Hi all,
After having it in my radar for some years, I’ll be starting to teach in Julia in the Information Sciences department of the Javeriana University, in Bogota, Colombia. I have been a long Pharo user, enthusiast and promoter and even I made my own computational notebook based on it, called Grafoscopio. This semester I want to see if Julia fits more fluently the approach I have been experimenting previously with other technologies and will be a good way for me and my students to experience an interesting technology ecosystem and the communities around it.
Our approach is closer to Science and Technology Studies (STS) than the more empiric analytical epistemologies (mathematics, natural sciences and engineering) where Julia has been used. However I think than Julia can shine not only in STEM disciplines but also in the STS transdisciplines, despite not finding much priors on those fields.
Because of our context and where we teach/learn, we will try a mixed and eclectic approach that includes:
- an introduction to computational thinking, with more classic sources, including snippets from “How to design programs”, “Think Julia”, several tutorials, and some simple data scrapping and chatbot projects, if time allows.
- a critical approach to AI (or what I like to call “Apparent Intelligence”), and a way to “de-hype” it, including the Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia, data colonialism collectives with introductory texts and related videos like “Is AI making us dumber? Maybe”:
Because of everything I have talked before and because we are trying to dis-encourage the “AI first” approach in favor of a “think by yourself and with your peers first” approach, I would like to know if is it possible to disable the “Fix Syntax with AI” suggestion from the Pluto UI and make it a default when installing it from the package manager? This will help us to avoid unnecessary student temptations and to showcase that, in some places, is still possible to escape the “AI down your throat” of big corps and (Global North) markets.
Thanks in advance, not only for the answer, but for the wider Julia ecosystem and the communities around it.