MediaBerkman

Jon Udell on Rethinking the community calendar: A case study in learning and teaching Fourth R principles [AUDIO]

December 7th, 2010

The real challenge of community calendaring isn’t technical. It’s conceptual. Most people don’t know how they could (or why they should) be the authoritative publishers of their own data. This comes from a lack of understanding of some of basic concepts of computing, including:

The pub/sub communication pattern
Indirection (“pass-by-reference” vs “pass-by-value”)
Structured versus unstructured data
Data provenance
Service composition

Along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, these “Fourth R” principles will empower an informed and engaged 21st-century citizenry. As Jeannette Wing argues in her computational thinking manifesto, computer and information scientists are no longer the only ones who need to understand and apply these principles.

Jon Udell—senior technical evangelist for Microsoft—draws from the experience of developing elmcity—a project for publishing community calendar events in a simple, structured, subscribable format—to explore Fourth R principles, why they’re hard for most people to understand, how we can teach them, and why we should.

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