Code Acts in Education: Learning through code, learning to code

Computer software is interwoven with contemporary collective life. The significance of computer software, and the codes and algorithmic processes through which it is written and put into action, is particularly vivid from an educational perspective. Technically, code instructs software how to act, but as code increasingly comes to saturate our world, as an invisible presence in everyday life, it also instructs people to do things. Code acts back on us as the lessons written down in the languages of computer programming, and as an algorithmic curriculum instructing us in new ways of thinking and acting.

The Code Acts in Education seminar series focuses on education as a specific field in which the problems associated with code are now part of an emerging public policy agenda and media debate. The debate is concerned with:

a) learning through code: how computer code acts to shape learning, thought and action in everyday life, and its influence on educational policies, products and practices; and

b) learning to code: promoting the skills of computer programming and critical digital fluency

The seminar series will provide a critical exploration of computer code in order to build greater public awareness of its influence on how we act, think, and conduct ourselves, and to inform and augment the existing debate about the importance of teaching children and young people to be able to program and understand computer code.

The series is also timely and important for social scientific research. Computer code and software are emerging as serious subjects for critical inquiry. Emerging research in geography has detailed the "code/space" relationships in software-intensive places like airports, shopping centres, hospitals, and workplaces. Sociological and cultural studies research has sought to understand the "cultural lives of code" as it is programmed into existence and then flows into the world in our everyday objects and practices. Research in the emerging field of software studies has examined code in terms of its influence on the mind, on ideology, on government, on the economy, on social interaction, and on cultural participation.

Yet its significance remains to be taken up in educational research. Undertaking critical social scientific research on code in education will allow us to demonstrate its powerful influence on everyday learning and on formal educational structures, institutions and practices. For example, educational institutions are increasingly animated and regulated by highly coded software, databases and networked infrastructures. Classrooms, at all stages from pre-school to HE, function as coded spaces where the lessons being learned are in part written down in programming language. Structures of educational governance are being reconfigured by transnational technologies of testing, inspection and comparison. Learning practices have increasingly migrated out of the classroom into the coded spaces and public pedagogies of the worldwide web. Software also influences and shapes professional learning, knowledge practices, new forms of work in the informational economy, and within higher education code has begun to reconfigure research and knowledge production itself.

This seminar series aims to develop the research agenda, relationships, frameworks and capacity necessary to undertake the research required to understand, interpret and begin to explain how software, code and algorithms act to influence and instruct us in everyday life, and how they are shaping contemporary educational products, practices and policies. By involving users of the research as participants and as advisors to the series, we will build communication channels and produce appropriate outputs to further inform the public policy debate on programming.

Who will benefit from this research?

Educators including teachers and curriculum developers in schools, further education colleges and universities. This group also includes professional bodies that support the work of teachers, such as Education Scotland.

Policymakers focused on skill development and education, such as representatives of Skills Development Scotland, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, as well as Scottish Government (education) and the UK Department for Education.

Public policymakers in Scotland and across the UK concerned with promoting digital engagement, usually to improve employability and quality of life, support communities, boost economic growth and increase productivity and innovation. Specifically, these users include representatives of the Scottish government (those engaged with Scotland's Digital Future: A Strategy, and the Scotland Futures Forum); the UK government (the Government Digital Strategy), and the Welsh government (Delivering a Digital Wales Strategy).

Intermediate third sector organisations promoting digital fluency, digital skills and capacity to code, particularly among children and youth. These organisations include Demos, Nominet Trust (which funds research that promotes digital capacity among disadvantaged children), Mozilla Foundation, and providers of educative materials to promote digital capacity, such as Raspberry Pi. They also include Nesta which has a broader mandate, specifically to generate innovation by promoting digital making, digital R&D, and digital education.

Professional bodies that promote standards of practice for professionals, and that provide professional development opportunities which increasingly promote digital literacy and adoption of digital technologies in practice, are also beneficiaries. In the first instance these groups include professional bodies serving teachers. However more broadly, we will be advertising this seminar series through our networks of professional bodies in nursing, medicine, social work and policing who are now linked with us in research and knowledge exchange initiatives to improve professional education and learning.

Broader public users include parents, employers and community members concerned with issues of digital engagement, digital skills development, and issues of digital code: how computer code shapes everyday life and lifelong learning, while opening new knowledge practices and forms of work.

How will they benefit from this research?

Advisory Group: We intend to assemble an Advisory Group comprised of key representatives from each of the user groups listed above. A key purpose of this Advisory Group is to help maximize the impact of this seminar series through specific input in identifying specific objectives, audiences, messages and channels for communicating findings and dialogues of the series. Members of the Advisory Group will be asked to attend as many seminars as possible and to work with the research team (including the investigators and four doctoral students) to draw together key themes and questions across the seminar activities. Members will be asked to mobilize their own networks and to suggest specific knowledge exchange activities to help engage their users in the seminar outcomes in the most productive ways.

Educational benefits: Most groups in this list are interested in influencing education, particularly of children and youth for developing digital capacity and critical digital literacy in learning to code and learning through code. This series will produce better understanding for all of the issues at stake, the skills required, the initiatives underway, and the pedagogies that can best enhance education for digital futures. Further, the series creates opportunities among highly diverse perspectives and sectoral interests to share perspectives, challenges and resources towards improving digital education through a focus on the problem of code.