
In Venting, a Computer Visionary Educates - kalvin
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11stream.html
======
skmurphy
thanks for posting this. I read his double-book "Dream Machines / Computer
Lib" when it came out: it changed my perspective on the future of computing
from numbers and mathematics to narrative and media.

I heard him speak perhaps 15 years ago now at a Computer Literacy bookstore
event and he was a little cranky but extremely insightful. I remember two key
points he made that I still value:

1\. We need to shift our thinking from an "educational curriculum" to a
reticulum (or network) that emphasizes the connectedness of topics and
concepts and teach students to learn how to learn through exploration as much
as rote and replay.

2\. Read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" for insights into Silicon Valley
entrepreneurship.

EDIT: more info including a summary of "pre-history chapters" available at
<http://geeks-bearing-gifts.com/>

~~~
michael_nielsen
Mark Twain's "Roughing It" is available here:
<http://www.mtwain.com/Roughing_It/index.html>

------
blasdel
Ted Nelson was a part of the orthodoxy in proscribing rich tightly-bound
hypertext. There were dozens of projects, but none of them were anything but
sandboxes at best.

The web succeded only because it was nothing like Xanadu, and Ted still can't
get over that.

Self-contained systems like wikis would be a great place for rich Xanadu-like
features, but MediaWiki hopelessly squandered that possibility. There are a
few systems that approach it (tiddlywiki does some cool shit), but for most
people Wikipedia's decrepit software has grounded their conception of what
wikis can be in mediocrity.

~~~
DTrejo
Ooh tiddlywiki, pretty cool.

I just checked out <http://www.tiddlywiki.com/> thanks for mentioning it.

~~~
mhb
You may also want to see a nice example of how Garrett Lisi used it:
<http://deferentialgeometry.org/>

