This thread is now available as a blog post:
https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto
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In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:
1. I was (and am) named Paul.
2. The prof, Cal Roetzel, was (and is) cool.
I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.
WHAT LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS FOR: A THREAD
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@DoctorDNS@masto.ai@inthehands I convinced my university (CMU) that programming language courses should count as foreign language courses. I argued that it allowed me to communicate with computers, the same way that learning German would help me communicate with, well, Germans. They bought the concept!
@DoctorDNS Heh, that is a very CMU story!
Our Director of Writing argued to me that my Software Design and Development course should be designated as fulfilling one of the writing requirements, since coding is writing. I replied that she is absolutely correct, but I didn’t want the designation because our computer science majors also need to be able to communicate with humans, even if their only function in life were to write software!
as it happens, I'm pretty sure a computing language first satisfied the language requirement (for chemists) my first year of grad school
@DoctorDNS@masto.ai@idlestate @inthehands I did it in 1971
oh, that's cool. mine was ... later.
and I meant 'first' only in the context of that program.
@DoctorDNS@masto.ai@idlestate @inthehands I was at CMU when they did not offer a BSc in Comp Sci. Only Grad degrees. So I created a student-defined degree in "BSc Computer Problem Solving" - a combination of psychology and comp sci. Some awesome profs, including Herb Simon. But that was back in the early 1970s, and the Interweb was in it real infancy. #Node12
@DoctorDNS @idlestate We now have many students taking / majoring in both psych and CS. It’s a well-recognized power combo. You were ahead of your time.
@DoctorDNS@masto.ai@inthehands @idlestate Indeed. I decided after my 2nd year I wanted to go into Computing., But the CS dept did not do BSc. So Imoved from the Engineering college into the Margaret Morrison Carnegie College where I, technically got my BSc from. HOw times have changed.