The Secrets of Cybersecurity Education Research, Part 1
What academia doesn’t want you to know about how it makes its sausage.
I don’t know how many realize there is a rich science around how to educate students. Pedagogy exists both as a general set of theories and applied principles. The general theory gets published as pedagogy, instructional design, and learning focused cognitive science. Meanwhile, the applied principles show up in subject domain specific places. In my case, that means cybersecurity and computer science.
Now, as an academic who enjoys teaching as much as researching, I’ve immersed myself in both theory and applied principles over the past 10 or more years in higher education. It is fair to say I know many of the secrets of cybersecurity education in particular. Rather than hoard those secrets like a dragon, I’m going to share them like a bard.
To me, the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants embodies a basic scientific principle. This principle is the foundation behind how a field of knowledge forms and, more importantly, grows. Thus, we can analyzing published literature using bibliometrics to render evidence of the principle observable. Indeed, it is reasonable to expect the body of knowledge to grow over time by extensions related to the established research topics, problems…
