Welcome to Teaching Impacts of Technology; Global Society.
My name is Dr. Simon and I'm a computer scientist,
an educator and a professor in Education Studies Department here at UC San Diego.
But before I tell you anymore about me or this class,
let me introduce you to a colleague.
This is Art Lopez and I got to know Art,
I don't know, maybe around 10 years ago,
because one of his students came up to him at the school where he teaches math and said,
"Mr. Lopez, how comes we don't have
any computer science classes like kids in other school districts do?"
He thought, that's a really good question,
I need to look into that.
What that led to was a great collaboration where Art started working with us in
our efforts to bring professional development
to help teachers who've been trained in other subjects,
learn to teach computer science in the ways that we think all kids need to know computer.
Art has been pretty successful.
Here in his district,
Sweetwater Union High School District,
which is just South of San Diego and just North of the border with Mexico.
Ten years later, they now have
computer science courses in every high school in the district.
That is making an immense change in the lives of the students there in terms of
their careers and how they understand that
computer science and computing really impacts our lives every day.
That got me really involved in this movement which is
popular in the United States right now called CS For All,
which is a picture of my laptop.
It's pride of place,
I only have one sticker there and I do believe like
many people around the nation and around the world
that computer science and computational thinking are things that every student,
every kid, every citizen,
needs to know in the same way that we believe they
all need to know reading, writing, and arithmetic.
But, it's a real challenge to get enough teachers
prepared and capable of teaching the kids the computing that we need,
and that is part of the goal of this class.
In this course, we'll be particularly looking at the impacts of computing on our culture,
our social interactions and safety law and ethics.
You might be familiar with this purple diagram.
It comes from a set of standards that were recently
produced by an international association called csteachers.org.
Now, we know that whatever country or state you're in and might have different standards,
but a lot of them are related to these.
So, we'll use those as grounding.
But, how are we going to look at impacts of computing?
We're going to be taking a very problem-based approach.
I mean, we're talking about impacts of computing on our lives,
so let's use our lives as a place to start.
Our lives have become so much more connected by technology and
that has made us be more understanding of ourselves as a global society.
You might live in a society where you feel like everybody
has got tons of technology around them or that
they're doing things all differently now either in
your classroom or at work because technology and Internet connectivity is ubiquitous.
But, it could be different in different places depending on where you live.
For example, phones and smartphones are getting everywhere,
not only because they're becoming cheaper and everybody can buy them,
but because those of us who live in
first-world countries are throwing them away and they're
making it to other areas of the world where technology wasn't as available before.
Technology is being used in lots of places including
third-world countries that you or your students might not be aware of.
It's causing some great benefits to maybe doctors are able to do
better diagnoses in areas without a lot of infrastructure or a lot of electricity.
There's this issue of micro-finance of people being able to get access to
loans even if they can't get access to a physical bank.
That startups really are starting up everywhere.
However, in a global society,
one of the things that has become obvious is that,
depending on where we live,
we might have different levels of the ability to speak freely.
This really has become a thing because,
free speech is different now.
We all now have the ability to get our ideas out there,
whether that be on and Twitter or Facebook or whatever,
but suddenly that brings out a lot of the differences
in the levels of free speech in various parts of the world.
That the same technology has also changed how revolutions happen.
Men used to be with guns and weapons and now maybe it's with Twitter and Facebook.
So, we'll take a look at that.
This ubiquitous technology leads to ever more problems with digital security.
We need to keep our devices secure
including maybe when we take them with us and to other countries.
What are the new ways that we can have that security available to us?
We'll then dig underneath to some of
the technologies that are important behind all of these ideas.
For example, if your access to Twitter,
Facebook or Google is blocked or limited in some way by the country you live in,
maybe one way you can get around it is using a VPN or Virtual Private Network.