The next big thing?

Tablets have largely eclipsed the netbook market and some (myself included) have argued that this format of device will disrupt education profoundly.  In saying this, I in no way am suggesting that radically new technologies will not emerge.  In fact, they already have – even if they are not commercially available yet.

For example, in 2009, MIT Grad Student Pranav Mistry gave  TED presentation in which he showed his sixth-sense technology with which a special necklace held a camera and a projector to facilitate augmented reality explorations of really neat things.  For example, if you picked up a book and looked at the cover, information about that book, including reviews, would appear projected on the book itself.  His video is a whirlwind tour of amazingly cool stuff that seemed like science fiction at the time – only he made it work in the laboratory in preparation for becoming products.

Fast forward a year or so and the focus shifts to Google.  While the public face of Google Labs has been closed down, Google is continuing to explore cutting edge ideas.  One shot over the bow was a free app called Google Goggles that lets you use your smartphone to do many of the things dome by Panav Mistry’s system.  Take a photo of a book cover, for example, and it not only recognizes the book, but provides links to reviews and even a link to Amazon in case you want to get your own copy.  Stand in front of a landmark building, take a picture, and get links to information about the building.  Take a snapshot of a Sudoku puzzle, and it recognizes it as a puzzle and asks if you would like the solution.

Last year buzz started to build around the idea that the Google Goggles software was going to get its own dedicated hardware – a pair of glasses with a built-in heads-up display.  For example, a recent article in the New York Times blog describes some of the possible features such a device would have.  This would be a truly hand’s free device using head gestures to send commands to the system.  While this format probably tops out on the nerd scale – which is probably why I think it is cool – it may in fact represent the new face of computing.

Only it isn’t new.

In July, 1945, President Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, wrote an article for the Atlantic in which he described his vision for the future.  One of his ideas was the following:

“Certainly progress in photography is not going to stop. Faster material and lenses, more automatic cameras, finer-grained sensitive compounds to allow an extension of the minicamera idea, are all imminent. Let us project this trend ahead to a logical, if not inevitable, outcome. The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.”

Of course he was thinking in terms of the photography of the time  which was film-based.  He was aware of photocells and even speculated about their use in photographic elements.  Instead of Bush’s “walnut” Google is opting (it seems) to use glasses – something well accepted in our society.

No matter how it all shapes up, it seems the time is ripe for wearable computing.  And it would be foolish to think Google is alone.  Apple’s iPod nano comes with wrist straps, using arms instead of noses as the support for wearable technology.

Of course these technologies are not going to replace computers any more than tablets have – they will be additional tools that open new opportunities for creativity and productivity – and may even have a place in education.

Only time will tell.

Tablets in Brazilian schools

Brazilians love their technology.  I remember decades ago when I first visited the country to see that people would mark their seat at a buffet by leaving their cell phone on the table.  In fact, Brazil was probably among the first country to have cell phones outnumber wired lines, although that was largely due to the difficulty of getting a new wired phone line at the time.

But technological romance remains quite high.  Our local shopping center’s Apple store is full of people.  Samsung’s store in the same center is also quite busy.  Even Nokia, whose future remains uncertain, gets some traffic – and this is not just window shopping!  The number of iPhones, Galaxy tablets, and iPads coming out the door is amazing to see.  In fact, a recent study by Accenture shows that Brazilians are three times more likely than the global average to be purchasing a tablet in 2012.

This caught me by surprise given the explosive growth of this sector worldwide.

While tablets are coming into US schools at a fairly good pace, some Brazilian schools are listing them as back to school accessories along with crayons and paper notebooks.  The explosion is not restricted to the private schools.  In Pernambuco (the state where I am in the northeast of the country) the government is purchasing 170,000 tablets in a pilot with second and third year high school students.  Nationwide, other pilots in the public sector are adding 350,000 more tablets to the mix, with the goal to bring these devices to every student in the country.

Now if tablets were cheap devices, this would be one thing, but they are not.  The duty on imported electronics is so high that, for example, Apple products are nearly twice as expensive in Brazil compared with their price in the US.  Of course, with the rapid growth in sales volume, Toshiba and other major players are opening Brazilian factories to avoid duties and thus bring the price down.

The alpha-geek in me loves to see all this activity.  I’m an avid and active tablet user myself.  But when it comes to education, huge projects are taking a big risk if they are not thought out in advance.  For example, what is the wireless telecommunications infrastructure of the school?  Can it handle a thousand kids online at the same time?  How will the tablets be used?  If they are just glorified textbooks, much cheaper alternatives exist.  If the uses are more in support of creativity and inquiry, what tools will the tablets have?  Most importantly, how (and when) will teachers be provided not just with the mechanics of tablet use, but with the pedagogical support to transform education in rich ways?

