Purpose of Education

There is the interpretation that comes from the enlightenment, which holds that the highest goal in life is to acquire and create, to search the riches of the past, and to internalize the significant parts for a quest of understanding.

Graduate school and general research tend to follow the ideas of the traditional enlightenment. It should be like this all the way down through kindergarten, but there are forces in society that would rather people not ask too many questions, to be indoctrinated, and obedient.

Impact of Technology

There has certainly been very substantial growth in new technology, technology of communication and information, and it has helped change the culture of society. But we should bare in mind that the current technological changes, while important, have nowhere near the level of impact that the technological changes of about a century, or so, ago have had. The shift from a typewriter to a computer, or a telephone to an e-mail, while significant, do not begin to compare with the shift from a sailing vessel to the telegraph. And the same is true with other technology, such as plumbing, where it has had a huge impact on the overall health of city when compared with antibiotics. So while current technology is extremely important, we should not forget the changes that have already taken place.

A person who wins the Nobel Prize in biology is not the person who reads the most journals and has taken the most notes, it is the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity, to seek what is significant and always being willing to question whether one is on the right track, is what education is going to be about; regardless of the technology utilized in the learning process.

Cost or Investment

Education is discussed in terms of whether it is a worthwhile investment, does it create human capitol that can be used for economic growth, and so on. It is a very strange distorting way to even propose the question.

Educational systems should create better human beings.

Assessment vs Autonomy

There is an increasing importance on passing examinations when compared to earlier forms of education. Taking tets can be of some use, for both the learner and teacher, but beyond that tests do not tell you much.

Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own. Because that’s what one does for their life, not just absorb material and repeat it.

I found the entire video inspirational, but those were just some of my favorite parts. Watch the entire video below:

I personally believe that technology will enable greater democracy for education. The platforms that are being built now, such as Kahn Academy, Lynda.com, and Coursera, will enable students to have access to valuable information with the assistance of guidance, direction, and the ability to customize their own learning framework. And I do believe that a greater education can solve many of the worlds existing problems.

Video from GigaOm:

You can go to the Apple II emulator here, and load many games:

To know how to load files you can read this tutorial on using DOS 3.3:

Firstly, you’ll need to call the contents of the disk up using the CATALOG command. As you might have guessed, this particular command will give you a catalogue or list of the contents of the disk. To use this command, from the BASIC prompt, type CATALOG & then hit RETURN. The disk drive will start up & the contents of the disk will be displayed on the screen. If the disk contents don’t display, there’s a chance that this is a specially protected disk & you will need to resort to more complicated measures to inspect the contents than this article outlines.

Goal: Produce one application for the iOS platform, and sell at least one copy in the iTunes App Store (to preferably not me, or someone I know, but this will suffice if it’s Dec. 31st 2012 at 11:59pm.)

iOS applications are built using Objective-C with Apple’s robust Cocoa framework. It’s an object oriented programming language, with syntax structure possibly a bit more advanced than other OOPs.

So why iOS? I believe Apple has the largest existing framework for mobile development. Meaning that I could build cooler programs in less time, and also they have a vibrant development community, and consumer community. And of course, developing for mobile is an exciting platform, as the mobile (Phone + Tablet) experience is the most diverse experience.

Thus I’m starting out trying to learn C, the basis of Objective-C, and Java, a general OOP language, that is used in many introductory programming resources.

I have a good career in producing video content, so why am I planning on dedicating so much of my free time to learning how to develop an iOS application? Well, there is a saying going around “Program or be Programmed”, and I want to learn how to program.

This is the first application that I built, a simple drawing application. It was built in the Flash environment, built in Flashes OOP language, ActionScript. I built this web app in 2010.

Also, there is the documented ’10,000′ hour rule of becomming an expert, as reviewed in Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’. Meaning that I would have to dedicate about 10 years to become an ‘expert’. That’s the plan anyways.

It will be fun to document my journey here. I don’t think I will have a viable application to share until December, as I want it to be cool. And that will take time. But I’m planning to allocate at least on average about 2 hours a day to my education of programming. And I might eventually post some ‘learning applications’ that I develop along my journey. My end goal is not to necessarily become a ‘software engineer’, but more become a programming expert on how to use coding as an artform to help define our future medium. How can one consider themselves a New Media Producer without being knowledgeable in the platform itself is not known. So if I become a software engineer of sorts in the process, it will be through the goal of wanting to help build platforms to experience and deliver content. I’m interested in helping design programs, and the interfaces that we use to consume media.

But basically I just want to be able to produce, design, and build cool stuff.

Image from the most recent magazine issue of The ASC’s American Cinematographer, Jan ’12.

So what will television be in the future? Television as we now know it will become antiquated rather quickly, and be replaced by a medium that is fluid, dynamic, and has a natural human interface making content easily searchable, and on-demand, able to watch anywhere and anytime. We already have many of the basic elements of the ‘future television’ today, but it will continue to evolve, and eventually evolve into a form which is the dominant process of how we recognize and consume ‘television’.

Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group wrote a white paper on the future of television after having in-depth discussions from industry leaders and researchers. They summarized the results in a list of ten features.

1. Channels Go Away
2. Kiss the Remote Goodbye
3. Screens Do Anything, Anywhere
4. Ads Get Personal
5. Don’t Just Watch–Get Involved
6. Watch Together, Virtually
7. Is It Real, or Is It Television?
8. Your TV Follows You
9. “Regular Joes” Go Hollywood
10. Creation Goes Viral

For many of us, we are already living multiple versions of these ‘futures’. The difference is that soon they will become the dominate form of how our greater society consumes media. Why is Cisco interested in this? They are interested in profiting from the “Business Models in Flux”:

Television’ s current business model is delicately constructed, with many players and numerous,
interdependent revenue streams. Parts of the experience that we have grown to accept as
core— $70-plus monthly subscription packages; programming across hundreds of channels;
the 30-second TV commercial; delayed release windows for DVDs; free premium shows on the
Internet—are all a result of the business model in place today. That model is under pressure,
and while there is a great deal of debate and disagreement among industry experts about
exactly how it will evolve, there is no question that it will change dramatically over the next five to
10 years.

The views among experts were varied:
● Forty-six percent thought the role of carriage fees in the business model would become
less important, and the other 54 percent disagreed.
● Thirty-eight percent believed that advertising would play a less important role in the
business model; the remaining 62 percent disagreed.
● Thirty-eight percent thought government sponsorship of public channels would play a
less important role, while the remaining 62 percent held a different opinion.

However, most experts ag reed that in the future, consumers would enjoy more flexibility in how
they purchase TV. Eighty percent of respondents felt that consumers would have the flexibility to
build their own TV subscription packages by adding only content they want

Needless to say, some great companies will fall during this transition, and some great companies will rise.

You can download the white paper here.

Most of the content providers of television are lobbying for, and backing, SOPA and PIPA, as a way to insure their dominance in the future. It is sad to see these companies spend millions on trying to change the law, instead of inventing the future. The only thing that stays the same is change, and many of these large corporations do not know how. Maybe part of the reason why these mega conglomerate corporations are spending their money in the wrong places is because of the idea of ‘maximizing shareholder value’, a late 20th century corporate ideal, that may need to be rethought. Apparently it may be cheaper for large media corporations to buy congress rather than evolving their antiquating business models, that are currently becoming unsustainable.

White Paper via Inventing the Medium

UPDATE:

An awesomer Steve tech blogger comments on SOPA, the media industry, and innovation in this well articulated blog post:

Piracy

One of the claims that studios make is that they need legislation to stop piracy. The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. Video games and software have been targets since their inception. Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. Credit card companies call it fraud. But none use regulation as often as the movie studios to solve a business problem. And none are so willing to do collateral damage to other innovative industries (VCRs, DVRs, cloud storage and now the Internet itself.)
The studios don’t even pretend that this legislation benefits consumers. It’s all about protecting short-term profit.

SOPA

When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists are ex-Senators, understanding technology and innovation is not one of your core capabilities.
The SOPA bill (and DNS blocking) is what happens when someone with the title of anti-piracy or copyright lawyer has greater clout than your head of new technology. SOPA gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the Internet.
History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player or now the Net. It’s prudent for courts and congress to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude.

I would like one.

Flipboard just released their iPhone app, which was previously only available on the iPad. Flipboard is the popular social media content curation platform backed by many well known venture capitalists, and considered one of the first of it’s kind, as it took news stories posted by friends and presented the content in a magazine aesthetic.

Here is a video introducing Google’s new Currents platform:

And here is Flipboard’s latest video:

Here is Flipboards initial promo video from mid 2010:

Wonder how Google’s Currents will effect the current standard, Flipboard.

And if you are in the Atlanta area, check out the Picasso to Warhol MoMA exhibit at the High.

Full PBS episode of One Last Thing:

Beet.TV:

From Adage on Netflix’s business model:

The Netflix business model is vulnerable, especially as competition grows and the cost to acquire content escalates. In 2008 Netflix paid Starz $30 million a year for the rights to stream its movies from Disney and Sony as well as the premium cable network’s original content. Just three years later, the renewal deal fell through even though Netflix reportedly upped its offer to Starz tenfold, to $300 million a year. In an indication of how rapidly streaming rights costs have risen in a short period of time, Netflix will pay DreamWorks $30 million per film under a new deal with that studio — the same amount it previously paid Starz per annum. One analyst projects that the cost for Netflix to stream content will grow from $180 million in 2010 to $1.98 billion in 2012 — an eleven-fold increase.

Netflix is also still largely dealing in back seasons and old shows because they’re cheaper and easier to secure. But there Netflix is merely taking a well-hewn path of TV business-building: Using older content to build a video distribution business is exactly how most cable networks began. And maybe Netflix should look a little further along cable’s history for some inspiration of its own.

Interesting argument from Adage, but of course they are bias to ads, as they are an ad trade magazine/news outlet.