[Edu-sig] Low Enrollments - programming as anti-intellectualism

[Kirby Urner]

> You'd probably appreciate the recent cite on PlanetPyhton:
> "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" iPod edition ;)
> http://pythonzweb.blogspot.com/2005/11/structure-and-interpretation-
> of.html
> 

Yes thank you.  I've not ready for vPod but can handle Divx.  I'm
downloading the first lecture now, to see what it's like.

Speaking of video lectures, here's a great stash of some of Feynman's:
http://www.vega.org.uk/series/lectures/feynman/index.php

> But my problem with media like movies is that they are designed as linear.
> A good technical books is designed more for random access. Easy to read
> those three pages again, jump forward a chapter, then back 3.  True, its
> easy enough to mimic that in current forms of media, and the tech-savvy
> might get all excited about the achievement of doing just that, never
> feeling fully obligated to explain the advantage of their advancement over
> what it is mimicking - a book.
> 
> Art

I appreciate your desire for non-linearity and have plans to support it.  My
model is [heavily influenced by] 'Sesame Street':  a growing database of
videoclip shorts, retrievable by key topic (letters A-Z, numbers 1-13 or
thereabouts, other key concepts).  Every show adds some new content, but a
lot of it is recycled, but in new orderings (edit/recombine ops).[1]

In my Classroom of Tomorrow, the teacher has random access to a gazillion
video shorts in the archive, and during Q&A might pull up just the right
ones to sustain the dialog.  It's not a matter of the teacher losing control
to "A/V" (e.g. half- to full-hour documentaries).  I just screen a quick
animation of a fetch instruction:  bits on the address bus trigger RAM to
dump some content onto the bus, which get loaded into a register on the CPU
(25 seconds play time).

Kirby

[1] http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/vidconcept.html