Without thinking these questions through, the huge influx of tablets will likely fail to effect permanent change.  With the right support, though, we may see that the consumer driven romance with technology (especially among the young) will produce benefits that far exceed the cost of these devices, and this is a result worth seeking.

Why does Apple want to kill education?

Today Apple unveiled a free iBooks 2 application for the iPad that brings interactive textbooks to the popular tablet computer.  According to Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, ”Education is deep in Apple’s DNA,” which is confusing to me since texbooks are a major component of an education that has been flawed since the late Middle Ages, and one would think that Apple’s DNA would recognize that schooling and education are sometimes at odds with each other.

“With iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn.”  This quote is pure and utter garbage.  What is new about canned content from Pearson and the other companies drooling at the prospects of finding new ways to view children as bodies with wallets, and education as the memorization of mindless material that, most likely, can be found in better form in ten minutes with a well-crafted Google search?

He said the iPad is “rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world” and 1.5 million iPads are already being used in educational institutions.  This should make us cry.  Apple has clearly lost its soul.

Back in the early days when Apple really cared about education, a variety of creative ideas were encouraged both inside and outside the company all centered on the idea that computers let us do things we simply couldn’t do before at all.  Languages like Logo were supported, along with other creative tools such as Hyperstudio, and some internal projects as well (especially Cocoa which spun off and became Stagecast Creator).

Then along comes the iPad – a potential game changer being driven into schools by the students themselves.  Scratch, an amazing programming environment for kids (and grownups) developed by Mitch Resnick’s group at the MIT Medialab, was REMOVED from the iTunes store.  And now, the offerings of the old guard publishers will be featured.  The message is clear – “school is fine the way it has always been – now buy some new toys that require no changes in the system at all.”

This didn’t happen by accident.  Careful thought went into Apple’s perspective on how tablets should be used by children.  Today they decided that the iPad should be a costly version of the Amazon Kindle Fire.  while this may be a lucrative move on Apple’s part, it destroys any semblance of Apple caring one whit about real learning.  It is as if Dewey, Piaget, Papert and other giants in the field had never been born.

The bright spot is that the MIT folks are currently working on bringing some of their creative projects for kids to the Android platform, so this is not a condemnation of tablet strategies in general, only of Apple’s astounding march to the 19th century (as so aptly put by my friend and colleague, Gary Stager).

I bear no ill will toward Apple, only sadness in their decision to sell out the nation’s youth to curry favor with the very publishers that have done everything in their power to hold education to the past – at any cost.

This is a sad day indeed.

Internet Censorship

I live off my copyrights, so the protection of intellectual property is important to me.  But the pendulum is swinging so far towards restriction that the the Senate is poised to vote on a bill that would end the internet as we know it.

If it passes, the “Protect IP Act” (and its companion bill in the House, “SOPA”) could put people in jail for uploading a video to YouTube and would severely limit our right to free speech.   Copyright infringement is already illegal, so adding more stringent laws seems ill-advised.

This bill has been rushed through Congress because big corporate interests like Comcast, Pfizer, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have spent millions of dollars lobbying for this censoring legislation.

I told my senators to protect our free and open internet and oppose the Protect IP Act. You should do the same. You can sign the petition at the link below.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/internet_censorship/?r_by=-2288543-6rnzmcx&rc=paste1

Will 2012 be the year of the “ultrabook?”

The Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show opens on January 10, and there are rumbles that this show will feature lots of ultrathin laptops similar to the Macintosh Air.  Last year was supposedly the year of the tablet, but the rollout didn’t take place until months later, leaving Apple with the market pretty much to itself.  Of course that has changed, with everyone from Toshiba to Samsung offering quite powerful tablets at reasonable prices.  Schools, in particular, seem eager to jump on the tablet bandwagon and, while a good case can be made for this, my guess is that much of the early enthusiasm was generated by the freshness of the product category.

And some of these tablet installations are huge!  The Brazilian State of Pernambuco is placing an order for 130,000 tablets as a trial run for high school students to use!  Other projects on the drawing board are larger than that.  Everyone who can create code is getting up to speed on the Android OS and educational apps of all kinds are in various states of preparation – apps that go way beyond e-books or other applications reflective of the outmoded educational practices found today.

So, if the tablet is just now starting to emerge as a big seller (and it is), what is the rush to create a new class of ultrathin laptops that will cost a bundle, and do nothing you can’t do with the laptops we already have?  My guess is that this move is just to embrace an idea and hope it becomes a trend.

We saw this with Netbooks – a technology I endorsed when it came out.  Netbooks never achieved their potential because the price differential was not big enough to keep people from buying full-sized laptops.  The death blow, though, was the tablet – a truly portable device that can be used while walking around.

