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When Bruce A. Reinig lived in Hong Kong in the late 90s, he was surprised by the amount of pirated software he saw in the streets each day.

Conventional wisdom says that developing countries are havens for the most pirated software, but Hong Kong is anything but a poor nation.

“It didn’t seem like it should be there,” says Mr. Reinig, chair of the department of information and decision systems at San Diego State University’s College of Business Administration.

Mr. Reinig was intrigued enough by his finding to start investigating what made some countries more hospitable to pirated software than others. It’s a valuable question: A joint 2010 report by the Business Software Alliance, an information-technology trade group, and International Data Corporation suggests that the rate of piracy is on the rise and that the value of all pirated software in 2009 exceeded $ 50-billion.

Working with Robert K. Plice, a colleague at San Diego State, Mr. Reinig looked at three factors to determine…

Wired Campus

Joseph Cohen says he’s fed up with Blackboard. The leading course-management software is overloaded with features and dreadfully designed, making simple tasks difficult, says Mr. Cohen, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He’s not much kinder to other solutions: “It’s ridiculous,” he says, that some professors still post syllabi as clunky Microsoft Word documents.

Mr. Cohen and a classmate, Dan Getelman, have launched Coursekit, a stripped-down online learning-management system that offers a discussion board, a calendar, a syllabus, and related resources for courses at Penn. Mr. Cohen says he hopes Coursekit’s simple interface and Facebook-inspired tools will help make online discussions in a course as social as the course itself.

“It’s the classic example of a bloated and bad industry,” he says, “and we think it’s about time that it ends.”

A small army of entrepreneurs would like to take down Blackboard, of course—start-up Instructure is just one recent…

Wired Campus

Readers of this blog may recall that Greg Wilson has been developing a course he calls Software Carpentry, providing the computing knowledge that computational scientists and engineers will need.  He just concluded his course with a summary seven principles of computational thinking, based on Jon Udell’s seven principles of the Web. Yet another take, to contrast with the CS:Principles work.

Hello, and welcome to the final episode of Software Carpentry. We’re going to wrap up the course by looking at a few key ideas that underpin everything else we’ve done. We have left them to the end because like most big ideas, they don’t make sense until you have seen the examples that they are generalizations of.

Our seven principles are:

1. It’s all just data.
2. Data doesn’t mean anything on its own—it has to be interpreted.
3. Programming is about creating and composing abstractions.
4. Models are for computers, and views are for people.
5. Paranoia makes us productive.
6. Better algorithms are better than…

Computing Education Blog

Blackboard announced on Thursday that it would offer a free version of its course-management software to instructors who wanted to use it for up to five courses. The software, CourseSites, is intended in part to show off Blackboard’s newest platform to faculty members at institutions that are still using older versions.

Wired Campus

I’ve heard of “software studies” once before, which is described as “applying humanities methods to problems in software, software culture, and computer science” (by Jeremy Douglas), but haven’t read much on it.  I was just perusing Jeremy’s movie “What counts as code to criticize” (slides are available in PDF) where he contrasts traditional textual programming, natural language programming (which is what he calls Inform 7), and programming patches with Max/MSP.  Honestly, I don’t quite get all that he’s saying, but the idea of using humanities methods to compare and contrast languages like these is intriguing.  Part of what we argue with contextualized computing education is that we are now getting students who think like us.  The students who aren’t in our classes probably don’t think like us.  We need to think about what we do in new ways to figure out strategies to engage those others.

Tagged: computing education, media Computing Education Blog