesses. Restructuring the University in the near term is motivated by financial considerations as much as logic, as it makes the university more competitive for federal and private research contracts that are now increasingly multi-disciplinary. Over the long term aligning academic units according to professional consideration is part of the status quo (Colleges of Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Health, Medicine, etc.), so with the increasing awareness of IT as a profession, the College of IT will follow.
Computing faculty will have to learn some new terms and adjust to some new colleagues. Besides the business and the engineering perspectives, IT will benefit from the contributions of the librarians (information architecture), the systems engineer, and the biologist. New professional societies have formed (e.g. INCOSE for Systems Engineering) or have developed within existing organizations (the American Society for Information Science and Technology [11] hosts information architecture and ACM will host the Society for IT Educators (SITE) [12]) to represent these new computing branches.
Undergraduate computing will increasingly specialize along problem dimensions. Animation, networks, e-commerce, wireless-telephony, and bioinformatics are merely the current IT-intensive areas that are demanding attention. The skills the each requires are largely disjoint. Knowledge of compilers and operating systems, or of database, or of AI will be of use to any professional (knowledge is good!) but finding fundamental knowledge that is common to all will be increasingly difficult. The definition of what any well-educated computer scientist should be acquainted with has guided the development of three or four computer science curriculum recommendations. But the response to what should a well-educated e-commerce professional know is not likely to overlap with either the knowledge of a traditional computer scientist or with the knowledge of a well-educated bioinformaticist. There is already work toward IT-fluency that will broaden the scope originally in the computers and society courses of the 1980s, blending in the skills of the current computing tools courses. Academe will seek a higher level of IT skill from all graduates, and this, with perhaps a year of programming, may constitute the hub from which the various IT major spokes will emanate.
All IT disciplines share the computer, but they differ as to what about the computer is of greatest interest to the application. Unfortunately, the new disciplines use the vocabulary of computer science and engineering with their own connotation, and as technologists strive to deal more concretely with the user and the “soft side” of computer applications, they are also encountering unfamiliar connotations for the user-centric vocabulary. The need to accommodate the hard and the soft is recognized and is being addressed by every group. For example, in talking about a curriculum for Information Architecture, Don Latham [13] notes the value of both computer science and information systems:
[S]ome knowledge of programming languages and database design can help the information architect to understand more fully the possibilities available for creating information structures. Such knowledge could also help the information architect be a more effective project manager in working with the computer programmers and database designers on the project team. An understanding of information systems, both the hardware and software components, would be useful as well to the information architect involved in implementing and maintaining a content management system.
Andrew Dillon represented the relationship of IA to other disciplines in Figure 3. [14] It is interesting that the IT professional is usually presented as a team participant engaged in creating a complex application, and each IT specialist is prepared to be the team leader.
Figure 3. Context of IA
Rochester Institute of Technology claims to have implemented the first undergraduate IT major, and their website explains that the IT professional is a user’s advocate.
