This post is inspired by a nearly three hour conversation I had last Saturday with Ben Manski about the Democratizing NOVA project. While Ben was discussing the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the Next System Studies project at GMU, I mentioned that since information and communication technology will naturally have a crucial role to play in any next system developed in the 21st century, it is my dream to be able to use my work as a computer science and web application development teacher to contribute toward that development. I told him that I was basically an OER curriculum geek, and that I had been working on an OER intro CS curriculum for decades. He asked me to send him a link to some of what I've done. I figured a blog post would be a better way to do that, so here we are.

I began thinking about OER well before the term was coined by UNESCO back in 2002. In the early 1990s at the beginning of my career as a high school teacher, I had the great fortune to have Dr. Martha Brown as my mentor. I spent two summers in my first years teaching being paid to work with colleagues developing math curriculum. I found the experience exhilarating, even though logistical challenges made it very difficult to reproduce and utilize our work. Flash forward to 1999, and I needed to develop high school friendly teaching materials using the Python programming language. The wonderful people at the University of North Carolina's ibiblio project gave me web space to host this work, which is still there as part of the Open Book Project. The main project I hosted there originally was a translation of Allen B. Downey's GPL licensed Java programming textbook, How to think like a computer scientist. I translated the book from Java to Python, and hosted it on ibiblio.

Working on OER curriculum has from the beginning for me been a way to contribute towards knowledge equity and the decommodification of educational resources. I have long been deeply morally conflicted by my role as a CS / ICT teacher, given my awareness that with the perverse incentives that drive the tech industry, it does more harm than good to humanity. So working on OER is not only wonderfully fulfilling in a creative sense, it also helps me sleep at night by allowing me to rationalize away all the thieving billionaire tech oligarchs and their AI spies and killer drones that I am indirectly supporting through my role as a tech teacher.

In 2009 I started teaching DE classes at the Arlington Career Center with the college credits given through our partnership with Northern Virginia Community College. I am both an APS high school teacher and an NVCC adjunct professor.

We actually offer a full Associates Degree in Computer Science concurrent with our high school degree. From 2009 until being joined by my new colleague Chris Jones this year, I was the only teacher designing and implementing our CS curriculum. This provided me with an incredible opportunity to do something few educators teaching in similar programs get to do, since:

1. As the only CS instructor in the program, I could integrate learning objectives across our course sequence, knowing that I would have control over the successful delivery of those objectives and could count on students developing the desired skills from one year to the next.
2. As a high school program that could not force students to purchase expensive, non-free educational resources, I had the implicit license to ignore early recommendations from the college to adopt textbooks even my wealthy school district could not afford and to use OER resources instead.

While I love teaching in this program, I am keenly aware of the educational equity issues inherent in offering an academically rigorous DE program like ours. I haven't done the formal data analysis, but it is obvious that my students are both wealthier and whiter than APS's student population at large. This demographic fact alone means the program could be fairly criticized as being "elitist".

So, What's a Social Justice Warrior to Do?

The Arlington Career Center as a whole, especially back in 2009 when we began our DE program, had the very opposite demographics. It was both lower income and had more students of color than the school system population in general. I've wanted from the beginning to find a way to build an academic program that serves the needs of all our students.

This doesn't mean abandoning our CS program. The next system won't be built without the help of supportive allies from the privileged classes. What I wanted to do was find a way to create an educational environment that would support the academic needs of the A.S. in CS students, while also offering a related, integrated career pathway ICT program that would meet the material needs of students who have to work their way forward in life. Such a program would have to do the following:

1. It would have to provide lower income and immigrant students, many of whom work full time in addition to going to school with a way to quit their job at the restaurant and earn a comparable income developing their ICT skills.
2. It would have to provide them with job ready skills upon leaving the program, so they could continue to earn a living in the ICT field when they leave us.
3. It would have to be in an academic environment with enough wraparound services to support students in the program in dealing with the many challenges they face.

I choose to focus on web application development because:

1. It provided a way to meet the second of the above goals, since an entry level full-stack web developer could learn what they needed for the job in a four year high school DE program.
2. Since both CS and web application programming require the skill of computer programming, it could be easily integrated at the early stages with the CS program.
3. It aligned most closely with my moral imperative to use computing to serve human needs, since the web can be used as a freely available platform to publish ideas about whatever one wants.

To meet the first requirement, providing paid skills-building internships enabling students to leave their other after school jobs and have the time they need to build their web skills, I began NOVA Web Development back in 2012. Despite having dedicated tens of thousands of dollars of my own money hiring students to work with the coop, I have failed thus far to find a way to turn this into a viable, sustainable business that could function on its own. This is an absolute requirement if we are serious when we say we want to serve students equitably. If we fail to address this need to support low income students economically, we are simply lying to ourselves when we say we want them to have an equitable educational opportunity.

I'm still dedicating most of my energy toward this social justice computing effort. I'll be turning 64 years old next month, making me ancient in Internet years, so time is definitely running out for me to be able to contribute toward this goal. That said, I haven't thrown in the towel yet, and I have reason to hope that in all my previous years of failure I have both learned valuable lessons and formed valuable relationships that may make this 4th Reboot the one that takes off.

ACC's Dual Pathway CS / Web Development Pathways and Collaborative Curriculum

I am currently in the later stages of developing the integrated dual-pathway CS / Web Application programs that I began working toward in 2009 with the following course sequences:

• Computer Science Pathway
• Web Application Development Pathway

All curriculum materials are OER, and all course content is hosted on the program website. I still make use of the Open Book Project website for two online textbooks I'm working on for our programming courses:

• Beginning Python Programming for Aspiring Web Developers
• A C++ Book for Undergraduate Computer Science Majors

Former student and now APS CS colleague Paul Bui wrote the original C++ translation of How to think like a computer scientist back in 2001, which I recovered last year and am now in the process of remixing for use with my classes today. This highlights how transformative OER is in terms of student centered education, since it allows students, educators and interested volunteers to directly contribute to knowledge production while they are learning.

My dear friend and NOVA Web Development co-founder Kevin Cole took a PDF of a 1975 typewriter manual for an early computer and turned it into:

• Altair 8800 Operator’s Manual

which I am now using as the main online textbook for our computer systems class. Last year one of my very gifted students, Nate Levin, created a custom search website to help with Kevin's manual:

• Altair 8800 Instruction Search

I've been working with students to create online educational resources ever since former student Jason Straw wrote the original version of Getting Down with HTML back in 1998. It's good for students, it's good for educators, and it's good for our society.

Final Thoughts

Ben asked me if I know any of the computer science instructors at GMU. I told him that I did not, but that I very much wanted to, especially if they shared my interested in social justice computing. Ben said he might be able to introduce me to a few instructors that do share that interest.

A social justice computing pathway that began at the Arlington Career Center and continued on to GMU that aimed to use computers to serve human needs and practiced what it preached from the get-go by providing underrepresented students with the means by which they could successfully participate in the program would be a dream come true for me.

I will definitely follow up with Ben on that!

In solidarity,
Jeff Elkner