Introduction to Cambridge: UNDERGRADUATE

Many of the readers of this column are, I hope, familiar with the Future of Computing Education Summit that took place in the Washington, D.C. area in June 2009. The Summit brought together key decision makers from all the major professional and academic societies that have an interest in computing education. The real long-term impact of the summit will depend on the success of planned follow-up action. It was, however, clear during the meeting that the summit helped key influencers within each of the organizations to learn about other players in computing education and motivated all participants to find ways to work toward the common goals of attracting high-quality students to the field and engaging them so that they complete their studies and thrive in the field as professionals. Encouraged by the summit, my focus in this column will be the role of the Information Systems community in collaborative efforts within the computing discipline and particularly computing education; general results of the Summit will be reported in a much more comprehensive way through other channels. IS was represented at the summit by three different organizations: Mary Granger represented the Association for Information Systems (AIS) as its VP for Education, Dave Chatterjee represented the Society for Information Management (SIM) as an active academic member and the President of SIM’s Atlanta Chapter, and I was involved through the ACM as one of the members of the Summit organizing committee. It was very important to have the perspectives of AIS and SIM present at the summit; many thanks belong to all participants of the meeting who volunteered their expertise, time and efforts. In general, the conversations at the Summit provided support for several general observations regarding computing education in specific and the role of Information Systems in the broader computing education community in particular. In the rest of the column, I will both outline these observations and invite IS academics to action based on them. First, academics from various computing disciplines do not generally know the fields outside their own very well; this, of course, applies also to what IS academics know and don’t know about other computing disciplines. IS as a discipline and we as individual IS experts have a lot to learn from our colleagues in computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, information technology and the various informatics fields. It is, however, very difficult to learn from other computing disciplines and help these disciplines learn from us if we do not engage actively in the work that the computing field does as a whole. I would strongly encourage the entire IS education community to find ways to collaborate not only with colleagues in IS and other business disciplines but also with colleagues in other computing disciplines. Information sharing through active collaboration can be very beneficial for all parties involved. Second, “computing” is still very much “computer science” in the minds of many of the key players in the field of computing education. This perception is slowly changing, but the only way we can move closer to a broad and inclusive perspective of computing is through active collaboration between computer scientists and representatives of other computing disciplines. Computer engineering, software engineering, and information technology have traditionally been more active in this cooperation with computer science than information systems has; it is up to us to make sure that our field is visible through the work we do for and together with the broader computing education community. Third, Information Systems has a special role as a computing discipline that brings computing together with in-depth domain understanding. Since the early days of the IS discipline, the field has been learning and teaching about