Video Description
Coding For Everyone: Democratizing the Power of Digital Knowledge
Christine Goutrie, an interaction designer and professor, discusses the need to make coding education more inclusive and accessible. She highlights systemic barriers to digital literacy, the lack of diversity in programming, and the importance of integrating personal experiences into learning. The lecture challenges biases and myths about coding, emphasizing the role of education in democratizing digital knowledge.
TRANSCRIPT
Coding for everyone, democratizing the power of digital knowledge.
Very often, when I speak about digital knowledge, people expect an objective introduction to it, and they also expect an objective or professional introduction of myself. So I tell them that I’m an interaction designer with a background to computer science, that I had a professorship for technologies, for Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Magdeburg, and since more than 10 years, I have a professorship at the weissensee School of Art and Design Berlin, for foundation of digital media. But does that include me as a person, as a whole person in the classroom? And I refer here to Bell Hooks, who described in teaching to Transgress that it’s essential pedagogy that dares to subvert the mind body split so include the mind and the body into the classroom, and therefore allow us to be whole in the classroom, and as a consequence, wholehearted. And that’s what I really try in this introduction to coding for everyone also. And I found an very interesting concept to help with this integration into digital media teaching it’s a concept called factography, and that’s a concept it’s more than 100 years old, was developed in the Soviet Union, and there is a extra video lecture about the factography itself. What it helps with is to explain from what perspectives do I speak, not just one perspective, but my many perspectives, and also that they have an influence also on my view of digital media, for instance, very specific that my languages I speak and read English and German, they limit the possibilities of my research and my interests also limit the way I can teach digital media, and therefore my own positionality is always with me in the classroom. And the question is, is it there without talking about it, or is do I talk about it and open space also for the different positionalities of everyone within the room, within the classroom, and in my case, very briefly, only some examples.
It’s that I grew up in East Germany, so my first passport was not the German passport was but a passport of the German Democratic Republic. And now I have a so called German passport from the Federal Republic of Germany. I’m a gender non conforming person. I live open lesbian. I’m a parent of biological kids, a non biological kid. I’m also a white parent of a black child. With my professorship, I am socially secured, I’m able body and I could continue. And all this positionality has influence on my view of digital media, so I always include that in the teaching itself. What is it? What do I mean with the coding for everyone? It’s mostly about digital literacy. Yeah, and it’s digital literacy. It’s important to realize that, of course, the digital media are changing the world around us, and it’s also changing our thinking and our perception of the world, but it’s also important to keep in mind that it took us a long time to acquire the more traditional media, like the written language, reading and writing. It took a few centuries till every or most people in Europe were able to acquire these fluency or literacy, and if we look back when the first computers were built, it’s only 80 years ago, it’s a pretty short time, and we still need possibilities and resources or. Also to gain digital literacy. And digital literacy for all the foundation of digital media is, or are bits and bytes. And bits and bytes are just materials. Yeah, they are just materials from which digital media forms are created. The mission for this lecture on coding for everyone is to offer the possibility for everyone to acquire an eloquence and ease in dealing with digital technology and tools, and it’s not just using the tools, but it’s also whiting digital media and also to satisfy the technological desire. So that you ask yourself, how exactly does it work, and what I have, what, what I have to do to create something of my own. Yeah, this dealing of being productive with the digital media. In this topic, coding is my synonym for digital literacy, for digital fluency, but also for a basic understanding of coding. How does programming code work for basic understanding of algorithms? What are they? So in general, it’s a synonym for a basic understanding of digital systems. Usually, if I teach in front of an audience, I ask the people, how many of you have done coding, and I mean just one line of code or two, not really complex programs, just how many of you have done coding. And usually, I teach classes of 15 to 18 students, so I just took 17 and for the last 11 years at the Weissensee Art Academy for art and design, usually it’s two people, two out of 17 in some groups, it’s only one. In some groups, it’s four or three, but in general, it’s usually, and there’s no change in sight. Yeah, for more than 11 years, it’s two out of 17. And what does it mean? We have to talk. We have to talk because only 12% and let it be 20, it’s still very little. Yeah, 12% of every group have already written lines of code themselves. And therefore we have to talk about the power of knowledge. Who has it and who has it not, and which structures are responsible for the current situation, because that also means 88% or let it be, 75% of students cannot use digital materials as fluently as analog materials for their artistic expression and designs, and if you cannot participate or shape the digital world, the digital systems, your contribution is lacking, we are missing the digital voices of you who cannot code and come on. It’s 2024 why? Yeah. Why is it that way? Why? What if it’s about power structures? What if it’s about discrimination? What if it’s about racism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, you name it. What if it’s about a clue, exclusive mechanisms? Interesting enough. When I ask students afterwards, why can’t you code, most students start their explanations with, I, I did not. I have not. I was not. And that’s the point where I tell them, It’s not your fault. And by the way, this is the most important slide of the whole lecture, yeah, so it’s not your fault, yeah? What if it’s the propaganda out there? Yeah, because that’s the way discrimination usually works, that you you are told that’s your individual problem. Yeah, you could have done that, but you didn’t. Okay, so it’s your fault. No, it’s not. Yeah, no, it’s not.
