Informatics: the third “power” revolution

di Enrico Nardelli

(versione in italiano qua)

Everyone agrees on the importance of Digital Education for all citizens. But too often action plans to implement it fail to approach the issue appropriately and put an excessive emphasis on technological side of it.

The main problem, in my view, behind these difficulties is conceptual. People consider information technology as just another technology, while Informatics has brought about in the world the third “power” revolution [1], empowering human capabilities to a degree never conceivable before.

The invention of the printing press has been the first “power” revolution, since by making it possible to very easily reproduce texts allowed to bring knowledge everywhere and gave everyone the possibility to access it. It was no more needed to be in certain place at a certain time to learn something from the voice of the master. His knowledge could be reproduced by a book, far away and at a later time, whenever needed. Knowledge is still power, but now this power can be distributed and replicated: the seeds of modern society had been planted. Books, produced by hundreds of millions, changed societies and spread science and technology all over Europe.

The second “power” revolution is the industrial revolution: machines can do the physical work of people and allows mankind to overcome its own intrinsic physical limits. Machines can produce objects days and nights without becoming tired, and machines can produce other machines boosting the physical capabilities of human beings. A single person can move huge earth piles with a bulldozer, quickly transfer with a car, speak at long distance with a telephone, and so on. Mankind is no more powerless in front of the nature and starts dominating earth, sea and air, even if many times forgets our planet still remains very powerful.

Then, in the second half of the last century, after the building of hundreds of billions of machines, the third “power” revolution, the informatics revolution, slowly starts. In the beginning it appears like just another embodiment of the industrial revolution, but after the turn of millennium it becomes apparent it is much more than that. What is replicated now is not the passive and static knowledge of books, what is empowered here is not the physical strength of people, now we have the amplification of the cognitive capabilities of humankind. Digital artifacts, that is software programs, represent and store “knowledge in action” [1, 2] or “actionable knowledge” (“actionable”: ready to be put in action).

As hinted before, there are two critical elements distinguishing the actionable knowledge in digital artifacts from the one of human beings: learning and adaptability. People are intrinsically able to learn what is unknown to them (while digital machines can only learn what they have been designed for) and have learned over million years of evolution to adapt to unforeseen changes in the environment (while digital machines – once again – can adapt only to the foreseen changes).

Therefore, while certainly people can take advantage from the always improving actionable knowledge stored in digital artifacts (the very recent progresses of Artificial Intelligence clearly show this) it is of the utmost importance that everybody is appropriately educated in the science making this digital artifacts possible: Informatics.

That is why Informatics Europe, the association of European departments and research centers in Informatics I am the president of, together with the ACM Europe Council, has presented last March in Brussels to the European Commission the report “Informatics for All” advocating Informatics is taught to all students in school, starting in the primary school.

We suggested a two-tier approach: both

1. to introduce teaching of informatics as specialized subject, starting in primary and all the way up to secondary, and
2. to teach informatics (integrated in other subjects) as a method and a language capable to offer an additional and specific way to describe and explain phenomena.

The former is required to prepare citizens able to actively participate in the digital society in an informed way and to more safely and critically navigate and contribute to a fast expanding info-sphere consisting more and more of algorithms that may be biased or information that may be flawed or incomplete. The latter provides new and additional viewpoints in many scientific fields, by building and manipulating visible representations of physical laws and/or natural/social phenomena. Interactive simulations (i.e., modeling a situation and exploring its possible evolution) made possible by informatics offer a very powerful tool to improve understanding and informatics is unique in its capability of making concrete the abstract models defined by a simulation.

To this purpose, we have argued in our report, it is needed to work in three areas:

1. Curriculum, to develop both school curricula for all levels, and effective learning materials.
2. Teachers, to appropriately educate them and provide them supporting tools and content to be effective in their action.
3. Research, to understand what to teach, when to teach, how to teach (mathematics and other sciences had centuries to discover these, we need to know very soon).

This a grand educational challenge like one could have if Mathematics existed only at the university and – having understood the importance of the capability of exactly defining quantities and their relations – one had to plan to introduce it into all school levels.

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I will now further dwell on consequences of this third power revolution in terms of digital education. In the past, an excessive emphasis has been put on technological skills (for example with the European Computer Driving License), that are certainly important, but which in this area risk to spoil the educational efforts.

More recently, on the one side we hear about introducing “coding” in all schools, since “coding” is the “new English” (needed to work everywhere) or the “new Latin” (needed to reason in any field). On the other side, they say what needs to be taught in all schools is “computational thinking”, the new discipline needed for every student, whichever will be the field she will work in.

