Computer Lab Instruction

I've tried to summarize my duties as a Computer Lab Instructor for an elementary school. I'll be developing the curriculum over the summer. 

Here's what I have so far:

____________________

Goals for Computer Lab Instruction

As digital computer systems grow more and more essential for daily communication in personal, professional, and academic endeavors, the students benefit tremendously from a computer lab teacher dedicated to teaching the skills, techniques, and the “experience from practice” required to develop competence in the use of the digital creative medium.

Students will use productivity tools (MS Office) and creative tools (graphic arts and 3D modeling & simulations) to reinforce grade level standard competencies.  Other skills taught include keyboarding, digitally mediated teamwork, internet research, online safety, parts and functions of computer equipment, and business professional role play.

The lab instructor helps the faculty develop instructional best practices to share with other schools and districts. 

The lab instructor checks that the equipment is maintained in working order, that it is sanitized for shared use,  and that the students handle the equipment properly.

The instructor also helps the school plan for future digital service and equipment needs.

This person also maintains the computer lab environment to make sure it is conducive to learning.

The instructor develops and administers instruction to grades 2 through 5 during the  school year.

Each teacher brings their class to the computer lab for 50+ minutes of grade appropriate, focused, prepare instruction. By providing dedicated lab time, the instructor minimizes any disruption of current successful curriculum presentation and focuses on conveying digital skill instruction concisely and accurately while creatively engaging students’ interests and productive capabilities.

The computer lab instructor should frequently consult with the students’ teachers to find what would work best for them and their students without adding extra burden on them.

The instructor can also provided personal instruction to the teachers regarding digital skills on an as needed basis.

What is "Mathematics"?

To answer a question Bill Kerr asked on his blog:
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-is-maths.html

A recent, personal, epiphany came when I realized that the mathematics which I experience is the selective ignoring of detailed qualitative information so that one can concentrate on the quantitative properties of a problem one wishes to solve, or find an answer to a proposed question. I'm constraining my answer to the applying of mathematics as the purpose for teaching math, not just as teaching "thinking". Studying rhetoric and philosophy also teaches "thinking".

We measure a coast line for reasons of property ownership or weather effects or such not, regardless that the physical length of where the water meets the land changes numerous times every fraction of a second in numerous places. We compare apples to apples vs. apples to oranges even though no two apples are precisely the same.

To address the physical exercise analogy, our muscles are designed to remember what they need to remember as they have for thousands of years as used every day. Often what we learn in school is used once and infrequently after that. Perhaps if students in school were required to "start, and maintain for a long period, a profitable business" they might be compelled to practice what they've learned more frequently.

The interest in developing skills in mathematics might arrive more through the nature and personal relevance of the questions asked rather than the question of the relevance of learning how to solve them. Maybe we should start with probability theory and statistics rather than geometry so that the population can better understand when someone asserts something "is" a fact that it really "is" a fact (even better if drawn from current events). At least, fewer would lose their quantitative money at casinos. ;-)

Geometry was great when the industrial age needed engineers to change our physical world.

Probability is greater in a world where everyone has a global microphone, where everyone competes for global resources, where everyone can make micro level changes in their lives which have an accumulated global impact (in many domains) so that "facts" can quickly dissolve unnoticed into shades of gray in our only, shared, moment-by-moment ever changing world.

Even if you "don't do math", you can be sure that global markets, multinational corporations, national governments, insurance companies, university survey researchers, and marketing firms are "probability" and "mathematically" measuring you every moment of every day ... and even using those nasty "quadratic equations" to do so. :-)

IT and Teachers - How will they work together?

If, like Alan Kay (creator of Squeak) says, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it,"
then the best way to see the big picture is to paint it.

I do agree that there is a gulf between IT and educators.

Like many technologies, the value of the tools for learning is determined by the value of the tools in the students' "after graduation life". But the tools take on the style of how they are used in business... PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, word processors, security, hierarchies of authority, etc. Also, as "after graduation life" tools become more complex, specialized, and expensive, the path to bringing a student to competence with those tools becomes more complex, probably exponentially complex.

I have Psychology training, have taught in a school, and have professional IT experience.

Part of the solution will be achieved by the "digital natives" as they become educators. They will demand change. But, who will provide it?

I believe the other part of the solution will be revealed through the metaverse. How? Just like spreadsheets try to model the functions and states of human projects and relationships in businesses, everyone will begin to model these same projects and relationship in 3D simulations. Like Google Earth, 3D allows one zoom further and further out to see the entire context of the complex systems. Simulations also archive the past for examination and study. So too, they model the anticipated future and intended goals of the systems we create. Hence, we begin to play with time itself, such as one does with time-laps photography.