You are not the type of people you were told so many times. Yeah, many people didn’t like math, physics, chemistry. In school. But is it the problem of the people or the students, or it is how, how these subjects are taught in school? Usually, the computer science courses were boring, or you heard to learn coding, you have to be very smart, yeah, and in the end, many, many, many people do not have the self esteem for just start coding, because also representation matters. Yeah, and that’s which kind of images do we have in mind if we think about coding? Yeah, coding, programming is still a very white, male dominated area, and we, all of us, even me, we do not have very diverse images in our minds. So that has to change. You hardly know any female programmers. Usually, I brought you a few here just to give you an example. Yeah, Hedy Lamarr, for instance, an Austrian. If you research Heidi Lamar on the World Wide Web, you will find a lot of photos of her as as an actress, because she was a movie star by her time, she was born in Vienna, and she fled Austria during Nazi time to the US, and she was very successful as a movie star, but also as an inventor. And she got together with a friend, she even got an patent in the US for a technology which is called frequency hopping, or radio technology, yeah. So this was really important technology. It was developed during the war to avoid torpedoes hitting ships, but it’s still in use. And frequency hopping technology is still the basis of GPS, for instance. So and it’s part of all our mobile phones, but a lot of people never even heard about Heidi ller, for instance, another one, Jean Janek Bartik, she was one of the women who programmed the first electronic computer of the World, and she also wrote a very interesting autobiography about it so and the interesting story here is that even though only women program this first electronic computer, it took more than 70 years to make this knowledge more available to people, Even I studied computer science. Never heard about that before. Yeah. Or Katherine Johnson, who worked in the 60s, late, late 50s and in the 60s for the NASA and had really important work, or did really important work for the mercury and also the Apollo missions to the moon. It also took 50/60, years to make this contributions more broadly known, and in 2015 Catherine Johnson, because she really became very old. Even got the Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama for her contribution. Or Stephanie Shirley, Dame, Stephanie Shirley, actual, she was she was born in Dortmund in a Jewish family, and she was sent as a Jewish kid with a so called Kinder transport to the UK to be saved from the Nazis. And there she founded, in 1962 a company which was called F international group, and this company was a software company, and first of all, people, mostly men, laughed at her that a company which only produces software, not building computers, but only focusing on software, would not be successful and interesting enough in and I repeat the time. It was 1962 she hired only women, and she hired mostly so called freelance women who worked from home. It was the early 60s. So a lot of women, or quite some women, also earned degrees in mathematics and cybernetics and physics, but they usually were not couldn’t find jobs at companies because they either didn’t hire women or there was no childcare at all available. So Stephanie Shirley founded this company and hired the women as freelancers, which who could work from home. That was really innovative, but still, it was really, really difficult to acquire jobs. And so she decided to sign all her letters applications with Steve, not Stephanie anymore, but Steve and the company skyrocked, yeah, at some point, she was the third richest female in the UK, or Christian Floyd, important person in the German context, because she was the first computer science professor in Germany. She got the first professorship in at the Technical University of Berlin. Later on, moved to Hamburg, and she also, far, she was always very critical also about the the influence the computer science can have on society. And she also founded the forum Informatica in Frieden. Frieden So also, but also very unknown, yeah, even though she’s an important person in the digital media field or computer science field, or Adil Goldberg, who developed programming language. It’s called small talk. It was the first of its kind, and it’s so called an object oriented programming language, yeah. And we are still dealing with object oriented programming in all our computers we are using today because this concept, this programming concept, is a basis, not only for C Plus Plus, but also for Java. And this is the basis for all the operating systems also we are using today, or the last person here on this list, la tua Patterson, who’s really important person in the computer games industry. She also had a very YouTube video series about girls, girls in games, and she’s also highlighting the necessity of diversifying the computer game area a lot and supports also Black Girls CODE. So these are only a few to show you female programmers. And now the question for black, indigenous people of color, programmers and I also brought you a small list here. It’s first is melboroughton, also working for the NASA and especially developing an education program for introducing mostly women to computing and programming. Bucha pageu is also called the mother of computers in China, who worked for many decades in China. She also wrote books about computers and programming and as a very big influence in the independent development of the computer industry in China. Or Nick we know who was the director of ICANN for some time. He’s a professor in computer scientists in Ghana.
