tags: education/didactics vs learning/teaching

Question

I was confused a bit by education and didactics. Mainly, I guess, since I thought didactics is part of education.

Would it be better to change those tags to learning-cs and teaching-cs respectively? Or should these maybe only be synonyms?

Answer 1

I think you summed up the difference between didactics and education aptly in your tag excerpt suggestions:

Education: General questions regarding learning computer science disciplines and CS education

Didactics: Didactic tools and methods particularly suitable for Computer Science education

I don't think a separation in "teaching" and "learning" is wise. Learning and teaching can often not be properly separated, in particular if you talk about education in the broader sense. Didactics is somewhat exclusive to teachers, although you can become a teacher quickly when explaining something to a colleague.

I also considered creating intuition-building for certain kinds of questions but thought it was too unspecific.

Answer 2

I propose we keep education and get rid of didactics (e.g., mark it a synonym of education). I think the distinction between the two is too subtle and people won't know how to use them (and the current tag wikis don't help).

I looked through some questions tagged didactics and all of them seem like they could equally well be tagged education (in fact, most of them already are tagged with both tags). They certainly aren't currently used in a manner consistent with the distinction Raphael proposed earlier, so even if we previously thought that distinction might be useful, I think experience over the past 4 years suggests that we were over-thinking it. And, personally, today, I don't see enough value in the distinction, given how confusing the distinction is.

So, let's get rid of didadics and just use education.