Update from Urner
kirby...@gmail.com
best behavior, as Minister of Education, government in exile.
So what's up in Kirbyland as Pam calls it?
Well, some of you who've been tracking my career know me as adjunct
faculty with Portland State University, under the auspices of Saturday
Academy, a 23-years-young school funded by Silicon Forest executives
who want local Oregonians to have alternative experiences optionally
leading to high tech careers by a process of smooth transition (and not
waking up screaming, suddenly hip to the fact that your schooling has
not well served you, in terms of getting that dream job our neck of the
woods).[1]
What is the Silicon Forest? Check Wikipedia. We stretch from Redmond
(IronPython) to Ashland (Shakespeare Festival). Our symbolic Silicon
Pine Needle (not really silicon) dominates the Seattle sky line, right
next to Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum, where Neal Stephenson's
pen-written stack of sheepskins or whatever (the Baroque Cycle in
draft) sits humming behind glass. Maybe it's just paper...
Well, my class his filled again, so for a 3rd term I'll be diving head
first into Pythonic Mathematics, a wonderful subject that makes
Mathematics come alive. We get to generators right after functions,
cutting teeth on Pascal's Triangle and the Fibonacci Numbers for
starters. Guido's easy GCD function gives us a handle on Totients and
Euler's Theorem. Before ya know it, we're talking RSA, even with
middle schoolers (most are from high schools, but some like to leap
ahead). We also import visual.
Why government in exile? Well, that's how it feels, with Texas
controlling everything with its stupid Instruments. No Python in math
class, because kids are forced to punch calculators, squint at tiny
screens. At every OSCON, I raise the battle cry, asking all Open
Source Language Communities to unite against this tyranny and
oppression. I don't care if its Ruby, Python, Perl or Haskell that you
champion, let's recognize that Jill and Jane aren't getting their tax
dollar money's worth, as Everyday Math shares approximately zero Geek
Culture.
We're deliberately shoved off the radar, sidelined, while fuddydud
professor teacher trainers spout chalkboard truisms in bastardized
ancient greek, never giving us the time of day (it's really quite late,
past twilight). When the NCTM (a math teacher think tank) talks about
"technology in the classroom" do you think they mean our Gorgeous
Snake? No way. They mean TIs, calculators, little black boxes that
can't serve a web page worth beans. For all they care, kids won't
learn any math through programming until the cows come home (around the
same time hell freezes).
One of the first heros to lead the charge in favor of using
self-executing math languages in the classroom, was Harvard's Kenneth
Iverson. APL, and later J, was everything one could want in a math
language. It ate hyperdimensional arrays for breakfast, controlled
graphics, served as a shorthand for IBM's inner sanctum. Best of all,
like Python, like PLT Scheme, it was interactive. Enter a line, get a
line back. Neal's 'In the Beginning...' recounts what a boost that
experience gave him (a true command line experience). People usually
never look back at that point, thinking "this is for me."
Seymour Papert's team at MIT then gave us Logo, in complement to
Dartmouth's BASIC, and for a few glorious years, it looked like
computer programming for everyone and $100 laptops (kid-friendly tablet
PCs) were just around the corner. This was the 1980s. Peace Dividend
just around the corner, relative utopia.
So what happened next?
That's a history that still needs a lot of documentary treatment.
Salon published a breakthrough article a few weeks ago, about "Why
Johnny Can't Code". But that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot
more went on behind the scenes, to dumb it all down, to assert
continued moron control. It hasn't been pretty (as if you needed *me*
to tell you that).
I'll turn you over to my blog at this point, dear reader, just in case
you want to track more of my military-industrial campaign:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/chatting-with-mom.html
And yes, I still think I'm winning.
Kirby
[1] more re Saturday Academy:
http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-wings.html
Michael Sparks
>
> Unlike Arthur, I never swore to stay off this list, so here I am, on
> best behavior, as Minister of Education, government in exile.
Oh what a pity, I un-subscribed from edu-sig because it was full of
your rantings, ramblings and general world assumption that your view
of the world is the only valid viewpoint and everyone else is worth
drowning in your self important bollocks (as per above) that made that
list totally unusable for its stated purpose.
If you really think that you're minister of education for a government
in exile (Who's? China's ? Taiwan's? Belgium's? India's? France's ?
Ireland's?) you should seek help from a psychiatrist (preferred if
you're that far gone), or psychologist.
You're possibly the most pompous self important ass that I've had the
displeasure to recieve email from in a long time. Please go back under
the rock you crawled out from underneath.
[rest snipped and unread due to the disgusting self important
bollockshite way of starting an update that no-one's interested in. If
you want to post things like that, start a bloody blog like any other
sane person so we can all ignore it ]
Michael.