Both approach are partly right, but cannot be considered definitive, since they provide only a partial view of the issues at stake. I have to say that this situation is more typical of Europe, since in other countries, e.g. USA or China or Japan, people speaks about teaching “Computer Science” and not “coding” or “computational thinking”.

First of all let us consider “coding”. Informatics is not (just) coding, as Mathematics is not (just) "table of Pythagoras". Multiplication is (just a) part of Arithmetic, which is (just a) part of Mathematics, together with Geometry, Algebra, Probability, Statistics, Analysis, and so on. Similarly, coding (or programming) is (just a) part of the software development process (which includes Analysis, Design, Coding (Programming) – Testing, Debugging) and software is (just a) part of Informatics, together with Data Representation, Algorithms, Programming Languages, Computing Systems, Distributed Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and so on.

Also, the purpose of teaching "table of Pythagoras" in primary school is not at all that children knows by heart that 3x2=6 o 12:4=3. The purpose is that children understand that when 3 girls have 2 sweets each the total number of sweets is obtained by a multiplication, while if 12 biscuits have to be distributed to 4 girls the number of biscuits per girl is obtained through a division. We are not teaching a tool but a way of understanding and operating in the world: we can call it “mathematical thinking”.

Well, somebody may say, let’s then teach “computational thinking” (CT) in schools. Speaking about teaching CT is a very risky attitude: philosophers, rightly, ask what do we mean by “teaching thinking”; mathematicians appropriately observe that many characteristics of CT (e.g., abstraction, recursivity, problem solving, …) are also proper of mathematics (which they do not call “mathematical thinking”); pedagogists ask how can we be sure CT is really effective in education; teachers want to know which are the methods and the tools for teaching this new discipline and how they can learn to teach it; and parents are on one side happy because it appears school has finally started to align itself to the digital society, but are on the other side worried what will happen to their kids in the future if they just learn to code with the language of today.

I am convinced this approach is misleading: in the long run it will do more harm than benefit to informatics. In schools they do not teach “linguistic thinking” or “mathematical thinking” and they do not have “body of knowledge” or “assessment methods” for these subjects. They just teach (and assess competences in) “English ” and “Mathematics”. Subsequently, the various linguistic (resp. mathematical) competences gained by study of English (resp. Mathematics), beyond being used in themselves, find additional uses in other disciplines. Between CT and Informatics there exists the same relation. Therefore we should discuss what to teach and how to evaluate competences regarding Informatics in primary/ middle/ secondary schools.

The main problem, in my view, behind these difficulties in appropriately approaching digital education is conceptual. People consider information technology as just another technology, which is wrong [3]. Automation supported by Informatics substitutes human intelligence with machine intelligence: this is a radical change of paradigm in the entire history of industrialization, which never happened before. Notwithstanding the success of Artificial Intelligence , informatics systems do not have the flexibility and adaptability to successfully tackle an ever changing reality and to learn by one’s own mistakes, like human beings do.

Actually, speaking about CT has the purpose to explain people why informatics need to be taught in all schools. We aim at teaching the scientific and cultural aspects of Informatics: not system and tools, but principles and methods. Differently from what happens with language and maths, we are forced to explicit this distinction since computers are what embodies informatics for most of people.

On these grounds, for example, in the USA Computer Science (their name for Informatics) has been added, on par with other scientific disciplines, to the “well rounded subjects” that students have to learn in schools. This is not because they think the “computer scientists’ way of thinking” (a simple explanation of what CT is) is better than others, bust just that it offers a complementary and useful conceptual paradigm to describe reality. Informatics provides cognitive insights and a common language for all subjects and professions.

Every discipline has its own set of concepts to describe the world. For a mathematician are quantity, relation, structure… For a physicist masses, forces, fields… A biologist uses cell, organism, metabolism. An informatician uses algorithm, program, automata, …

Digital society is already here and we are not adequately preparing our students and citizens. They need to learn Informatics so as to be able to understand, participate in, influence and contribute to the democratic development of the digital society. A the same time, this will provide a significantly improved opportunity for recruiting and educating the large number of IT specialists Europe needs to maintain and improve its position in the digital world economy.

We need to act now!

References

[1] E. Nardelli, Senza la cultura informatica non bastano le tecnologie, Il Fatto Quotidiano, April 2014.

[2] E. Nardelli, La RAI che vorrei: diffondere la “conoscenza in azione” per far crescere l’Italia, Key4Biz, April 2016.

[3] E. Nardelli, The maintenance is the implementation OR Why people misunderstand IT systems, European Computer Science Summit, (ECSS-2010), Prague, 2010.

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Versione originale pubblicata su "Broadband 4 Europe" il 18 aprile 2018 e il 20 aprile 2018 (archived copies, the original site is no more available).