Through Downes’, I found an article by David Wiley’s with the provocative title How Technology Will Destroy Schools (he actually is being needlessly provocative, he means “schools as they exist now”). The gist of his argument goes as follows:

The development of (…) technology will obviate the need for certain types of instruction — like the teaching of facts. Why spend time memorizing when the same information is available just as quickly from the network as it is from your own memory? But never fear, schools! The technology will create the need for new types of instruction — in higher level information literacy skills. Perhaps this will finally force some change through the public schools.

Well, I must admit. I have a Ph.D. in mathematics and I never learned my multiplication tables. There you go. I never saw the point of learning these tables, so I didn’t. Instead, I learned a few tricks to do multiplications… like 9 times 8 is almost 10 times 8, you have to subtract 1 times 8.

Mathematics, to a very large extend, is not about learning facts. I suspect that all disciplines have a component above learning the facts. You can’t be an expert in something if you only know the facts… because I can easily input the facts into a piece of software and compete with you, but we all know that software can’t compete (yet) against human experts. I’m not very good at memorizing facts, I’ve never been good at it. In fact, I’m not good at memorizing anything and that’s why I have a PDA always with me. Yet, I’m in expert at some things.

It is the difference between real knowledge and shallow knowledge. Most of our education system is based on acquiring and testing shallow knowledge. Most but not all.

How are you going to get past shallow knowledge through technology as Wiley predicts we will? I think that blogs, games, and simulations are good examples. Yes, we can role play without technology, but it becomes so much cheaper to deploy gaming scenarios through technology (because you only have to do it once) that it might become more common place in the future.

Maybe my son Lohan, by the time he makes it to school, will have “gaming instruction” where he will enter a gaming universe to learn basic mathematics. Who knows.

I’m not holding my breath though, I think we lack the human power to do pull it off in the next 5 years.

A beautiful article by Paul Graham: What the Bubble Got Right. It is a good analysis of the dot-com era. I totally agree with the analysis too! People tend to overestimate the impact of technology over the short term, but underestimate it over the longer term. The dot-com bubble was proof of that. It is not so much that the new economy was a sham… but rather that the new economy will take a bit more than 2 years to settle… Here’s the conclusion of this beautiful article:

When one looks over these trends, is there any overall theme? There does seem to be: that in the coming century, good ideas will count for more. That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections. That doing good work will matter more than dressing up– or advertising, which is the same thing for companies. That people will be rewarded a bit more in proportion to the value of what they create.

If so, this is good news indeed. Good ideas always tend to win eventually. The problem is, it can take a very long time. It took decades for relativity to be accepted, and the greater part of a century to establish that central planning didn’t work. So even a small increase in the rate at which good ideas win would be a momentous change– big enough, probably, to justify a name like the “new economy.”

As a side-note, the mere fact that such a good article is waiting at the end of a URL, for all to see and absolutely free, should remind you of how powerful, after all, the Web really is. I was raised in an era where you needed to go buy a magazine to read such a great article. Then you’d get many bad articles, but what could you do: there were few magazines, and your choices were limited. Things have changed, they have changed tremendously.

Seems like Gartner predicts data centers are going to become a utility:

The office environment will dramatically change in 50 years’ time, with desktop computers disappearing, robots handling more manual tasks, and global connectivity enabling more intercontinental collaboration. Data centers located outside the city will run powerful database and processing applications, serving up computing power as a utility; many more people will work remotely, using handheld devices to stay connected wherever they go, although those devices will be much more sophisticated and easier to use than current handhelds.

I’ve finally moved all my machines to Mozilla Firefox 1.0. It is, by far, the best browser I ever used, and it is totally, truely free. Unfortunately, the French version is lagging behind a bit. Unless you are running something else than Windows, Linux, or MacOS, you have no excuse to use another browser. None.

Update: Sean asks why I switched away from Konqueror. The main reasons are XML support and Gmail. Gmail doesn’t support konqueror for some reason, and I badly need a browser having decent support for XSLT. Also, there is a comment below saying that Firefox is not stable on OS X 10.2.

Here’s a page of links reporting many SOAP Problems. Glad to see I’m not the only one who doesn’t get SOAP.

I’m really getting old. I had trouble syncing my old palm m500 since I upgraded to kernel 2.6.8. Naturally, I figured the trouble was with a kernel module or something of this sort. No. It was with a system-level application called hotplug. Apparently, all Linux distributions now rely on hotplug to support hot swapping of USB and PCI devices. I had no idea Linux supported hot swapping of PCI devices. Go figure!

Update: I think hotplug doesn’t work very well under kernel 2.6.8, I’ve read somewhere it works better in 2.6.9.

First, the shameless plug: my long-time friend, Jean-François Racine published a book available both as hardcover and paperback. The title is “The Text of Matthew in the Writings of Basil of Caesarea”.

More seriously, and maybe he had told me about this, but he told me about this specialized word processor he uses, called Nota Bene. More interesting is a component of this word processor called Orbis. Specifically, Orbis generates vocabulary lists, as well as frequency of occurrence; and it allows you to define synonym lists to expand search capabilities.