And that brings me to an important point.  I was an early fan of the Netbook, and it didn’t take off.  I am a current fan of tablets, so what are the chances I will get this one right?  I think my chances are pretty good.  The relationship kids have with tablets is different from the one they have with laptops of any kind.  That is true for adults as well.  Yes, tablets do not currently offer the rich variety of software found on laptops, but that is starting to change.

CES may be where the dreams of Ultrabook designers get shared, but I’m sticking with tablets as a dominant platform for the foreseeable future.

Painting over rust

In 1972, Alan Kay gave a speech at the ACM conference on the design of a computer for children (http://mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html).  This presentation introduced the world to the Dynabook, a concept of Alan’s from the 60′s that he was pursuing at Xerox PARC in the 70′s.

His comment, at the time, is that much that passes for “change” in education (and elsewhere) is simply “painting over rust.”  It looks pretty for a day or two, but then the paint falls off and you are back where you started.  When we look at the world of personal computing since the 1970′s, we’ve seen lots of attempts to force fit failed educational models inside the new tools, giving the illusion of change where none existed.  Like Seymour Papert, Kay was one of the few visionaries who understood from the beginning that the power of computers in kids hands came from the artifacts they created themselves.  This model (Papert calls it “constructionism” says that it is the act of creating something in which a child shows her true learning.  Whether (as Papert suggests) it is a sand castle, a poem, or a computer program, the point is the same – the student is not treated as some vessel to be pumped full of stuff.  Instead, the child’s mind should be triggered to do what comes naturally – to make observations about the world around him, and to create and test models of this world in the quest for understanding.

Which brings us to tablets today.  All across the world, we are seeing huge installations of tablets as the next big thing in education.  While there is much to like about these devices (their true portability, long battery life, etc.) I am still waiting to see the kind of child-appropriate programming environment envisioned by Kay and by Papert (to name two examples) with which children can build and run their own models.  This software exists on netbooks, laptops, and all the other computers we now seem to have put on the back burner and, as a result, we may be (in the short term) making a huge step backwards.  Search for Logo, Squeak or Scratch to see what I mean.  At this point, precious little exists to let kids harness the true power of the tablets they will be getting.

Textbook publishers love tablets.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.  This romance is destined to drive tablet use as a distribution medium for the same content that has failed to meet the needs of all learners for generations while creating the illusion of newness.  It is, in fact, just another layer of paint over the rust.

Will this change?  Apple banned Scratch (a logo-ish language for kids developed at MIT) from the iPad.  This was one of the most stupid decisions that company ever made.  In the Android world, I expect Scratch to appear sometime in the next few months (at least that is my hope).  There is a language called Frink that runs on Androids, and while not based on Logo, still allows kids to write their own programs.

As schools race to embrace tablets, let’s stand up and ask: “Are you painting over rust?”  That is a question worth asking.

The birth of personal computing

As one of the original members of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), I have always been proud of the contributions we made to the field of personal computing in the 1970′s, driven, in part, by earlier ideas developed by Alan Kay and others.  Kay’s “Dynabook” was a vision of a mobile computing device (much like today’s tablets) but it required technology that was unavailable at the time.  Our device, the Alto, was split between two boxes – one for the computer hardware, and another for the display.  It is safe to say that much of the look and feel of computing follows a straight line path from our lab to the present.

But, was PARC the real home of personal computing?  Perhaps in its implementation (that was part of our charter), but in fact others had been thinking about the idea before PARC was created.  As described in an article in ComputerWorld (http://bit.ly/LeCmj) a group of thinkers (and doers) in San Antonio, Texas may have been the first to think seriously about the design of a computer that would belong to individuals, not sitting in a corporate “computer room” somewhere.  Their company, CTC (later changed to Datapoint) was in the computer terminal business building what we used to call “glass teletypes”.  These desktop boxes had a display and keyboard and were designed as input/output devices for centralized computers.  Many of us using these devices, referred to them as “dumb terminals,” because they seemingly lacked the power to do any computing on their own.

What we didn’t see at the time was that these devices were designed to be Trojan horses.  The were programmable at some level, and could easily have been morphed into true personal computers.  The design of the Intel x86 class of microprocessors grew out of the thinking behind the Datapoint terminal, and the founders of the company were keenly interested in building a computer, but lacked the financial support to bring a separate terminal to market.

So why didn’t this device take off?

Well, the “computing” aspect of their device was not part of the original business plan.  The seeds were there, and had even been planted at Intel (where they bloomed into a huge business.)  As for Datapoint itself, it fell on hard times and faded from the scene.

