whining about children and technology

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Jeremeanie started me thinking again with Too many topics, too little time. » This note’s for you » One Laptop Per Child? about the One Laptop Per Child issue, and then I found this on SlashDot below. I think what’s bugging me is that old standard of ‘what was good enough for me is good enough for everyone’ nonsense. When was our modern notion of the child invented. I’ve heard it variously put as post war, turn of the century, early 19th C or beginning of the industrial revolution. And this has nothing to do with whether we loved children or not. Point: how we see children is socially constructed and open to change. Secondly, technology for children is also not eternal, and will change, just look at the history of children’s books. Personally, I think TV was a bad thing because it opened up children to advertising, aside from the notions of what the CRT does to the brain. Point: children are already wedded to produced content and current technologies of the time.

As with most everything, people think that what they grew up with is the norm, and befores and afters are somehow unenlightened.

I don’t know if the OLPC project is a good thing. It definitely bugs me for its lack of transparency and inclusivity, and the hegemonic air about it. Perhaps I’m just out of the loop and everything’s kosher, but who knows.

I do know that there’s no validity in the status quo argument at all.

I’ll wait to see what happens.

Slashdot | OLPC’s UI To Be Kid-Tested In February
“The AP is reporting that kid testing of Negroponte’s ‘$100 Laptop’ starts in February. This article is some of the first mainstream coverage of just how different the user interface of the XO Computer is — it ditches the traditional office metaphors in favor of a ‘neighborhood’ and an activity-based journaling approach. Video of Sugar, as the UI is called, has been out on the net for a while, and Popular Science recently gave the color / monochrome display a ‘Grand Award’ in its 2006 technology roundup. What do you think of this new UI?”

Related links:
Low-cost laptop could transform learning - Yahoo! News

YouTube - Slightly better demo of the OLPC User Interface

PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2006

Public Domain Day 2007

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

From CopyrightWatch.ca :
“It’s January 1st, the day on which the calendar rolls over, and with it, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of books, articles, photographs, works of art, unpublished documents, and other “works”, in all areas of human endeavour, fall out of copyright to become the common cultural property of all citizens of a given country.”

Bits of Change, a la Catsy

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Wish I could go to CUSEC 2007: Canadian University Software Engineering Conference

Michelle Levesque
Google Corporate Speaker
http://www.google.com/

Bits of Change
How can software be political? Which components of software make a political statement: is it this function call over here, or is it that while loop over there?

In certain parts of the world today, governments read private e-mail and arrest people based on these random sweeps. New software allows them to do so with amazing efficiency. That software was written by someone like you.

Politics, law and ethics are becoming increasingly intertwined with software engineering. These changes are having drastic consequences in the field of software design; the future of our industry will depend on the the next generation of software engineers and the choices that you make.

NEW The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

I’ve been working on this for almost a year. To upgrade The Harrow: Original Works of Fantasy and Horror to the newest version of John Willinsky’s Open Journal Systems | Public Knowledge Project software. And it is finally done. It has been a nightmare, but I learned stuff. I hope you’ll all have a look.