CARLIS Colloquium: Love, Learning, and Computing Education

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. This week's speaker, Amy J. Ko (University of Washington, Seattle), will be giving a talk titled "Love, Learning, and Computing Education"

Abstract

We live in a world that is increasingly full of hate, cruelty, and violence. These cultural forces are destabilizing schools, colleges, universities, libraries, and other places of informal learning, and every learner, teacher, and leader in them, threatening education and democracy in the U.S. and worldwide. What is our role, as computing educators and scholars, in resisting this hate? In this talk, I argue for love. A kind of love that shows up not as an abstraction in our values, but in the concrete ways that we teach computing, in the questions we ask about learning computing, in the technologies we create to support computing education, and in what we choose to teach about computing. To make this case, I examine my own experiences with love in computing education and then offer a conception of love in computing education, drawing upon a rich history of scholarship on love and learning. I then deconstruct some of the fundamental tensions between love, computing, and computing education culture. I end with several examples of loving computing education from scholars in our community, each showing us how we might reimagine our teaching, research, and institutions around love. Through this transformation, I hope we might inspire a generation of youth to help create both loving uses of computing, a loving society more broadly, and perhaps a more loving scholarly community for ourselves.

Biography

Amy J. Ko studies equitable, liberatory learning and teaching about computing and information, in schools and beyond. She draws upon computing, education, learning sciences, behavioral sciences, sociology, and more, examining and reimagining learning through a transdisciplinary lens. Her work spans more than 140 peer-reviewed publications, with 23 receiving distinguished paper awards and 6 receiving most influential paper awards. She is an ACM Distinguished Member and a member of the SIGCHI Academy, for her substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, computing education, and software engineering. She is Professor and Associate Dean for Academics at the University of Washington Information School, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science & Engineering. She is also a proud biracial trans woman of color, mother, and community organizer for equity in K-12 education in the Pacific Northwest, which includes civil rights and sanctuary for transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming youth.