Collaborating across Boundaries to Engage Journalism Students in Computational Thinking

The push to enhance journalism students' computing skills presents a welter of curricular and pedagogical challenges and opportunities. While growing attention and debate has been devoted to the teaching of particular skills such as scripting and programming, less attention has been paid to more fundamental questions, such as, what does it mean for journalism students to think computationally? What kind of scaffolding do journalism students need in order to understand when and how to apply computing tools and processes in their work? How might they become motivated to master new computing skills, and how will they gain the confidence to persist when the effort proves challenging? And finally, since computational journalism at the professional level is a multidisciplinary, collaborative effort, how and where do journalism students learn these collaboration skills?The competencies and problem-solving skills that we are seeking to inculcate have come to be known as computational thinking. While there is as yet no uniform definition, there is general agreement that computational thinking includes a broad range of mental tools and concepts from computer science that help people solve problems, design systems, and engage computers to assist in automating a wide range of intellectual processes. Computational thinking can be regarded as a group phenomenon as well as an individual one and this facility can assist specialists in other disciplines to more effectively adopt, use, and develop computational tools (National Research Council, 2010, p. 27).These questions dovetail with a national effort to broaden and deepen the ranks of computing professionals, and to enhance the collaboration and communication skills of computer science students. In the last decade, formal research collaborations have emerged between journalism and computer science educators aimed at enhancing computer science instruction while broadening participation in computing through computational journalism. This paper describes CABECT (Collaborating Across Boundaries to Engage Undergraduates in Computational Thinking), a research project rooted in the belief that multidisciplinary computing collaborations at the undergraduate level and directed at real community problems will boost computational thinking, improve students' knowledge of the computing tools and processes relevant to their profession, and whet their appetites to learn more.Specifically, we describe a multi-semester collaboration between two faculty members - one in computer science and the other in journalism and interactive multimedia, and their respective classes to build a software system to provide comprehensive, accessible information about underutilized land in an East Coast American city. Student feedback and assessment data support the hypothesis that such collaborations engage students more deeply in computational thinking. However, journalism students did not show as much positive change as did students in computer science, interactive multimedia and other majors. The data here raise questions about the best curricular preparation for such collaborations that present opportunities for future research.Literature ReviewThe transformative impact of computer science on journalism practices has been widely noted and remains an object of continuous study. Royal (2015) argues that it has been so profound that the industry itself is now a technology industry. Gynnild (2014) characterizes these emergent practices as "computational exploration in journalism" which "typically involves the journalistic co-creation of quantitative news projects that transcend geographical, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries" (p. 713). Flew, Spurgeon, Daniel, & Swift (2012) note that bringing journalists and computer science together opens up the possibility for new computing tools for mining data, contextualizing information, and engaging citizens both as news consumers and as citizen journalists. …