Everyone looking at the model must consider how their piece fits in it, functions in it, and helps achieve the goal. The goals can not be represented as just "words" subject to interpretation, miss-communication, and debate. 3D simulation components enact the people and organizations actually performing the resulting intended (or unintended) effect.

This is a response to Marsha's blog entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/627/25204156

"Sandbox" or "Theme Park"?

I enjoyed Gardner Campbell's interview with Jon Udell, so I'm following his blog now.

Here's my reply to Theme Parks and Sandboxes.

I think that one man's sandbox is another man's theme park, and that we should alternate. A professor's sandbox may be a grad student's theme park, until they know just enough to build their own. The same would be true for a grad student to an undergrad. A team of undergrad student's sandbox could be a professor's theme park.

The problem is in the content development platform. As you noted in your interview, paper-based learning encourages the theme park environment because it's so hard to change (unless you use it for origami on a very large table :) ). But, that kind of learning or park ride is also traditional, popular, and repeatable. Sandboxes seem to be traditionally found in (shudder) apprenticeships and trade schools where one manipulates the physical world around oneself and where one must learn the personality of the physical material, and its unpredictability, more so than someone else's mental skill.

Current content development platforms' strengths and weaknesses can be evaluated by looking at the core building blocks which the participant/reader/creator can manipulate. Second Life is a sandbox up to the point of the edge of the real estate. There are some seriously limiting factors in that real estate bias of SL. Just as artists know, to convey detail, one needs a very large canvas to start with. Also text and text documents are second class citizens in a SL world, as exhibited by the limited searching ability. This is difficult when we exist in a world of text documents which represent our invisible mental world (like the invisible mental world of "ownership" where everything you own isn't physically labeled but "documented"). Blogs are good for text and dates, but not so much for, say, creating 2D illustrations. Other platforms lack "communication" as a fundamental building block. Operating systems' fundamental building blocks are files.

So, it seems to me that we desire a development platform where 3D, 2D illustration/animation, 1D text, hypertext, movies, and the labels for ideas (and how these all co-exist and intermix) are all first class citizens for building block manipulation. Croquet, built on Squeak, Morphic, Smalltalk, and the constructionist learning philosophy, while still in its embryonic stage, seems the best candidate to me.
YouTube video
Med res video

Qwaq Forums talk at BarCampLA

Here's a kind blog post from Vaughn Hannon who attended my talk about Qwaq Fourms:
Session: Collaborating in Virtual Worlds - Qwaq Forums

A very special thanks to Howard Sterns and Qwaq for their support in my preparations to give this talk, and especially Howard who was my co-forum-attendee for the presentation and who help fill in some gaps in my understanding of Qwaq Forums. I'm glad the setup allowed our audience to hear Howard directly.

I was bumped to a different room to make place for Richard Stallman who also received the lion's share of the audience, but that's fine. It was a special time for the audience to see Stallman.

I also have time to prepare for an even better presentation for next time. BarCampLA5 be prepared for "Qwaq: Part Deux"
:)

OpenSocial

What does OpenSocial mean for the growing metaverse?

I'm not sure, yet. Dan Farber concludes, "Facebook users won’t run for Orkut, Plaxo or Ning unless they have a far more compelling proposition."

Being an open API, metaverses might be able to leverage OpenSocial more than the HTML oriented Facebook development platform. But, Facebook might adopt OpenSocial as well.

Need to Become Three

In the Metaverse, everyone needs at least three avatars... one representing their past, one representing them now, and one representing what they will, might, or wish to be in the future.

Futures Book Club

Just had a great discussion at the first monthly "Futures Book Club". This is a follow on of the Los Angeles Future Salon which has not met again since John Smart and Iveta Brigis left for SFO.

We talked about the internet's current and future influence on culture and society. We discussed how we learn, how our mind adapts, how our vocabularies are changing possibly making access to classical literature less accessible.

We covered computer languages, programmings as Haiku, and limits to servers hosting virtual worlds. We weighted the merits of security, trust, metrics, markets, entertainment, commerce, using social capital, viral presence, Trumors, and what a society needs to know vs. what a society thinks it needs to know. We also share our thoughts about what seems to be the problem facing todays schools teaching in a digital, interconnected world.

We mentioned the Singularity and what in technology makes it more difficult for governments to govern or makes it easier for them to control. We talked about the military's use of simulations and the changing mindset of a trained and/or highly trained soldier.

Randal mentioned how, in the past, HAM radio operators where similar to the internet users in that they spent long hours physically isolated and yet had an international relationships with a great many people sharing many ideas, often filtered through a three character "key code".

