maradydd: (Default)
maradydd ([personal profile] maradydd) wrote2009-06-03 11:38 am
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If you teach them, they will learn. Also, my representational state-transfer future.

Today's cool link comes from Billings Middle School in Seattle, Washington. Their Digital Arts students came to San Francisco for a class trip focused around Maker Faire, with side trips to the Exploratorium, the operations booth at Giants Stadium, and my old home away from home, Noisebridge.

Their beta school website is quite well-produced (if sized a bit large -- I have to side-scroll on my EeePC), and there are touches that make me wonder if the kids are the ones designing and maintaining it. If so, that owns. I wonder if there will soon come a day when "markup" replaces "writing" in the Three R's. I'd really like to see that -- not so much the notion of presentation (which is how it would mostly likely be taught, sigh), but the notion of encapsulating levels of detail in a hierarchial schema. The notion of being able to "zoom in" and "zoom out" on how much information you want about a particular topic.

This is what English teachers were trying to teach, rudimentarily, as the "five-paragraph essay" when I was in high school, but the notion generalises -- to an academic paper, to a book, to a series of volumes, to interconnected documents. I want uniquely addressable resources at any level of detail, I want to live in Roy Fielding's future. I want to be reading a paper in a PLoS journal, and when I see a citation, not have to jump to the endnotes to see what the citation is about -- I want to be able to jump to the exact table, the exact paragraph, the exact equation that makes the context clear for me. With a minimum of hassle: if you have pop-up balloons that show me a preview, I want to be able to turn them off easily (I'm looking at you, Snap.com) and I want to be able to open the resource in another tab easily (I'm still looking at you, Snap.com).

Oh, hey, and let's make it so I don't have to use my hands, that would be pretty cool too.

Re: Xanalogical

[identity profile] maradydd.livejournal.com 2009-06-04 11:31 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, but Ted didn't have the most coherent way of addressing it. IPv6 makes more sense.

Re: Xanalogical

[identity profile] kragen.livejournal.com 2009-06-04 03:49 pm (UTC)(link)
The hell it does. IP addresses for document naming are a terrible idea, whether v4 or v6.

Re: Xanalogical

[identity profile] maradydd.livejournal.com 2009-06-04 03:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh holy Jesus. That was not what I was suggesting. Merely comparing the naming schemes.