💬 LMS Dogma
E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Brett Victor’s “The Future of Programming,” and Audrey Watter’s PLATO review. I liked the way the idea of dogma weaved its way through all three pieces, and it resonated with the students as well.
Jim, I love Victor’s presentation on programming, as much for the style as the message (can they be separated?) However, I was left rethinking it in light of Victor’s take on making makerspaces more ‘scientific’ seeing space. It had me thinking how sometimes we can trivially end up picking and choosing between ideas and thinkers. For example, I would love to know Watters’ take on Seeing Spaces.
Aaron,
Thanks for the link to that video, I just watched it and it seems to be the roadmap to Victor’s Dynamicland: https://dynamicland.org/
I think Dynamicland as way of re-thinking how we computer is pretty compelling, I have to say I am not fully clear how it all fits together, but this idea of seeing seems essential. Everything is interactive, recorded, and then visualized. It’s pretty cool, in terms of the presentation it seems pretty geared towards scientists and engineers (which makes me feel a bit on the outside), but it is certainly an interesting vision for the future of maker spaces. When I was in the Canvas headquarters they had there server infrastructure running on AWS visualized, and it was deeply compelling to me. Watching an entire infrastructure spike and lull over the course of time does teach you a lot, especially if you can capture and compare over time—not to mention explore different possibilities.
I would want to see a space here for those who tell the story of the explorations and narrate the process. i think Victor is quite a storyteller, and that does carry over from The Future of Programming, as well as the idea of trying to break free of the dogma of how we compute currently.
Out of curiosity, what part of this talk made you rethink the programming talk? Did this talk seem incompatible with the ideas in his other talk?
Thank you Jim for taking the time to reply. I was not aware of Dynamicland. That makes a lot more sense. I think that I viewed Victor’s ‘seeing space’ as being more akin to a surveillance space. After watching The Future of Programming again, I think that I probably need to explore some of the history more. Although I know the ‘events’ I think that I need to do a lot more reading to understand the context.