Holiday Reading

From a csta post http://blog.acm.org/archives/csta/2009/12/holiday_reading.html


Ah, the holiday break. Time to relax, catch up on sleep, and perhaps read a book or two. If you are looking for some interesting reading related to CS education, here are three books that I read over the summer and really enjoyed:
Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, by Jane Margolis, Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode (CSTA Board Member), Jennifer Jellison Holme, and Kimberly Nao. MIT Press, 2008.

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown & Co., 2008.

Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis. Addison-Wesley, 2008.

As a CS teacher, if you haven't read Stuck in the Shallow End yet, you really should. It gives a detailed analysis of factors that have led to our shortage of CS students, especially among women and minorities, and describes the project currently underway in L.A. to try and address these factors. All of Malcolm Gladwell's books are interesting and fun to read. This one looks at characteristics that lead to success (and so complements Margolis' book very nicely). Blown to Bits is a great description of the technological changes going on in society and how they impact our lives. Lots of fascinating facts and anecdotes you can impress your students with ;-).


I have read stuck in the shallow end, I brought the book off amazon, however this time I want to read blown to bits, the dollar at the moment is not good, so I have looked at books.google.com for a copy and found one.  Blown to bits-books.google.com