And most of you will ask, what is ICANN? That’s also really interesting that almost nobody knows what ICANN stands for. It’s the organization organizing the internet. Yeah, the ICANN is the worldwide organization organizing the internet. When Nicola was director of this organization for quite some time, and was also very engaged in the development of the infrastructure for the internet on the African continent, or John Henry Thompson, also computer scientist who developed a programming language called lingu for a product, what’s called Macromedia Director, which was for quite many. Least 20 years or so, the Software prototyping tool for mostly designers. Yeah, so very interesting and amazing programming language called lingo was also developed by him and the last one, Erica Baker, you see her here at the Tech Tech Talk, because she’s quite famous, because she’s not only a computer scientist, but also an activist, and most mostly known for her activism at Google, because at Google also, like all the other big tech companies, no one spoke about about the salaries, and she just started and questionnaire, or not, a questionnaire, Just a spreadsheet. She put her name and her annual salary in it, and asked all the colleagues if they want to join on a voluntary basis, of course. And the result was amazing or not, not in a positive way, but it showed clearly that men earned a lot more money than the women at Google, and that black people, or black indigenous people of color, earned much less than all the white people, even white women. So she left Google after that, but started this discussion about the differences and the pay gaps, and not just the gender pay gap. And she also worked for GitHub, Slack and Microsoft, so this is just to show you that representation is important, and we mostly do not know about programmers computer scientists, besides white males. And this is one really important aspect why a lot of people do not think that coding or programming is something for them. And another aspect I want to highlight here is that coding seems to require natural talent. That’s a myth that is really consistent still. And the problem with that is that this natural talent in coding is usually not expected in girls and women, yeah, and we just take the parameter of female students in computer science as an indicator, yeah, so we just Think about how many women do study computer science, just to get an impression how the different societies deal with these myths of a natural talent. And I know it sounds very binary, only female and women and men and male, on the other hand, but the statistical data, unfortunately, do not provide any other gender categories. So far, in Germany, we have the situation that’s for most of the time. For the last 30 years, around 20% of women study in computer science, and the problem is that it’s not only that women are not encouraged to study computer science, but the other half of these general categories the male and boys, they are also affected by these gendered expectation, because many of them are not also not gender stereotypical, and they also think it’s not for them. So we are losing quite a lot of people to these stereotypes, and I brought you some statistics to question this myth of the natural talent. Here we have statistics from the US, and it shows clearly that in the 1960s we have very low rates of women studying all kinds of subjects, medical school, law school, physical science and computer science, yeah. So it started. It starts between five and 15% and then in all subject, the numbers increase consistently. Yeah, they increase and most in most of the subject. The increase, not right to 50% but reaching almost 50% except computer science in the mid 80s, we have a steep decline of the numbers in computer science, yeah. Interestingly, in in West Germany, we didn’t even have this this high numbers of 37% in the West Germany, it stayed most of the time around 20% but in the US, we have this really steep decline. And historians explain that that mid 80s was the time when personal computer became available, at least to middle class households, because they only cost two to $3,000 so middle class households were able to acquire personal computers, and most of the personal computer advertisements advertise them for fathers and their sons and not for the girls. So that’s not might not be the only reason, but it’s definitely one reason, and still today, also in the US, the computer science, numbers of women are around 20% if we look around the world, we have the US. We have Jordan with 45% in 2022 we have India in 2018 in 45 with 30 45% also. And for Iran, I didn’t find exactly computer science students numbers, not now, but I will keep looking. But we have the astonishing amount of 70% of all science and engineering students are female, yeah. So and with this numbers, the Iranian female enrollment ranked first in the world. So that means it’s not a natural talent. It’s culturally coded. Yeah, it’s coded within the society Yeah, who is expected to be good at yeah in and the last very personal statistics about that is computer science students in East Germany, for instance, the Technical University in Dresden, 1986 there were 150 males and 150 females, yeah. And that’s when I started my computer science study also. So it was 50% Yeah. And it was all over East Germany, and it was also the case in all East European countries by the time, yeah. So there is no natural talent, and the question is, what’s going on here? What’s going on here is that we all have a talent for coding, and please don’t forget, it’s not your fault, and we want to change that.
Thank you very much for your attention.