Computer Literacy: An Educational Experiment

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The aim:

Revising and transforming the DeLong and Olney textbook for the modern age:
- Post 2007-9 Second Great Crash
- Post 2008-2018 Great Recession/Lesser Depression
Lightening the grading load on GSIs...
Teaching some useful data manipulation (and other data science) tools...

Why iClickers?

Important feedback mechanisms for us up here…
- How many times was I sitting where you were now, feeling completely lost?
- And realizing everybody else was completely lost too (except possibly for Seth Lloyd)
Important feedback mechanisms for you as well…
Part of structured repetition, which we need to learn
And TO WAKE YOU UP!!!!

Education and Technology in 1450

Just how many copies of the Nicomachean Ethics are there in Western Scotland, anyway? Listen to the book being read aloud, and take your notes
LECTURE: NOUN: An educational talk to an audience, especially one of students in a university. ‘in each course there are supporting lectures and tutorials’. Origin: Late Middle English (in the sense ‘reading, a text to read’): from Old French, or from medieval Latin lectura, from Latin lect- ‘read, chosen’, from the verb legere.
Max Roser: In 1483… [for] three florins… Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies whereas the scribe would produce one copy for one florin. This implies that the cost per book decreased 341 times with the introduction of the printing press… http://tinyurl.com/ybvbww3n
Another factor of 20 since: $70,000 -> $10

Post-Gutenberg

Markets for textbooks:

Suppose there were a bunch of textbooks, all about equally good
The market would “work”
It would be a machine for providing people with what the need at the full social cost of production—but no more
The problem is that there is one textbook that is a better fit—the assigned textbook. So they can charge more—up to a limit price, where people start to think the textbook with the best fit is not worth it. And they do.
But each book is the “best fit” book for its own home courses. The market can—and does—settle at an equilibrium in which each book charges the full monopoly price for its home courses. And they compete not on price but on services to peel away other books’ home courses

Berkeley's textbook burden:

20,000 x 8 x $200 = $32,000,000 per year
What could we do with $32 million/year?
Why do we accept this?
It is the professors’ fault
- They decide on books and course structure
- They don’t “feel” the impact of their decisions on students’ pocketbooks
- And, for the most part, they don’t think—or do not think very hard…
- My high school rolled the cost of books into tuition…

What Is to Be Done?

Peeling back the curtain

The Knotty Question of Machines in Class

Four Stages in the western European academic intellectual tradition:

The Visible College: Scribal literacy and Roman numeracy
The Invisible College: Print literacy and Arabic numeracy
The Republic of Letters: Enlightenment critical thinking and the scientific method
The Unseen University...

Rules for Computer Programming

Three principles:
- Find a program that does almost what you want to do:
- Inspect the source code…
- Tweak it and see if that does the job…
Google the error message…
Deep Wizardry…
- Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman (1993): Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: "Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform. A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring…"

Things Go Wrng!

Gandalf the Grey, Python νB, confronting unexpected behavior from a Python pandas.DataFrame:

Why Python?

Something Seth Lloyd said to me in May: "I have made it a lifelong goal to only have to know one computer language at a time..." He has had some success in his career as a "Quantum Mechanic"
Berkeley as Close to Python Central
Python as Least Unfriendly: Kunal Marwaha: "Python... the functionality of a general-purpose language but with different “packages” for different disciplines… Python is friendly to novices. Most languages can do what you need, but efficiency depends on how quickly you can learn it…
The user community of each language makes a big difference: Python is the fifth most popular programming language and is open source.

Teaching Economics