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SUMMARY:Prize lecture: What do we Think we are Doing? - Alan Blackwell (Un
 iversity of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20171026T131500Z
DTEND:20171026T141500Z
UID:TALK94315@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alexander Simpson
DESCRIPTION:Alan will be repeating the talk he was invited to give at IEEE
  Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) 2017\, given after 
 receiving an award for 20-year Most Influential Paper. His 1996 paper [1] 
 challenged the VL community to ask What do we think we are doing? It might
  now be called a Systematic Literature Review\, although formal procedures
  for SLR were not developed until later. It made a textual analysis of pub
 lications in which authors described a cognitive rationale for VL research
 \, observing that many relied on insights from folk psychology\, from intr
 ospection\, or speculative computer analogies to the brain. This was a stu
 dy of metacognition – beliefs about one’s cognitive ability that shape
  the mental strategies we choose. In the case of programming language desi
 gners\, the choices being shaped were not their own problem-solving strate
 gies (something we all do)\, but the design rationale for new languages (w
 hich will affect others).\n\n[1] Blackwell\, A.F. (1996). Metacognitive Th
 eories of Visual Programming: What do we think we are doing? In Proceeding
 s IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages\, pp. 240-246.
LOCATION:SS03 Meeting Room\, Computer Laboratory
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