Some thoughtful questions raised:

• Twitter raised the important question: "What are you doing now?"
• "What is it possible to do in this culture and not elsewhere?"
• "What are we going to be in 30 years?"
• "In 5 years, will we, with a sensor attached to us, think to Google a query and receive the answer back?" and if so, "Would every MBA student see this as a business advantage at every business meeting and want one?"
  [Would a remote assistant monitoring by cell phone be able to do the same thing?]
• "What's our internet future?" Korea's CY World as an example of ~89% usage.
• "Will taking risks and constant change become a natural skill for the next generation?"

See you all next time.

Justin Rattner's Talk Summarized

Jeremy Kemp has summarized Justin Rather's talk "Virtual Worlds – The Rise of the 3D Internet".

http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=RattnerIDF

School Ideals suffering through Hyperinflation

Every day when I drop off my children at the local public school, I see armies of their fellow schoolmates swarming the school in the morning trailing rolling backpacks. This daily performance reminds me of the photos I saw, when I was back in school, of Germans pushing wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread during Germany's period of hyperinflation (historical photo on this web page).

I couldn't help imagining, with information so fluid in this digital age, why these "digital natives" were toting around so many reams of paper, cardboard, and larger books than ever before. (The books are larger because they need the color photos, illustrations, and aesthetic white space to keep the interest of today's youth). The children also must tote writing paper, writing tools, parent-teacher correspondence, etc. It seems so obvious that a single electronic device would do well for them, as envisioned by the OLPC group. And, because the information is paper based (like Germany's paper money which they kept printing more and more of thinking that more of the printed stuff would solve their problems), it's value to the students and society is decreasing exponentially even while the student is exerting energy, consuming time, losing their posture, and losing skeletal structural soundness while dragging the stuff around.

Obviously this "burden of Atlas" on the students is designed to benefit the schools and the curriculum designers rather than the students themselves. Why not have small booklets for each chapter (like Singapore Math)? Or, one set textbooks for home and one set for school? The cost for the school is for the benefit of the publishers of the book rather than in the actual cost of the manufacturing of it. The publishers even add the extra cost to the schools to make the covers glossy, colorful, and sparkled and then the schools make the children immediately cover th book so the children don't damage them. Even still, they get pencil marking and normal wear and tear. The children should be eager to markup and "tag" the content (in a del.icio.us sense) to make it more personal and interesting and make it their own, but they're told "thou shalt not!"

I've never understood how educational organizations expect the students to internalize and value the knowledge they're learning, if they cannot permanently own the information on the medium by which it's deliver to them. "Look but don't touch" their told. I think all they are told they need to know should be part of their life long portfolio. Even after school, if what they've learned becomes known to the school to be outdated, the school should update their former student's life long portfolio with the corrected information. If the schools don't follow up, did they really want all their students from the beginning to know "the truth" of the world around them? It's certainly easier and less expensive to do this digitally.

If the knowledge and skills which the schools teach are so important that the students are expected to remember them for the rest of their lives, why is that information copyrighted? Why are schools so dependent on copyrighted materials if this knowledge and these skills are so important and so pervasive and essential in society? Anyone should be able to teach this stuff and generate the materials from memory. I'm being just a little sarcastic at the irony.

I like how Seymour Paper tried to reformulate the issue in terms of trying to compare "paper based" learning with "digit content based" learning and compare them as just different mediums rather than "new and expensive" vs. "old and trusted". We can then evaluate them in terms of whom each medium benefits, who really pays for it, and who endures the non-monetary costs.

Croquet Software Demo Movie (August 2007)

Here's an online demo of Croquet and short descriptions about what it can do. It seems a little light on why it's important to teach and communicate in this way.

The Croquet team does well at demonstrating how text, numbers, 2D and 3D graphics, worlds, and external applications are all manipulated at an equal level of control and importance in this environment, which is not so true in most any other 3D environment. However, they don't demonstrate that the underlying programming rules and logic are just as easily manipulated as the visual artifacts! But, that's really too much for just one demo.

QWAQ on the move at Intel Developer Forum

Andreas Raab writes to the developer list this notice. I hope this helps their visibility and that of Croquet.

Slightly OT here but for those of you who want to see Croquet in action,
check out keynote by Justin Rattner from Intel's developer forum in San
Francisco this morning:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2007/webcasts.htm

The topic is "The rise of the 3D Internet" and Croquet is featured both
in the talk in general (as an example of P2P collaboration environment)
and live via a Qwaq Forums demonstration (about 15mins into the talk).

