ICER 2006

The Second International Computing Education Research Workshop

September 9-10, 2006

University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

ICER 2006 is now over. We hope that participants enjoyed it, and intend to attend future ICER events.

Computing education, as a research discipline, is the study of how people come to understand computational processes and devices, and how to improve that understanding. As computation becomes ubiquitous in our world, understanding of computing in order to design, structure, maintain, and utilize these technologies becomes increasingly important - both for the technology professional, but also for the technologically literate citizen. The research study of how the understanding of computation develops, and how to improve that understanding, is critically important for the technology-dependent societies in which we live.

Learning: Computing education is naturally concerned with how students make sense of computational processes and devices in formal education, including primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions. Computing education also goes beyond formal education. What do adults understand about computation, and how do they come to that understanding? What do children understand about computation given their limited conceptions of time, process, and agency, and how does that affect their later formal learning about computation?

Instruction: Learning may be enhanced or impeded by instruction. Educators bring instructional methods, formal or informal theories, and values to specific learning environments and situations. As researchers we explore the educators' role in the learning process?whether that educator is a teacher, near-peer, remote resource or the computer itself.

Computing Education Research employs methodologies from many fields, amongst them psychology, education, anthropology and statistics. As a consequence, research is frequently characterised by a diversity of methodological approaches; these may be applied directly, or may be combined and modified to suit the particular cross-disciplinary questions that we ask.

Associated events:

These events are free and you do not need to attend ICER to attend them. See individual web pages for registration details.

Using BlueJ for education research workshop will be held immediatley prior to ICER in Canterbury
PhICER - ICER 2006 The Second International Workshop on Phenomenography in Computing Education Research, will be held in Canterbury immediately after ICER

UK Events that may be of interest:

Date	Conference	Venue
29-31 August	ICS HE Academy (British Computing Subject Centre) conference	Dublin
30 Aug-1 Sept	Threshold Concepts conference	Glasgow
4-8 September	ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS) IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing PPIG	Brighton
9-10 September	ICER 2006	Canterbury
11-15 September	HCI 2006 (British HCI conference)	London

Conference Chairs:

Richard Anderson, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Sally Fincher, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
Mark Guzdial, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Review Committee:

Andy Bernat, Computer Research Association, DC
Mike Clancy, University of California, Berkeley
Tony Clear, Auckland University of Technology, NZ
Ann Fleury, Aurora University, IL
David Ginat, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Raymond Lister, University of Sydney, Australia
Lauri Malmi, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Renee McCauley, College of Charleston, SC
W. Michael McCracken, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Anthony Robins, University of Otago, NZ
Stephen Seidman, New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ
Judy Sheard, Monash University, Australia
Josh Tenenberg, University of Washington, Tacoma, WA

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