Category Archives: Linklog

Want to know what’s coming next, what spectacular new technology is going to change everything about everything? Just look around, says Clive Thompson. It’s already out there:

Can this actually be true? Buxton points to exhibit A, the pinch-and-zoom gesture that Apple introduced on the iPhone. It seemed like a bolt out of the blue, but as Buxton notes, computer designer Myron Krueger pioneered the pinch gesture on his experimental Video Place system in 1983. Other engineers began experimenting with it, and companies like Wacom introduced tablets that let designers use a pen and a puck simultaneously to manipulate images onscreen. By the time the iPhone rolled around, “pinch” was a robust, well-understood concept.

A more recent example is the Microsoft Kinect. Sure, the idea of controlling software just by waving your body seems wild and new. But as Buxton says, engineers have long been perfecting motion-sensing for alarm systems and for automatic doors in grocery stores. We’ve been controlling software with our bodies for years, just in a different domain.

Virginia Heffernan, for the NYT Opinionator blog, looks at the state of education through the eyes of students who have grown up on Facebook, and wonders if they’re being ill-equipped:

When we criticize students for making digital videos instead of reading “Gravity’s Rainbow,” or squabbling on Politico.com instead of watching “The Candidate,” we are blinding ourselves to the world as it is. And then we’re punishing students for our blindness. Those hallowed artifacts — the Thomas Pynchon novel and the Michael Ritchie film — had a place in earlier social environments. While they may one day resurface as relevant, they are now chiefly of interest to cultural historians. But digital video and Web politics are intellectually robust and stimulating, profitable and even pleasurable.

The contemporary American classroom, with its grades and deference to the clock, is an inheritance from the late 19th century. During that period of titanic change, machines suddenly needed to run on time. Individual workers needed to willingly perform discrete operations as opposed to whole jobs. The industrial-era classroom, as a training ground for future factory workers, was retooled to teach tasks, obedience, hierarchy and schedules.

It’s a convincing article, but I particularly liked a commenter’s take:

As noted, the material written for peers was better than the assignments written for the teacher but doesn’t everyone do their best work when they’re doing it for someone they connect with? The argument for collaboration is a big hurdle for traditional education, as what the work world calls sharing, schools call copying or plagiarism. Very few of us work alone: why should school be different, once you master basic individual skills?

When I was in school, I was told over and over that the most important thing I was learning was how to learn. How to work with people, how to tackle something I don’t understand, how to think and act critically and thoughtfully. This collaboration piece, I think, is critical to schools’ success: We need to provide teaching and coaching on how to exist in this ever-more-discursive, crowdsourced, everything-and-everyone-within-reach world. That’s what kids are having to learn themselves, by commenting on Politico or writing blogs for their friends, and what schools seem to try to beat out of them.