Also, a link to the press release of the Qwaq/Intel collaboration:

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20070920corp_a.htm
http://www.qwaq.com/press/release_2007-09-20.html

I hope this helps their visibility and that of Croquet.

Enterprise 2.0 & eLearning 2.0 ... the one and the same or a marriage?

Dan Farber posts about Enterprise 2.0 and the discussion he moderated.

Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

This raised an interesting question in my mind. With Web 2.0 tools for conducting business and an emphasis on informal processes for conduction business leveraged by these tools, the goals of these two techniques seem to be merging. Perhaps the "social scripting" which Jon Udell mentions allowing more dynamic scripting of business tools will help turn the social talk into social action.

I know corporations don't accept 3D simulations much as yet, but I don't think they can resist for too long. Enterprise 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 is good for bottom up, less expensive material, but top down is good for keeping a big picture to reduce fragmentation of information, identify gaps in the knowledge set about the domain, and working together toward a common goal.

So, how to we leverage the knowledge of the crowd without going back to a top down system to keep unity and context? Here again is why I believe simulations will be important. What one submits via the Web 2.0 tools, would still need to be placed within the context of the simulations, so every participant can see where they might be headed as an organization and how & why their contributions help. It's easy to assume everyone has the same mental model of what's going on if they are all reading the same text posts, the same calendar, and same numbers in the same spreadsheets, but that assumption is often wrong simply due to the timing of communications, the people we have the most exposure to, and our own built-in biases from different personal experiences, among many other reasons.

Simulations also help use measure what we individually and collectively believe the future will bring and be able to compare it against what actually comes to pass. Then we can drill down further to see which rules we assume to be in force where mistaken.

Seems like much of the fun is yet to come.

Why 3D and simulations? One answer: "Educational Uses of Second Life"

Here's a nice video done in Second Life explaining a bit of why 3D and simulations help self-directed and organized learning, titled "Educational Uses of Second Life".

Parry - Repost

Just attended Tony Karrer's talk on eLearning 2.0.

He has inspired me to blog more often.

So many ideas, so little time to type them all.

I mentioned my B.I.M. (Building Intelligence Model) as a metaphor for how a simulation summarizes large amounts of fast, dynamic, ever changing information like the information in the future that's awaiting us.

An analogy I should have used to help Tony understand my perspective comes from my experience in IT. The ERP systems I've installed and maintained for manufacturing corporations gave me a unique perspective of the company, one only afforded to top executives. I see the GL, AR, AP, Inventory flow, Shipping, Receiving, and a good amount of the communication between departments. From this bird's eye view, an ERP system looks like a simulation. One where budgeting is how one "replays" the game. The company looks like a living organism with a heartbeat (monthly reporting) and circulatory system that nourishes or withers departments of the company (cash flow). It moves and changes, searching for food (markets), reacting to an ever changing environment.

Would it be easier to quickly understand what a company does and how it functions by ....
A) Reading dozens of spreadsheets representing the changing, quantifiable aspects of the company?
B) Reading assorted emails of company employees?
C) Reading brochures about the company?
D) Reading the book of policies and procedures (in their current state) generated by the company?
E) Watching a documentary about the company?
F) Walking the floor?
G) Watching a visual, animated simulation of the company with labels for appearing function and animated actor?

Which of the above helps answers all five questions of "who, what, where, when, how, and why" the best?

I suspect simulations would be best at each of these.

Crushpad type business could make students dreams come true too

Crushpad type of "hands on to learn a process" business suggests one reason why youthful students could learn best by simulations, simulations integrated with real people in the real world.

Reviewed here.

Crushpad is at the forefront of changing how we will view our place in the industrial supply chain forever.

In case you aren't familiar with Crushpad, it is a company that leverages their knowledge, experience, and technology to help you make your dream come true of being a world-class winemaker.

...

It is a brilliant idea and one that I think will catch on all over the world, and not just with wine. People have fantasies and see themselves as makers and creators. However, they often don't have the experience or the access to the technologies to make it a reality. I can see this business model coming into all facets of industrial and agricultural production.

This is part of the new face of the web…connecting knowledge and materials to people who have a fantasy of assembling them into their own creation…making their own dreams come true. Instead of simply building more and more virtual connections to people and places, we'll begin to see a shift of the virtual to the tangible.

Simulations and Self Governance

Beyond what Jon Udell describes as citizen ads and citizen analysis lies citizen simulations.

My thinking suggests that our society is moving toward simulations of what candidates and organizations propose can be accomplished and what evidence they have and the dynamic principles in play (data, data sources, logical reasonings, and calculations) that affect it.

