Objectives, Levels, and Degrees of Freedom

• Your course objectives indicate a broad range of conceptions of your role.
• Asking "why" generally brings us up one level in a "rationale" or "teleological" hierarchy. Asking "how" generally brings us down one level.
• What constitutes the "top level"? When does "why" not make sense?

  I conjecture it is when we reach a fixed constraint or deeply held assumption?

• What accounts for our differences in course objectives? What accounts for our differences in our locations on the hierarchy?

  One of the large differences might be what we perceive as our degrees of freedom in our work.

• There are not inherent advantages to any particular location, but strengths and weaknesses of each.
• The risks and rewards of thinking at different levels

  Level	Risks	Rewards
  high	Difficult to connect to evidence (that goals are met) Discount fixed constraints	Can instantiate in multiple ways Grounds "why" in tacit theories of (CS) learning
  low	Direct connection to evidence Sensitivity to fixed constraints	Premature commitment to particular implementations Pedagogical rationale remains opaque

• Perhaps we can: consider goals at multiple levles, and challenge what we take as our fixed constraints and deeply held assumptions?
• Making these explicit helps.
• We should endeavor to avoid reproducing power/status differentials in our language and interactions within this group.