What do you think? Is this article a fair shot, or a low blow?
~Jeff
As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory. He likes to mention Dakar, but doesn’t like to mention how that pilot ended — or that no real facts about the validity of the approach came out of it. And there sure as hell doesn’t exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.
This passage took me back to my (mercifully short) time teaching computer science at a local Western Massachusetts high school. I had a classroom full of truly shitty Windows machines, which annoyed me to no end at first, but soon enough I discovered with an install of free software on them (Firefox, WAMPserver, Notepad++) they became perfectly reasonable ways to teach HTML and PHP.
By using the correct software, the underlying OS fell away, and it wasn’t important that these machines were 8+ years old and running Windows — they did what they needed to do to serve the students’ needs. The fact that the software was free and open was lucky (because the school system was essentially broke!) but not at all necessary for the learning process. Having the students editing text via emacs, vi, or nano wouldn’t have meant anything at all — and now, having come around to finally embracing this mode of thought and “lowering his standards” to allow a plebian OS such as Windows XP on his beloved hardware, it’s too late. The industry has figured out how to make better OLPC-style hardware powerful enough to run Windows, linux — whatever the kids might need to use in order to learn.
The true shame is epitomized by this reddit comment:
The most depressing part of it is that Negroponte rejected [Steve] Jobs’ offer of free Mac OS X on basis that it wasn’t fully open source. Now he’s thrilled to get a cut-down version of 7-year-old closed-source, commercial OS at $3 per license + $7 for extra memory to hold the bloat.
Ouch. It’s funny because it’s true.
~Jeff
Comments and suggestions are, as always, warmly welcomed.
~Jeff
And the interfaces — good lord, the interfaces. Every single one was “press source again and again and again until you get the right music source, then hit the select button, then dial to the correct playlist, then hit select again, and then, and then, and then” — overwhelming and cumbersome*, and you’re supposed to pull this all off while driving. God forbid you’ve got GPS, a cellphone, or XM radio going on as well.
In short, the state of car stereo design in 2008 is almost exactly like the state of smartphone design in 2006, pre-iPhone. Which is to say: in 2006 there were expensive devices that made phone calls, played music, and let you read your email and browse the web, but none of them did all of those things very well. It took Apple to come along and make a game-changing gizmo like the iPhone before people started warming to the idea that these were all viable activities that they one could reasonably expect to be able to do without compromises in a handheld device. Similarly, the car stereo market has devices that do what I want — play CDs, play mp3/aac files, and hook up to the iPod — but the interfaces are atrocious and the aesthetics are worse. Apple could come down like the hammer of Thor on this market and fix this muddled mess in one shot.
~Jeff
* Note to hardware user interface designers: if your design has the user hitting a single button over and over to get to the option they want, you’re doing it wrong.