By simulations I mean an interactive, digital, playable, visual representation model of the conditions and dynamic forces at work in the area of concern. Simulations would be compared with each other, forced to merge or interface with each other, and eventually proven true or false (or even which parts of the simulation are true or false). One can't speak of global warming w/o referencing simulations of nature and industry. Eventually these simulations will leak out of the ivory towers and think tanks and become a democratized medium of communication thanks to Moore's Law and distributed peer Volunteer Computer Grids (ala Human Proteome Folding Project and Amazon EC2) and the help of proxy organizations representing us. Then the simulations can generate the stories or vision which we choose to believe and support or which we choose to reject.

Talk is cheap, even in TV/internet ads. Simulations can be made to lie like statistics can (such as pumping them with too much marginally relevant information), it's just harder for simulations to maintain a lie over time under public scrutiny. Simulations can be explored at whatever level of detail a citizen is comfortable with, and they can still come away with a useful understanding of what's at risk.

Simulations might tell us what we know, but more importantly, might tell us what we really don't know. We may have to make decisions on a hunch, or a hunch provided by the wisdom of the crowds. But, we should know that it's a hunch.

I suspect even the governing process itself will be subjected to the same simulation process and analyzed for effectiveness and thereby new possibilities simulated and proposed. Perhaps we are our data and our data becomes us.

Is Second Life a Learning Environment?

I think Clark Aldrich's point is that Second Life is not a good institutional learning environment (government/private school, corporate) … because of the variables the educator cannot control:

1) Attention interruption

2) Testing that cannot be gamed

3) Advanced/secure programming & data storage

4) Portability

5) Intellectual Property and Copyright theft

etc.

I believe an open source, 3D, peer to peer, programming with IDE and full class library, “packaged as a platform” solution would address most of Clark’s concerns. The best contender, that I know of, and that I know is in experimental use by the military and higher education, is Croquet sponsored by the Croquet Consortium.

http://www.croquetconsortium.org

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project

Why Interactive 3D?

I believe that the strength to be found in 3D environments has already be researched and summarized by Janet Murray in “Hamlet on the Holodeck – the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace”. In that book, she traces how, for each new medium, technology changes the communication medium content, authoring, and the communication medium’s structure, information, size, duration. The techniques to influence the mind are, in turn, formed by the limitations of the physics of the medium. From oral tradition to song/poetry/verse, to parchments as memory aids, to the codex, to the novel, to radio, to movies, to TV, to computational 3D, each style, genera, and techniques are formed by the physical limitations of the medium. The “novel” explores personalities and their relationships. The “movie” explains by action (you don’t want someone just explaining by talking in a movie but showing you). The radio draws on environmental sounds, metaphors, and visual vocabulary to sway the imagination.

Murray says that interactive 3D teaches by explaining the “process” of the dynamics of an environment that changes over time. It’s hard to explain in just words, pictures, or movies how the intricacies of the interdependent actions and reactions work in complicated systems described by “systems theory”. These systems can be found in social interdependent dynamics as well as the ecologies of the physical world and as also in the interdependent dynamics of past discoveries and the changes in the world of knowledge within every discipline. It’s hard to rewind a movie and run it a gain with a few different choices made in the beginning.

Note that each medium doesn’t exclude the prior art but usually incorporates it. One should also expect 3D to allow one to use text or 2D as easily as 3D or the efforts will seem feeble. Murray shows that each new medium in its genesis was a poorer copy of the prior art and took about 20 years of experimentation to get its own feet and techniques. (Novels can pan and zoom but movies can do it faster.)

I suppose the holodeck in Star Trek could have been just 2D. Somehow I think that would have made a very different story and very different lessons for the characters. Going the other way, why couldn’t the bridge and its controls for controlling the whole ship have just been a holodeck? Have “who you need”, “what they say”, and your own “controls” everywhere you go. No more “can’t get to the bridge” by broken lifts. The 2D controls they used were just as “virtual” and subject to the same “bugs” (so the story goes).

Someday we will control whole companies by manipulating them within visual representations of them. ERP and accounting systems are just text & 2D representations of models of the company. But you must admit that they are rigid, easily outdated, and very poor shadows to try to represent the moment by moment dynamics of a modern company and their dynamic working environments… competitive, legal, global, social, labor, etc.

Today, “processes” change so fast and new process constantly created by large social groups, that text and 2D just can’t keep a person informed fast enough. That’s the motive behind the BIM (Building Intelligence Modeling) process. Blueprints just aren’t fast enough anymore to keep all parties informed of all the latest changes by all parties in the time it takes to build a skyscraper or any other large building project.

