November 2011
0 posts
Dijkstra on patience
Already many a large organisation is nearly crushed under the sheer weight of the illogical, unmastered complexity of its automatic data processing systems. Things have to change and, therefore, will change. Perhaps we have to wait for a few more spectacular collapses until it dawns upon mankind that we had better understand what we are doing. I don’t believe in stagnation, I do believe in...
October 2011
2 posts
Dijkstra on education and dictatorships
Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Within a few months, they find their way in a new world with a justified degree of confidence that is radically novel for them; within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically novel dimension. To my taste and style, that...
May 2011
1 post
Back Up Blogspot using WGET
So let’s say that you want to download an entire blogspot blog. Wget will consider all links with the character ? in them as different links. So you will have to download them. Furthermore making wget reject those links will still download them. (This is because those files are html files, and wget downloads to follow them recursively and then removes them.)
Fortunately, there is a way...
March 2011
4 posts
Síntesis sobre el Plan Ceibal y la educación.
Este artículo es una síntesis de mi artículo El Plan Ceibal y la educación.
1: Las ceibalitas solo podrán ser incorporadas al aula exitosamente si se incorporan de manera que no requieran de nuevas técnicas pedagógicas.
2: Existe un método de enseñanza mediante computadoras que no requiere de nuevas técnicas pedagógicas. El mismo tiene un precedente exitoso.
El primer punto es obvio. Si...
El Plan Ceibal y la educación
Escribo para dar una posible explicación a porque el Plan Ceibal no ha dado los resultados esperados en el ámbito de clase. He sido voluntario tanto de Rap Ceibal como de Ceibal Jam, donde interactué con maestros, padres, niños y técnicos. También estudio Licenciatura en Sistemas y llevo mucho tiempo interesado en el efecto de la tecnología en la sociedad. Lamentablemente mis credenciales para...
I mean, for the cost of a pre-school, we can be...
I mean, for the cost of a pre-school, we can be educating millions of people for all of time. It’s not even like a school where if the funding dries up the school disappears. No, the content will be there. It will be there on iTunes and YouTube forever. I said, gee, I’ve got to be able to convince somebody.
— Salman Khan
Go explore the http://www.khanacademy.org/ now!
Or read the...
You know, there’s billions of dollars being spent...
“You know, there’s billions of dollars being spent on education. There’s thousands of people with PhDs, spending their whole life on fixing the education system. Isn’t it arrogant of you to think that you and your YouTube videos are going to have any type of impact?” That’s essentially the summary of what a lot of people would tell me.
—Salman Khan
...
February 2011
4 posts
Salman Khan, you are awesome
Salman Khan has thousands of videos explaining anything from math to history. In his words:
“With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. I can’t imagine a better use of my time.”
— Salman Khan
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Dictatorships
I’ve been terrified by dictatorships since I was a little kid.
My parents said to me that the more communicated the world was, the more difficult was for dictatorships to stand.
I’m glad to see that they were right.
Cheers to Egypt! Cheers to Tunisia!
Termites and Wikipedia Editors
Wikipedia Editors:
Note the virtuous circle at work here: because enough people thought of using Wikipedia as a coordinating resource, it became one, and because it became one, more people learned to think of it as a coordinating resource.
Excerpt from Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
http://www.shirky.com/
Termites:
When they start to build a nest, termites modify...
3 tags
Here Comes Everybody
Have been reading Here Comes Everybody.
Even in a medium that allowed for perfect interactivity for all participants (something we have a reasonable approximation of today), the limits of human cognition will mean that scale alone will kill conversation. In such a medium, even without any professional bottlenecks or forced passivity, fame happens.
Fascinating.