STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

The First Annual Pakistan Blog Awards were awarded in Karachi on 28th May, 2010. STEP was honored to be  the recipient of the award in the Best Education Blog category. We are honored and delighted, mostly because we had some very worthy contenders in our category — we encourage our readers to visit and support their efforts in this domain too. Read the rest of this entry »

The next talk in the STEP Lecture Series will be given by Prof. Jeannette Wing, President’s Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, on Friday, April 23rd at 5:00pm PST. The title of the talk is Computational Thinking. The talk will be streamed live and a brief Q&A session will follow the talk. Undergraduate and graduate students with non-engineering backgrounds are also encouraged to attend.

Title: Computational Thinking

Where: Air University, FAST-NU Islamabad, IMS Peshawar, LUMS, and NUST SEECS.

When: April 23rd, 2010, 5-7pm Pakistan Standard Time (8-10am EDT).

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Abstract: My vision for the 21st Century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, let’s add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Bio: Dr. Jeannette M. Wing is the President’s Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004-2007, she was Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. Currently on leave from CMU, she is the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Professor Wing’s general research interests are in the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current focus is on the foundations of trustworthy computing.

Professor Wing was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals. She has been a member of many advisory boards, including: the Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) Technical Advisory Group to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Tecbnology (PCAST), the National Academies of Sciences’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, ACM Council, the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board, NSF’s CISE Advisory Committee, Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, the Intel Research Pittsburgh’s Advisory Board, and the Sloan Research Fellowships Program Committee. She is a member of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Professor Wing is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) for facilitating the video broadcast of this talk.

The other day I read Dr. Usmani’s article “From Florida to Topi: A Returning Fulbright Scholar’s Search for an Academic Position” on STEP. I sincerely appreciate his return (to Pakistan), and his desire to serve. However, in discussing Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST), Dr. Usmani has unintentionally — I am giving him the benefit of the doubt — offended me. Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to enforce quality, the HEC recently announced that they would not recognize PhD degrees awarded unless the recipient manages to score a 40 percentile on the GRE subject test at the time of admission to the graduate program, reported here. This is a revision of HEC’s earlier policy, announced four years back, that the GRE subject test must be cleared before submitting the thesis. The announcement has proven controversial among PhD instructors and their students. Read the rest of this entry »

Nature’s recent article on higher education in Pakistan has re-ignited the debate on higher education reform, evoking strong responses from both supporters and critics of the HEC. Recently, we interviewed the lead author Dr. Athar Osama, to learn more about his wider conclusions, and his response to some of the criticisms of the methodology used in the Nature article.

To seed this discussion, we present commentary from Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman. Dr. Hoodbhoy presents his opposing point of view, arguing that the measures presented in the article were inadequate, and further that the conclusions drawn from the metrics were flawed. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, founding (and former) chairman of the HEC, who led the higher education reform effort during his tenure, responds by pointing to data that, in his view, shows the depth and breadth of the reform’s success.

We invite our readers to contribute their thoughts on what metrics are appropriate for measuring the success of higher education within the context of Pakistan.

NOTE: Both commentators have significantly shaped the landscape of Pakistani education over the last few decades. We request our discussants to avoid personalizing the discussion and to maintain a civil and constructive tone.

Read the rest of this entry »