3D lets you create on model and the story/presentation/teaching-material changes (including its scope and focus) by simply adjusting the camera’s point of view. This is similar to how movies/TV change the story by changing the camera’s point of view, but with the participant in control of the camera and hence the in control of the story.

For example, if the environmentalist groups actually simulated the process of destruction, economic impact, all environments affected, alternatives, groups, individuals, and personalities involved and their unique interests, you might be more informed than by any other medium. We’re talking about such things as the “serious games” studied at the “Serious Games Summit”.

3D’s best use will be by simulations to, first, document processes, then become “practice-ware” to gain skills in the environments, and finally as “predictive-ware” when predictive mathematical models take on visual form, substance, and a life of their own that can more meaningfully interact with our own lives. Controlling and defining “processes” in complex, ever shifting, win-lose, interdependent environments and their related economies while absorbing and evaluating massive amounts of feedback, is what many of today’s youth are learning in MMORPGs.

Spreadsheet Based Blog

Would blogging be different/better if we (the blogging community) used something like Google Spreadsheets technology for all our conversations? Each paragraph would be a cell (that can be formatted by the same tools that a Google document would … mini cell-documents). We'd quote/reference by cells rather than site/page/article/comment (as controlled by others). We'd store/host/index our own cells. Gmail would just be a certain ordering of my generated content or polled content of cells. The interface would be something like merging Gmail and Google's Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, Calendar, Base, Video, and Page Creator into a single content creaton/presentation metaphor, single interface presence, and online communication medium.

We could group cells into our own conversation, something like our own wiki. Reuse the parts we repeat or reference frequently by reference pointer (like a spreadsheet’s “=A2” formula) rather than copy/paste. Tags would be cell properties (easier to tag implicitly by cell proximity to each other). Copyrights/Commons would be cell properties. "Author" would be a cell property. Cell properties would be replicated as part of the reference pointer as well. Security and encryption would be at the cell level as well. A cell could contain more media that just text such as a video clip, sound recorder/player, or a code snippet as an executable function.

Everyone could take advantage of the hide/reveal column/rows as a sort of ad hoc tree/hierarchy to improve navigation. Editing our own authored cells could replicate the fix throughout the blogsphere since the copies of text/content are by reference pointer. Each cell could keep its own change history like a wiki (possibly by both the author’s host server and any content consuming site’s host server). Since my host contains the initial cell’s

We could search the content we reference as easily as we search our own content since it would appear in one continuous UI domain (ala Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface"). And built-in spell check, grammar check too please (domain sensitive by context per academic, business, cultural, informal, etc.).

Formulas in our spreadsheets would consolidate (from 3rd parties services/feeds) our interests into easy to reference/reach cells in our other hosted spreadsheets. 3rd party apps would link to cells or cell groups in our spreadsheet. Since it’s referenced by cell, it’s easier to see who is referencing back to me, and specifically, what parts I said were most interesting.

We could leverage the "functional programming" type community application development that spreadsheets expose. Cells could map to programmers’ classes. When programming, a cell’s properties could appear in adjacent cells that could be hidden by column/row hiding.

I tried to describe something like this on the Twiki wiki some years ago.

Such a system could even be a replacement for email I suspect. On such a platform Gmail would just be a certain ordering of my generated content or polled content of cells. With such a system you’d be blogging to an individual, with all the identification that comes with knowing where the content is hosted, which could reduce spam.

SqSquare is something of a graphical 2D version of the previous concept, since an internet aware programming IDE is built-in with every client.

http://sqsq.jp/SqSquare/7

The Portal is the Avatar

While contemplating how people will interact with Croquet as it becomes ubiquitous, it occurred to me that they would represent themselves in the Croquet worlds less and less by visual puppet or doll type avatars. In their place would be something that would visually represent themselves more accurately... the worlds that the people created themselves.

The Spherical Portal would be suited to the purpose. By walking around someone’s portal-avatar you see various aspects of their world that they’ve put up closest to the front. Your avatar would be a continual invitation to join you in your world.

There would also be a non-verbal, non-auditory representation of your avatar that follows it wherever it goes ... more like a radio broadcast of content, only for the computers and rules of the computers of the surrounding avatars to hear. Just like one's blog is a broadcast of one's interests & purpose... your avatar would broadcast your intended data scent. Something like what Bluetooth friendfinder gadgets do in the physical world, and there may be a crossover of the two, blurring the boundaries between the virtual and the real.

Jamaica is First with Cell/TV Connection

Looks like Jamaican business leaders have already created a system like the one I suggested in my "Learning in 3D without a PC - Croquet on Cable TV?" article (only without the 3D). Here are some details below.

