Libraries and New Media
These are my rambling thoughts on a few of readings from over the past month. First of all, after reading Illich, I was delighted to learn that my profession survives in his vision of a deschooled society: The professional personnel needed for this network would be much more like custodians, museum guides, or reference librarians...
The schizo structure of research
I should be posting on the Sherry Turkle essay, since that is what we’re reading this week and I’m even presenting on it with Blaine today. But as I sat down yesterday morning and scanned through Twitter, a post by @wedaman caught my eye, about reading Engelbart to kindergarteners. (Which… fascinating, yes?) So I clicked...
Enacting our games
The element that immediately jumped out at me in Laurel’s essay was “Enactment.” It is interesting that the development of this theatrical genre has been concurrent with the blossoming of computer games as a popular form of entertainment, and I speculate that computer games have in some ways served as a model for it. In...
Can kids use the iPad to program for the iPad?
When the iPad was released this past year, to much fanfare and millions of sales, a lot was said about how Alan Kay’s vision of the Dynabook had finally come to pass. (Well, some people said Jobs stole the idea from Kay, but most people just trumpeted that the future was finally here…) And yes,...
"We can and must design the media"
I figure that the more you know about computers… the better your imagination can flow between technicalities, can slide the parts together, can discern the shapes of what you would have these things do. The computer is not a limitless partner, but it is deeply versatile; to work with it we must understand what it...