Becoming Computer Literate

-- By AngeloAngelino - 11 Oct 2019

Angelo vs. the Registrar

After 3 months of dismissive, unsatisfying, and unhelpful email responses from others in the office, I wanted to hear in person from the Dean of the Registrar as to why I wasn’t being granted academic credit for my enrollment in an undergraduate computer science course (taught in Python). As I was initially given a uncategorical ‘no’ to even enrolling in a computer science course, I figured there was more leeway given to registration decisions than initially let on...especially if that decision was coming from the top.

I had been waiting in the lobby for 45 minutes for the person at the window of the registrar’s office to call me over when I saw the Dean herself walking over to me. I stood up to introduce myself, thanked her for taking the time to meet with me as I’m sure the days leading up to the start of the school year are some of her most hectic, and began to shift my weight towards my front foot anticipating my following her back to her office.

“Great to meet you as well! Why don’t we just take a seat here” she says as she gestures towards the collection of individual couches in the lobby that I had just been sitting in.

Power move.

I can’t be sure, but I think I smiled when she said that. At the very least, I smile now thinking about how she said it. There could be a million reasons why she didn’t invite me to her office (walls being painted, spilled food that made the room smell, someone else using her office for a meeting of their own, her wanting a change of scene after hours being her computer), but I find it hard to believe her kind and welcoming gesture to ‘take a seat here’ as being anything besides “Hi Angelo, thanks for coming in with your inquiry -- but I want it clear from the start that the conversation ends here, at the start, in the lobby, in the same position that we both came in with, with you not receiving credit for computer science.”

Becoming Computer Literate

Choosing Computer Science

A part of my (successful) pitch to the Dean was that my desire to take computer science came from the potential value it could add to my legal career: working at Fenwick & West, one of the law firms that specializes in tech and startup companies, being able to understand code will allow me to add value to both my client and my firm in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. And that still is partly true! Observing the unique relationship between founders and attorneys who had programming experience, it was clear that this dynamic fostered a more comfortable and open conversation. It wasn’t just a meeting with a lawyer, it was time with an individual who could truly understand the company, the product, and the mission.

While that ultimately worked, my excitement about taking computer science doesn't even partly stem from the value I can/will add to the firm, but instead is about my desire to become computer literate. I hope to understand how computers work functionally as well as to begin to understand the implications of their use. So much value is placed on the ability to communicate and understand computers largely due to the great value that can be added to society with these skills. I’ve been struggling lately with the desire to act: while lawyers act and have an impact with their words, what do others do? Where can I add value once/if my legal career ends? In taking computer science, I hope to round out a long education process with some sort of practical skill.

Unfulfilled Expectations -- or maybe more something like Unknown Desires

As we talked about in class, it isn’t that shocking to think that as someone who has been using computers since I was a child, I still don’t know how they work as I’ve only ever used them. Unfortunately, my computer science course hasn’t helped too much. I was told by friends and mentors to take a course taught in python as it is ‘the most practical’, and 6 weeks in although I certainly have a greater understanding of how to translate my thoughts into a language that the computer can process to create some desired program, I still don’t know how to apply any of these programs functionally for personal or general use. Even more than that, my understanding of how a computer works has barely increased, as more often than not the class errs on the side of blazing through functions for practical application without a discussion of what the process does or even more basically where it comes from, how it is read by the computer, and how the program is processed. I went into the course with the hope/desire that I’d come out understanding how computers work (whatever that means), but I’ve come to realize that what I thought I needed to learn to achieve that goal isn’t even a small part of what is necessary to do so.

What next?

Perhaps it was more that I didn’t totally realize the depth of knowledge necessary to even partly begin to understanding the computing process, but now that I am in it it feels like I am behind. If I could, I’d take 4-5 computer science courses next semester without question. Realistically, I hope to take at least 1 more computer science course while at Columbia -- hopefully a course that provides me with a more complete understanding of the process as a whole.

Your draft makes two points:

1. It is difficult to find the sort of instruction in basic technological literacy and practical comprehension that you need, even if you are a terrific learner working in a first-rank professional school inside a great university; and
2. From an institutional point of view, nobody cares about that, because your desire for this learning is seemingly regarded as unnecessary.

These are very good points. They would be stronger if they were made in a less personalized context. Your conversation with Hazel May is not really the center of the analysis, but it is of the draft. Making the draft stronger involves losing some of your darlings here, which are personal to you, and making the larger reflections more present for the reader.

In fact, because the law school pays internal university money on the "balance of trade" system for the courses you take outside, basic CS instruction for students would cost us a good deal of money, so we are discouraging. And as you point out, the basic programming in Java or Python introduction is not well-adapted to your needs.

So there's a missing curriculum: computer knowledge for law students. It's not the same as IT for business students, or quantitative computing methods for social scientists, or all the other forms of curriculum this and other universities need to provide, and are ill-equipped—oddly enough—to offer. People know that you need to learn, but they don't, even here, have a way to teach you effectively.

Therefore they pretend you don't need to know, heightening the condition of "userness" that you comment on, and which is a precondition to the predatory style of technology design that is at the heart of surveillance capitalism. The pedagogical failure is bad for democracy, as Thomas Jefferson or John Dewey would have been perfectly capable of explaining. So can you, if you zero in on what matters to everyone, not to you only, in the next draft.