What does it mean to be engaging?

Last week, I was at Steven Dow's thesis defense. Steven was studying "embodied narrative engagement" -- storytelling in an augmented reality. As any good Ph.D. student should, he offered definitions of all his critical terms, including "engagement."

Given our theme for this year, I thought that it might be useful to share some of the quotes that he offered on "engagement."

• Coleridge, 1817: Engagement is a "willing suspension of disbelief."
• Nell, 1988: It's to be "lost" (as in a book).
• Janet Murray in her 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck: Engagement is to "confront questions of human existence."
• Bolter and Grusin in their 1999 book Remediation: Engagement is an "authentic emotional experience."
• Green and Brock, 2000: Engagement is to be "emotionally involved."

How many of these correspond to our notion of "engagement" in the classroom? Do we aim for students getting "lost" in the "authentic experience"? Do we reach for students being "emotionally involved"?

I look forward to seeing your definitions of engagement in your SIGCSE 2009 submissions, due this coming Friday, August 29!

Re-Visiting Chattanooga

Sue and I spent last Thursday and Friday re-visiting Chattanooga. We had last been there in December 2006, when we selected Chattanooga as our site for SIGCSE 2009. It was time to go back, meet our contacts, and start making lower-level plans for SIGCSE 2009.

We had a great visit. The weather was picture-perfect. We took walks around the city, to enjoy the city and to time the walking commute between hotels, the Conference Center, and the Aquarium. We met a Southern Belle telling us about riverboat trips available on the Tennessee River, pictured here with Sue.

On Friday, we visited potential caterers for the reception. What an interesting experience! At first, we couldn't understand why the visitor's bureau put long, two hour gaps in our schedule between visiting caterers. Then we realized: taste testing! Each caterer wooed us with tastes of wonderful food that might be served at the reception, and even napkins already monogrammed just for us. Even if you only "taste" each of the wonderful goodies, how many small meals can one eat in one day?!? We needed those hours between to simply digest all those goodies.

You can expect more blogs with pictures over the next few weeks. There were lots of good things to see in Chattanooga!

Thinking about Chattanooga

"Wow -- that SIGCSE deadline sure is early this year! AUGUST 29! I dunno...what's in Chattanooga anyway?!?"

Got these thoughts here in early August? Wipe those thoughts away! Get those submissions in!

Chattanooga is a really fun city. They just opened up a new website to highlight some of the excitement of Chattanooga. Find it at http://www.discoversceniccity.com/

Looking forward to reading your submission soon!

The Totally Cool Brochure That You Probably Didn't See

Our publications chair, Tom Cortina, did a terrific job at putting together a compelling hardcopy Call for Participation based on the web version. Even though we have an enormous program committee this year, he got the whole thing on the front and back of one sheet -- and still included special attention to our new video submissions.

Most of you, however, probably didn't see this. I'm including pictures of mine, for the many of you who didn't find it in their mailbox. Day after day went by after our mailing, with much of our program committee repeatedly reporting, "No mailing yet!" Many of our colleagues told us "Nope, didn't see it!"

We tracked this down, and discovered that a great many members of SIGCSE do not receive promotional mailings from SIGCSE! The two biggest reasons are:
(1) Members' addresses without institutions are not used for mailings from ACM.
(2) Most members have asked for "restricted" mailings, which means that their own SIG can't send them promotional information.

If you are happier receiving less dead-tree announcements, then you're fine. I'm happy to share with you Tom's fine work (at least visually) here in this posting. If, however, you would like to get physical mail information from your SIG, you can change your current US mailing settings with ACM by going to www.acm.org, clicking "myACM", logging in and then changing your ACM Postal Tolerance (under My Contact Information) to include ACM Announcements.

Keynote Speaker Craig Mundie in this week's "The Economist"

I opened up this week's "The Economist" and saw this picture:

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11614315

That's Craig Mundie, our keynote speaker for SIGCSE 2009, on the left behind Bill Gates. The article says: "Mr Ozzie...has been Microsoft’s chief software architect since 2006 and will steer its technology after Mr Gates goes, while Mr Mundie will take over as the company’s long-term thinker and public face."

Our keynote speaker for SIGCSE 2009 will be the guy responsible for long-term thinking for the world's largest software company. That will be a talk worth hearing!

SIGCSE 2009: The Place to Talk About New CS Curriculum Ideas

The next iteration of the ACM/IEEE Computing Curriculum recommendations is currently out for comment. A group from the ACM SIGPLAN has made a proposal that the standard be modified to require CS curricula to include as much on functional programming as on object-oriented programming. The proposal has led to a huge amount of comment, both in blogs and on the feedback site, most of which is quite positive. In my "other" blog, I recently posted criticism of the proposal (with some interesting comments from Alan Kay).

All of this discussion in the blogosphere made me realize one of the greatest benefits of the SIGCSE Symposium: It's the opportunity to discuss these kinds of proposals, face-to-face, in real-time. SIGCSE is where people report on the results of their innovations and reforms, where others can critique them, and where still others can talk about how to incorporate those changes in their own curricula. It's the forum for us to talk about best practices, and what practices should (or should not) become best practice.

Hey, Where Did My Week Go?

Another posting from our guest blogger, Steve Wolfman!

The end of spring is a special time for instructors. As we put the last red marks on our spring exams, our thoughts turn to summer: beach outings, grilling, movies in which various objects explode...

...and authoring SIGCSE publications!

If you're like me, the intensity of your summer work on SIGCSE pubs starts at 0 around the last day of exams and rises to approach a vertical asymptote around Labor Day. Imagine what would happen if someone took away that last week of steep progress!

The bad news is: someone just did. This year's SIGCSE paper, panel, special session, and workshop deadline is a bit earlier than in previous years, August 29.

The good news is: we changed it to fit in a new review process that allows more careful and thorough consideration of your submissions.

We've inserted an extra week of reviewing during which a team of Associate Program Chairs---members of the SIGCSE community selected by the Program and Symposium Chairs for their experience and expertise as both reviewers and authors---will help the Program Chairs give full and fair attention to the reviewing process (including more than 300 submitted papers and their more than 1500 reviews).

The benefit for the community should be a higher quality conference and increased clarity in reviewing. The cost is moving that asymptote a bit earlier. We hope you'll agree that the cost, though substantial, is worth the benefit.

And say, shouldn't you switch to prepping for your fall classes before that August 29th deadline, anyway? ;)