[Edu-sig] More thoughts on CP4E

[Dinu C. Gherman]

Kirby Urner wrote:
>
> When I was I kid, Sputnik happened and that shook 
> things up some.  People were willing to try new 
> things, to acknowledge that the curriculum was 
> falling behind, needed to be suffused with new 
> ideas.  I'm not sure what the next Sputnik will be.  
> Seems educators are pretty complacent about the 
> status quo these days.  Or maybe that's just my 
> biased perspective.

This is an entirely different point, IMHO, and much
rooted in the "surrounding" culture experiencing the
shock. What about this way of looking at it: Sputnik 
was a shock west of Greenwich, because it was laun-
ched east of it? For NASA programs like Mercuri, Ge-
mini, Apollo this was a good thing! But still, it was 
a political shock coming from outside that was lead-
ing people to do something. 

Without judging if this kind of externel impetus is 
to be preferred over other ones, I don't see anything 
like this in the IT world of today. Maybe when indus-
trial systems will eventually be so big and incompre-
hensible that their development, integration and 
maintenance costs surpass the total of this planet's
human workforce or maybe when the simplest things are 
made "intelligent" enough so they need to be program-
mable "4E" there will be some shock again? 

At the moment I have more "confidence" in the former, 
after working for three years in telecom software, but
this might change when I'll get my first fully pro-
grammable mobile phone/organizer/remote control/posi-
tion tracker... Pray with me it's going to be some-
thing like Python under the hood, maybe with an ad-
vanced voice interface from Tim Peters!? ;-)

Kind regards,

Dinu