Open Letter to People at #SIGCSE2018

The Annual SIGCSE Technical Symposium is taking place in Baltimore this week.  Some of the best minds in computer science education are sharing ideas in sessions, panels, birds of a feather, and hallway conversations. At the same time most of the people who really need that information – classroom teachers, adjunct faculty, and others teaching computer science – are not there to hear it. It’s reality. We can’t all be there. We are starving to hear about what people learn at SIGCSE though.
Now some of us who are members of ACM and SIGCSE will get the papers later but that only goes so far. My request to the people at SIGCSE is that they find ways to share some of the things that don’t make it into the printed papers. Things like the keynotes. What an amazing lineup of keynotes this year it is too!

And the birds of a feather and the hallway conversations and the rest of the stuff that is just so hard to capture.

How should you do it? Well lots of ways. For one thing live tweet the event. Use the official hashtag - #SIGCSE2018. There are people at home watching. We may even ask you questions.

Share things on Facebook. There are a couple of good groups there that would probably welcome SIGCSE posts. I can think of Computer Science Education: Researchers & Practitioners and Computer Science Educators as examples. Or post them as public on your own account so people can share them.

For another write posts on your blog. Don’t have a blog? I tell you what – I will post guest posts from SIGCSE attendees here on my blog. Send them to me at act2@acthompson.net with your attribution information and I’ll post as many as come in.

Consider offering to talk about SIGCSE at a future local CSTA chapter meeting. You’re probably going to share information at your home institution but there are lots of others who would love to hear about what you learned at SIGCSE.