The University of Massachusetts and Rutgers University propose to plan and lead a two-day workshop on Integrative Computing Education & Research (ICER), to be held in late October or early November 2005 in the metropolitan Boston or New York area. The purpose of this workshop will be to bring together a broad range of stakeholders from the northeast region with strong interests in CISE undergraduate education. Professors Jim Kurose of the University of Massachusetts and Barbara Ryder of Rutgers University will serve as workshop co-chairs. The two PIs are senior faculty members at public research universities, active in curriculum efforts at their schools, and leaders in the professional community.
The ever-changing technical nature of our discipline, the growing need for integrative and systems-level capabilities, and the new challenges faced by the students we educate (as well as those we currently fail to reach) together provide the impetus for this workshop. The workshop will bring together a broad range of stakeholders from the northeast region with strong interests in CISE undergraduate education, to identify and discuss needed transformations in undergraduate computing education in the USA. The workshop will provide an important step forward in organizing and creating innovations in an undergraduate curriculum in computing, cognizant of its relationship to other disciplines and recognizing its nature as a constantly evolving discipline. The output of the workshop will be a report documenting the ideas emerging from the workshop, as well as a set of recommendations to the NSF for programmatic activities that could help initiate the needed transformations.
The workshop recommendations will be aimed at long-term, high impact, and potentially high-risk, strategies to catalyze the transformation of undergraduate computing education throughout the nation. Strong emphasis on issues of inclusion of currently underrepresented groups in computing education also will further broaden the workshop's impact on society. The proposed workshop is inherently a community-oriented activity, as its goal is to develop new curriculum ideas consistent with technological advances in the field.