Firestream Media Distribution System Wins top Innovator Award
"what we have sought to do is use what is available in Jamaica, the cell phones and the T.V. set, and fuse both technologies and here we are today with real time distance learning being delivered to your home".
http://www.mct.gov.jm/s_&_t_awards.htm

A Futurist's answer to the question "Future of Smalltalk?"

Answering the initial question on the comp.lang.smalltalk newsgroup list ... "Future of Smalltalk?" (rather than the assumed question others are answering: "Is there a Future for Smalltalk?" My prediction is that Croquet will make Smalltalk take a sudden evolutionary jump for seven reasons, including it supports the new mash-up and social network culture in its core technology around loosely coupled, late-bound, system and social connectivity and due to it's creating its own niche.

I believe that Croquet will bring mind share to Smalltalk in significant numbers and that those minds will push the language itself into unanticipated directions much as Alan Kay said Smalltalk should.

How?

First, it creates new interface genera, or a market, rather than mimic what other languages do (websites, menus, forms, etc.). Hence, it treats itself as a framework for niche applications -- but what a visually appealing niche that is!

Second, social connectivity and system connectivity are built into its foundation. Social connectivity and the "mash-up" culture will change the nature of application development and Croquet is already built for it.

Third, as the discussion on "method comments" has underlined, comments (or determined lack thereof) reflect our understanding of our code audience, the code readers young and old (not the running hardware). In Croquet, the whole world is your pair-programming partner. As such, the world will be you best friend and harshest critic. In Croquet, annotations of all kinds are built into its very foundation. At every moment one assumes that everything one does in Croquet will be visible to an audience that is larger, diverse, and more varied in knowledge and experience. 3D annotation, audio annotation, animated annotation, nested annotation is built into all visual artifacts (hence, text is annotate-able too) in Croquet and built into its foundation for user interface and IDE .

Fourth, it doesn't completely shut out the others applications to be a platform island unto itself. It leverages Smalltalk's past API's into databases, DLL libraries, web protocols, VNC controls, e-mail protocols, instant messaging protocols, .NET interfaces, and even running some other languages in its own incremental compiler.

Fifth, (I hope this will soon be possible) to reduce code breakage, beyond "incremental compilation" and "check-in" "check-out" code text for logic changes, think in terms of "instant, incremental, code update integration testing". Like RSS, one "subscribes to the other developer's or vendor's Unit Tests". When their tests go green, your system has a separate image with your latest changes, imports their green light code, and runs your tests. You automatically self-publish your results back to the other developer/vendor who, in turn, subscribes to your results. Remember, code integration is a social network built on social trust and deep, frequent communication.

Sixth, since communication is its underlying premise, it is naturally targeting the learning and education sectors of our society (at eventually all age levels). This should boot strap improved ways of learning Croquet development as well.

Seventh, due to the Smalltalk technology underlying Croquet, it runs on all major OS platforms, is latebound, and is loosely coupled.

The natural conclusion we can draw from these possibilities will be that the ad hoc groups developing in Croquet will end up "paving the footpaths" and consequently more quickly change the language and the supporting VM.

Incremental Code Integration - Getting Projects Done Like a School of Anchovies

I look forward to the day when one subscribes to the development projects' code that one is interested in.

Imagine if everyone's (public code) SUnit tests' results are published in RSS.
When the developer gets green on the important SUnit tests, you get the notice in your "source code progress" aggregator (and a copy of code if its not too big, otherwise get a link to it).

Then, if you want to, you import the code to a safe copy of what you are working on and run your SUnit tests on the integrated code and programmatically post the errors (or positive results) in your own RSS feed. If the developer really cares, they could subscribe to your results feed. The aggregator helps mitigate interruptions and disruptions to programmer thought process.

This sort of closes the loop nicely, more tightly, and more programmatically than public broadcasts alone. Seems a natural for the collaborative nature of Croquet. Big code compatibility breakage lights-up the net like a Christmas tree. Because small changes are quickly shared as in a feedback system, it allows the group to more quickly move together in an aggregate direction and remain a unit ... something like how a massive school of autonomous fish can swim together in a school as if they were a single organism.

Beyond "incremental compiling" ... it's "incremental code integration", more fine grained than any project or .cs file making the rounds. It's also loosely coupled like the net itself. Unsubscribe anytime. This also lets the developer know how popular their projects are. It also makes it easier to share popular project development code "sets of subscriptions" between "friends of friends" automating it rather than just passing along a link to a site homepage or a copy of outdated code.

This might even be a nice chargeable, hosted service if open source folks care to post minute slips of changed code that pass their Unit tests to the service.

