the Design Experience Weblog Archive

Aaron discusses compulsory liscensing for music in Privacy, Accuracy, Security: Pick Two. It looks like some are trying to solve the music downloading problem by adding a tax on items like CD recorders and media. Aaron discusses the problems with this type of plan. I can't see any way around the problems of fairness and privacy that are brought up. Very informative.

I have been reading a bit. I setup the Bookshelf OpenACS package to keep better track of my thoughts on what I am learning.

Mainly I am interested in using technology in new ways, not to replace the teacher but as a tool. I really like Seymour Paperts argument for giving every kid a computer. Here is a nice article with a good explanation of it: http://www.papert.com/articles/laptops/acute_pencil_shortage.html and a quote

In a recent speech at Bates College, Seymour Papert -- MIT scientist/educator, world renowned technology/artificial intelligence expert and Blue Hill resident -- asked his audience to imagine some ancient time before there was writing. There were schools, but all knowledge was word of mouth.

Then, one glorious, epochal day, writing was invented. And along with it, an implement. Say, the pencil.

The Sumarian School Board, seeing the potential of this marvelous device, decided to get one. If it worked out, next year they'd get two. Eventually, they foresaw having a whole pile of pencils and once a week, for perhaps an hour, the pupils would march down to the Pencil Lab for cuneiform class.

Professor Papert then observed that all kids today have a pencil, the lucky few perhaps several. They use them even before they know their ABC's -- they scribble, doodle, explore, express, create. The naughty ones even run with them.

This idea really makes sense to me. Of course, I have been using computers pratically all my life so I can see how the computer can be used a tool to do anything you can think of.

Wow, its been a while. I have been busy working on a client project, rewriting general-comments and thinking about a design for a new CMS for OpenACS. General-comments is about half done. The rewrite is to make the comments their own object/content type and remove the unecessary dependence on acs-messaging which adds no value in this case. Also hopefully I can finish trackback support along with general comments.

I also started work on an Amazon.com web services API package. I wanted to download my wishlist data and import it into the bookshelf package. I got most of the way there, but life intruded, as usual :) I got the last bit of info to make it work from Michael Yoon who has a nice Amazon Wishlist ranking service.

Besides that I have been reading quite a few books, mostly inspired by visiting Squeakland.org looking for ideas on teaching programming to kids.

Complete Digital Photography looks like a great book. Thanks Andrew.

Tony Byrne of CMSWatch comments on Challanges of Dynamic Publishing. He makes some great observations about the differences and tradeoffs between static publishing and dynamic publishing from a CMS. Then he goes off into the woods about "ugly" URLs, search engines etc. I wish we could drop this. The ugliness of URLs is an artifact of crappy software. It has nothing to do with dynamic or static publishing. It is fully possible using simple code to have nice pretty URLs. Ok, now that I got that out of my system, I agree with most of what Tony says. Partially rendered pages is probably the best way to go, inserting the dynamic personalized bits where necessary. This is the ultimate direction I am working towards with OpenACS.