Faded, but not forgotten.  Yes, we at PARC may have invented modern personal computing as you know it, but we need to acknowledge the contributions of others – especially the CTC team who just may have been the first to think that you and I deserved our very own computers.

Economic recovery

I’m watching something emerge here in Brazil that could bounce the US economy back to full recovery pretty fast if we were to implement it as well!  Brazil’s educational system is putting hundreds of thousands of tablets in kids’ hands as part of a pilot project, prepping for nationwide roll-out on a grand scale.  What makes this interesting is not the technology, not even just the government’s funding of innovative educational programs.  There is something even more going on here!

The government has decided, since this effort is funded by taxpayers, that every tablet purchased by schools will be made in Brazil – no imports allowed.  As a result, we are seeing huge investments in high tech manufacturing.  If Toshiba wants to play (and they do) their devices will need to be made in Brazil by Brazilian workers.  The same goes for any other company.

Imagine what a policy like this would do for the United States – ANYTHING the government buys needs to be made in the USA.  Since governments at all levels spend a lot of money, this infusion of new business would put Americans back to work in droves.

Of course, this wouldn’t happen overnight.  I think that companies should be given 6 months to ramp up their assembly capacity.  Next they need to look at the components themselves and increase (or in many cases, rebuild) their manufacturing capacity in this area.

The spreading of US tax-funded purchases around the world in search of the cheapest deal is a luxury we can’t afford.  And, while the example from Brazil involves computer technology, I think the US should expand this vision to everything the government buys.

Will US-built products cost more?  Given the trade agreements we have, and our race to outsource to low-wage nations, yes they probably will.  But I’m asking myself what the real cost of products is when we factor in the cost to our jobs?  And, of course, we as individuals would remain free to buy products made anywhere we want.  My proposal only applies to those things purchased by the government using our tax dollars.

Is this a good idea?  what do you think?

The power of crowds

Several years ago I decided to take part in an interesting experiment run by Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org).  I and thousands of colleagues were presented with myriad images of potential galaxies and asked to identify if they were galaxies (as opposed to visual artifacts) and, if so, were they elliptical or spiral.  Furthermore, if they spiral, what their direction was: did they spiral to the left or to the right.  It turns out humans apparently can do these tasks with greater accuracy and speed than computers.

The result of the initial work was published in astronomy journals, and has since led to other studies in which trainable amateurs (like myself) helped scientists make fundamental discoveries in the Universe.  The results of some of the recent work resulted in Galaxy Zoo getting “Hubble time” to look at some new galactic structures.  Their blog shows some amazing new photos of their discoveries!

This kind of project shows what power lies in social networking when applied to the sciences.  There IS wisdom in crowds and it is nice to see it in action.

In addition to continuing their work on galaxies, the project has led to a spin-off involving the search for interesting artifacts on the surface of the Moon.  My guess is that this project will provide interesting results as well.

Register with this project – you may just help to make a major discovery in the field of astronomy!

The failure of telecommuting

Any good-sized city today has rush hours – times of the day in the morning and evening when roads are filled with (largely) single-occupant cars headed to town where people will spend their day in what futurist Frank Ogden once called “architectural filing cabinets.”  A huge percentage of commuters spend hours per week traveling to work in facilities whose data sets are online.  Back in the 1980′s I speculated that, with the rise of ubiquitous personal computing, people would increasingly work from home – saving time, gas, and personal stress.

In Brazil my office is a car-ride away.  Most days I still commute to work.

Given the traffic jams in Recife (rivaling those of Chicago, for example) I have plenty of time to think about why I commute to an office when the bulk of my work can be done from home.  After all, not only do I have a great broadband connection from home, there are free video conferencing tools (such as Skype, or Google+) that allow me to have “face to face” meetings.

My guess is that I persist in going to an office because of the things I can do there for which distance-computing is not adequate.  These are activities with my peers.  I often drop into other people’s offices to bounce around ideas.  Sometimes a casual encounter in the hall outside my door results in a meeting that leads to a new project.  And then there is lunch.  While I often have lunch at home, I also go out with others from the Center from time to time where we get caught up on each other’s lives.

In short, I commute to work in support of collegiality and serendipity – things for which I have yet to find technological alternatives.

My son, Harvey, on the other hand, is a master telecommuter – living in Colorado while working for a company in North Carolina.  But even his work brings him to the mother ship at regular intervals to do those things that don’t make it across the network.

The Internet is an amazing tool that has achieved great things in its short existence.  But, for now, many of us whose livelihood comes from information still need to be in physical proximity with our colleagues.  Technology changes rapidly, social systems do not.

Now when someone figures out how to pour a decent Merlot through the Internet, that may change things…