Tag: Bret Victor

Watched
Bret Victor reimagines the makerspace built around tinkering and argues that it is in ‘seeing’ that we are able to make this a science. He talks about three forms of seeing:

  • seeing inside the object being made
  • seeing across time to observe the various changes
  • seeing across possibilities to assess which is best solution based on data and reason

Victor elaborates on his idea here, including various sketches. Interestingly, this reminds me of John Hattie’s idea of the Visible Classrooms, where everything is recorded and analysed. This also sounds similar to AltSchool.

Jim Groom pointed out that this is roadmap for Victor’s Dynamicland project.

Liked PLATO and the History of Education Technology (That Wasn’t) (Hack Education)

The Friendly Orange Glow is a history of PLATO – one that has long deserved to be told and that Dear does with meticulous care and detail. (The book was some three decades in the making.) But it’s also a history of why, following Sputnik, the US government came to fund educational computing. Its also – in between the lines, if you will – a history of why the locus of computing and educational computing specifically shifted to places like MIT, Xerox PARC, Stanford. The answer is not “because the technology was better” – not entirely. The answer has to do in part with funding – what changed when these educational computing efforts were no longer backed by federal money and part of Cold War era research but by venture capital. (Spoiler alert: it changes the timeline. It changes the culture. It changes the mission. It changes the technology.) And the answer has everything to do with power and ideology – with dogma.

Bookmarked
Bret Victor argues that digital art needs to break with coding to create expressions that go beyond code and language. This is a fascinating presentation. I have postulated before of the idea of technology splitting music into its parts allowing users to not only listen, but also engage. This is something that Bjork explored with Biophilia.

Tom Woodward has captured a number of quotes from the presentation.