Searching for Computing's Soul: Professional Practice and the Future of Computing Education

Abstract

Computing has repeatedly proven its ability to change the world. Each new advancement of technology provides more power, speed, and efficiency, unleashing changes that would seem almost magical only a few years before. But even as each new thing becomes everyday, it also unleashes new challenges -- unexpected ethical dilemmas and often worsening cultural, environmental, and social injustices. As computing educators, we like to bask in the glow of our graduates' innovative abilities but we must also remain complicit in computing's capacity for harm. We might teach ideas of computing ethics or sustainability, but these mostly get relegated to soft skills ''thank goodness I've finished that ethics course, now can I get back to computing?''. I argue this problem can largely be traced back to computing's lack of purpose -- or an immature notion of a computing profession that lacks its own set of values and so accepts by default the neoliberal role as an enabler of efficiency. In this talk, I take a professional practice approach to consider how we might better integrate a hopeful and regenerative approach to computing education. I describe a professional framework of practice and its application in ethics, sustainability and decolonising computing and then provide examples of how these can be better integrated into computing education. I conclude with a manifesto for computing education.