SIGSOFT is an ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering and has a monthly informal publication called Software Engineering Notes (SEN). This month, when I was browsing in the ACM DL, an article from the latest issue of SEN grabbed my attention: History of computers can raise student's interest. According to this short note, if well-known personalities speak about the old times, students get more interested in computer history. Apparently this idea is also supported by another article titled as The design of a history of computing course with a unique perspective. I am just wondering, why don't we do this for accessibility? Why don't we have well-known personalities in the accessibility community telling us about the old times to increase students' interest in accessibility?

History of computers can raise student's interest

What was software development back in the 1960's and how did it evolve?

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1384139.1384152
Full Proceedings: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 33, Issue 4 (July 2008) The design of a history of computing course with a unique perspective

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a new history of computing course that includes personal and historical perspectives from faculty members to supplement the course material. Despite decreasing enrollments in our computer science courses, this new course has achieved significantly large enrollments and a wide audience due to this unique faculty perspective in addition to the approval of this course as a general education requirement that addresses the implications of science and technology on society.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1121341.1121366
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, 2006, Houston, Texas, USA.

Labels: computing, education, history, Web accessibility