Abstract

The education of computer science students is a challenging task: the compexity of the material that is part of a curriculum is increasing at an astonishing pace, following the complexity of the software artifacts that our students are trained to master.The free software revolution has entered the scene, and offers new challenges, and new solutions; on one side, the sheer amount of code available as free software today calls for the education of a new kind of computer scientist, and software engineer: they must be prepared to manage the complexity of software systems built out of components coming from all around the planet, evolving at fast, yet unrelated pace, and whose source code is freely available for inspection or customization. On the other side, this very same availability of the source code gives our student the possibility to reach a level of technical insight that was previously unthinkable.In this talk, we will try to give a few examples of new research challenges emerging from the free software revolution, as well as evidence that teaching computer science can no longer be done without free software.Nevertheless, it would be a huge error to believe that we are only called to educate computer scientists and software engineers, and hence could stick to a purely technical view of our duties: due to the unprecedented penetration of ICT in every aspects of everyday life, we are also, as computer science teachers, the first responsible of educating the citizens of tomorrow.This duty will not be fulfilled by simply passing over technical details: as the recent example of the electonic voting machines clearly show, we face the challenge of educating e-citizens which are not simply computer literate, but have a mental model of computer machinery allowing them a clear understanding of the limitations of this technology which is beautiful, but in no way magic.