“Accessory to your own intentions”

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I’ve had 3 days with the iPad now, and it’s been as exhilarating as other brushes with new technologies. I think of the first few days with the TI-Pro in 1984, HyperCard on the Mac in 1990, my first work with Web browsers and HTML in 1993, and the beginnings of podcasting in 2004: in each case, pennies dropped one after the other as I tried this and tried that and articulated and then found the answer to the next question… Doc Searls really nailed it with his summary of the iPad (for which read ANY new technology) as “an accessory to your own intentions”. It’s not the DEVICE we should be judging, but rather our engagement with it, and its effects upon our imagination. Often enough, what you EXPECTED as the outcome pales next to what actually happens, and it’s the unanticipated that’s the important consequence. Case in point: for several years Kate has been working on a map summarizing the Appalachian Trail adventure that occupied Betsy and me between 1992 and 2003. Here’s the topmost bit:

Kate's Appalachian Trail map

The whole map is more than 15 feet long when it’s printed out, and we’ve been wrestling with how to display it. It’s too big to hang on the wall, and clumsy to roll out onto the floor and crawl around on to read the details summarizing each segment hiked, but as a pdf on the iPad it’s absolutely perfect: you can pan and zoom and really explore, just by waving your fingers over the screen. And that experience leads one to thinking about map displays of many kinds, and other features that might go into map apps for iPad and successor devices. Not something we imagined when the iPad first arrived, and it was realized only after I’d figured out a clear path to move pdfs (via Google Documents) from computer to iPad.

links for 2010-03-28

  • Lady Gaga YouTube Videos: 15 of the Best
    probably good advice, from Stephen Downes: "…take the rest of the evening and explore the full Gaga canon that has formed online. There's a lot going on in them, so keep an open mind. They're probably not safe for work. Gaga is a genuine internet phenomenon, and a large part of her huge popularity is the widespread availability of her songs and videos free online…"
    (tags: media whoa)

All too accurate

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via Stephen Downes:

…and he gets it in one:

…the selection of what constitutes a core is ineliminably political, and therefore all (so-called) ‘common’ core initiatives are (thinly disguised) political campaigns…

At the moment I’m seeing the Grand Problem as one of motivation, given that learners of all ages HAVE magnificent and unprecedented tools at the tips of their fingers. Who will they choose to emulate? Who provides the spark that ignites an individual learner’s creativity? For most of us, that person was a Teacher, formal or informal, in school or out.

State Street Bank, 1964-1965

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24xissb20

In 1964-1965 (Junior and Senior year of college) I was employed as a Progress Photographer on the State Street Bank Building, one of the first BIG buildings in Boston’s Financial District. This allowed me carte blanche to wander around the building site, usually one or two days a week, and take pictures of anything I thought might be of interest to the general contractor (Gilbane Inc., still very much in business). They paid me for prints of pictures they found useful, usually scenes recording construction progress. I used the opportunity to take hundreds of pictures that I knew they wouldn’t be interested in –construction details, men at work, stuff that appealed to my developing aesthetic and compositional sense.
The 100-odd rolls of negatives lived in a box on a shelf, and I always figured I’d get around to doing something with them someday. That someday arrived last December, and in a month-long blitz I scanned more than 2200 images, and was overwhelmed with the riches and possibilities. It’s taken a couple of months to get to the next stage, organizing and putting up a bunch of sets of images at Flickr, but now there’s a Collection of five sets, about 250 images in all. It may be most effective to watch the Men at Work set as a Slideshow.