This role of user's advocate is diverse and multifaceted. In order to "make things work" for people in today's (and tomorrow's) sophisticated computing environments, information technologists need three general competencies:1) facility with current tools and technologies for networking, application development, digital media, and electronic publishing; 2) experience with the process of technology integration and deployment in a user community, including needs assessment, design, development, technology transfer, and ongoing support; and 3) an individual professional focus in some area like network and system administration, Web and multimedia development, client-server databases, learning and performance technology, or custom application development. [15]
Dean Jorge Diaz-Herrera of RIT’s College of Computing and Information Sciences proposes that the computing professions span from Theory to Solutions in a very wide band that encompasses more than technical knowledge but also knowledge of social and economic issues and human factors. His diagram in Figure 4 rolls all the IT disciplines other than computer science and software engineering into Information Technology. [16]
Figure 4. RIT’s categorization of Information Technology
As a degree program Information Technology has the advantage over IA in that undergraduate programs already exist and much work has been done by faculty to define a model curriculum. A report on the tentative structure of this curriculum was made to the ASEE Annual Conference in 2002 by a group of faculty who have participated in the three conferences on IT curriculum that have lead to the formation of SITE. This curriculum is influenced by RIT, the host of the third conference, and its structure is shown in Table 4 . “Table [4] …gives some powerful insight into one way of defining an IT curriculum for all IT programs across the nation. The strong number of mentions for the Core Courses indicates to these authors that all IT programs should consist of at least one course in each of these areas. It is these topics, in combination, that define the domain of Information Technology.”[17]
|
General Education |
# |
Related Courses |
# |
Professional Courses |
# |
Core Courses |
# |
|
Math |
31 |
Hardware: arch. & cir. |
25 |
Human communications |
56 |
Networking |
109 |
|
Holistic |
10 |
Thinking/prob. solv. |
21 |
Project management |
36 |
Software |
52 |
|
General education |
6 |
Embedded systems |
10 |
Teamwork |
20 |
Web systems design |
48 |
|
Physics |
4 |
Information content |
9 |
Enterprise topics |
18 |
Database |
44 |
|
|
|
System administration |
8 |
Ethics |
17 |
Digital communication |
35 |
|
|
|
Evaluation |
5 |
Social factors |
9 |
Data security/privacy |
33 |
|
|
|
Graphics |
2 |
Co-ops |
2 |
Systems design |
28 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Human-comp. interface |
24 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
User advocacy |
24 |
Table 4. IT Curriculum topics by category and by relative agreement of participants
The ascendancy of IT as a discipline and the professionalization of IT has begun and is gaining speed. Looking back, we can recognize that it is an inevitable part of the Information Age. Faculty should begin to revise the advice they give to freshman about computing careers. The opportunities to do computing in the next decade will be considerably more diverse than in the last. Keeping an academic perspective on IT will be considerably more challenging for faculty than were the three traditional flavors of computing. Curriculum revision and expansion will become more frequent and it will be increasingly difficult to keep the curriculum neatly cohesive. However, we are not alone; our colleagues across the campus are also caught up in IT and its multidisciplinary nature is reinvigorating everyone.
REFERENCES
1. Denning, Peter J., “The Profession of IT, Who Are We?”, Communications of the ACM, (44,2) February 2001, p 15-19.
2. IS'97 Model Curriculum and Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Systems , AITP, 1997. (www.is2000.org/is97/rev/review1.html)
3. Denning, Peter J., “The Future of the IT Profession” Interview with P. Denning, in ACM Ubiquity, (1,5) March 2000, published on the web atwww.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/p_denning_1.html.
4. Finkelsteain, Larry, and Carole Hafner, “The Evolving Discipline(s) of IT (and their relation to computer science): A Framework for Discussion,” presented February 2002, http://www.cra.org/Activities/itdeans/finkelstein.pdf.
5. ITEC Final Report—Executive Summary, http://www.colorado.edu/Committees/itc/itec/itecexecfinal.htm).
6. http://www.cra.org/Activities/itdeans/home.html
7. http://www.informatics.indiana.edu
8. Mitchell, William, “Information Technology Education, One State's Experience,” Journal of Computing in Small Colleges (17, 4), March 2002 pp. 123-132.
9. Chase, J. D., “The Design and Deveelopment of the College of Information Technology at Radford University,” SIGCSE Bulletin (33,1), March 2001, p. 416-7.
10. http://www.acm.org/top/coc/IT-school-survey.html
11. www.asis.org
12. SITE website: http://site.it.rit.edu
13. Latham, Don, “Information Architecture: Notes Toward a New Curriculum,” JASIST (53,10) September 2002, p. 828.
14. Dillon, Andrew, “Information Architecture why, what & when?” presentation at AI Summit 2000, referenced on the web February 1, 20003 at http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2000/dillon/index.htm
15. http://www.it.rit.edu/
16. referenced on the web February 1, 2003 at http://www.rit.edu/%7Egccis/yourFutureComputing/index.html
17. Lunt, Barry M., Edith A. Lawson, Gordon Goodman, C. Richard G. Helps, “Designing an IT Curriculum:The Results of the First CITC Conference” referenced on the web February1,2003 at www2.gasou.edu/coba/depts/sit/ CITC/Curriculum/provo.doc