Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bob Frankston <Bob2-19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: May 4, 2007 6:23:55 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Cc: "'Larry Press'" <lpress () csudh edu>
Subject: RE: [IP] The House of Representatives on campus downloading

I should preface this with reminding people that the term P2P has  
taken on a life of its own. In reality the Internet is 100% peer to  
peer – all exchanges are peer exchanges. Alas, we seem to be in the  
phase the auto-mobile industry faced when laws were passed to assure  
cars wouldn’t disrupt horses.



Once again the US seems determined to do the world a favor by ceding  
technology leadership – like the 19th century when Europe used its  
patent laws to assure that no new idea went exploited. Instead the  
initiative shifted to the Americans who didn’t feel they were bound  
by such restrictive rules.



When the “authorities” do embrace technology they miss the point.  
Today’s New York Times has a front page story on how laptops are not  
proving to be an effective tool in education. Of course this is a  
true “duh” situation. Next I expect to read articles about why  
vaccinations is useless – after all, if you order 100,000 vaccines  
and just pile them up in some corner then they won’t do much good. Is  
there any understanding that the laptop is not a magical device that  
works by just taking up space? It requires teachers and others with  
some sense of how to use it. Even if the teachers don’t the students  
may but, again, not by magic. There are studies showing that if you  
put a laptop in the middle of a village in India students will being  
to explore and discover what is possible But if you drop a laptop  
into a sea of iPods then it’s unlikely to be very interesting by  
comparison with the narcotic effect of the iPod. Yet we consider  
iPods to be technology.



Of course those who do take initiative to do more with the laptop  
than use it as a 1:1 replacement for what they already have then they  
will be considered disruptive. If we succeed in preventing such  
disruption then we’ll succeed preventing discovery. But then in an  
education system focused on testing for memorizing the past then such  
losses may result in improved grades and thus the illusion of  
learning. This recalls the great productive crisis of the 90’s when  
any productivity improvements due to computers didn’t show up in the  
standard measures.



Seymour Paper didn’t merely drop computers (in those days, terminals  
though today the OneLaptop project) into classrooms. He also  
developed programming tools and helped students take advantage of  
computing itself.



Today we have very powerful tools available to all yet many schools  
still treat computing as “keyboarding”. How many schools teach even  
elementary concepts of data representation? At very least we should  
be encouraging the development of peer applications to support  
collaborative projects and encourage students to take advantage of  
bountiful local capacity. Yet …



Those who do not know history may be doomed to repeat it but those  
who know only the past seem mired in it.



But at least we’ll protect our entertainment industry – after all, if  
we can’t produce new products at least we can entertain those who do.



PS: Sadly Seymour was injured last December though, according to  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert he is facing a uncertain  
recovery process.



-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2007 17:01
To: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: [IP] The House of Representatives on campus downloading







Begin forwarded message:



From: Larry Press <lpress () csudh edu>

Date: May 4, 2007 12:41:07 PM EDT

To: dave () farber net

Subject: The House of Representatives on campus downloading

Reply-To: Larry Press <lpress () csudh edu>



http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/03/download







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