Any opinions?

"Everything will change when 'accreditation for schools' changes to 'accreditation for courses'."

The most telling and revealing quote I heard at the ELI Annual Meeting conference:

"Everything will change when 'accreditation for schools' changes to 'accreditation for courses'."

Social networking efforts such as RateMyProfessor.com and those indicated by RatingZ.net may indicate that this happens due to market and social dynamics outside the control of formal accreditation agencies.

Interest to develop Singapore as an Interactive Media Hub

An interesting trend that indicates a prosperous future for Croquet: :-)

http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/cnm/people_joinus_academicstaff.htm

The Singapore government recently announced a $2 billion fund injection to boost the interactive/digital media industry. In addition, Singapore's growing interactive media industry is attracting considerable industry investment. Recent milestones include the establishment of the Lucasfilm Animation Studio and games development studios by Koei Games and Electronic Arts.

In view of government and industry interest to develop Singapore as an interactive media hub, the National University of Singapore seeks to expand its research and teaching expertise in the area. The Communications and New Media (CNM) Programme in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences invites applications for five tenure-track positions at either Assistant or Associate Professor levels.

Learning in 3D without a PC - Croquet on Cable TV?

Imagine you want to learn but live in a country where either computers are not available or not affordable.

What do you have at hand that you can use? Cell phones with IM? Cable TV?

Then put Croquet on a server with an interactive learning environment that takes IM messages from a large number of participants and sends the aggregated fly-through visually modeled results out on a cable TV channel!
___

While discussing with a Squeak/Smalltalk developer who lives in Argentina about the limitations to learning in societies without common ownership of a PC, I thought through a scenario that tries to use only what they actually have available.

Even if someone provides PC's at $100 to everyone in such a society, rolling out educational software and internet connections would take a long time as well. Given that they will not be getting such PC's any time soon, what do they have available?

The most flexible input device owned by the youth is the cell phone, with penetration guessed at just under 50% in Argentina. In general, those phones have instant messaging capabilities.

The broadcast medium with the richest media for distribution is cable TV with residential penetration guessed at about 30% there. In general, most cable networks have extra bandwidth for additional channels that they cannot fill.

Now that Croquet has Jabber instant messaging capabilities, I can imagine Croquet at the core of a whole new learning medium.

Start with an institution that has a vested interest in students learning a specific or a series of complex topics. This institution could be a governmental institution, educational institution, etc. They commission the topics to be modeled in Croquet and hosted on a server at the cable operator'’s distribution office connected to the internet and behind a firewall that only allows instant messages through (with a backup server in the same place with the same configuration, of course).

The Croquet application developer creates tasks to be complete by each of a group avatars and by the scripts that the people controlling the aviators they generate. Commands to control the avatar and the scripts it uses are to be submitted by instant messages to Croquet. The video output of a flying camera in the Croquet space is broadcast on a dedicated Croquet learning channel. Audio can be preprogrammed or spoken by a live commentator observing the contest by their avatar.

Then a competition is announced. Participants are divided in teams. Each team controls one avatar. In the case of conflicting commands, the command submitted by the most participants assigned to that avatar and its team wins to have their command received by the avatar.

This leverages the fact that most participants would respond in very similar ways. Unusual exceptions can be noted after each competition and the environment adjusted for the next competition. Overhead and cost of roll out are minimal. Recognition of sponsors can be easily integrated, "Thank you Mayor So-and-so for making this all possible!" with a photo or video clip of them.

The hardest part is setting up the competition to have testable pedagogical value and still perform as expected for the participation without confusing them with the visuals and text. It's still not ideal, but quite possible if politics don't interfere.

CroquetProject.org needs a link

Can we add a link to the Accelerate Madison video presentation on the
Croquet Project's "Croquet Blogs/Links" page? (Prominently I hope. Or
even the home page)

http://croquetproject.org/links.html
add to above page:
http://mslive.sonicfoundry.com/mslive/Viewer/NoPopupRedirector.aspx?peid=172f6de5-135b-4ba0-9207-ac6d383812c9&shouldResize=False#

"The Boy Who Drew Cats" on his Ubiquitous Computing devices - 猫を描く少年(小僧)

While contemplating why Ubiquitous Computing is important and how important agents might or might not be to it, I just remembered this ancient Japanese fable: "The Boy Who Drew Cats" ( 猫を描く少年(小僧) ) as translated to English by Lafcadio Hearn ( 小泉八雲 ) circa 1900 that I read in my childhood. I dug it out of my library but also found it online.
http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a0537.pdf
Images from the original printing with it's illustrations:
http://collec.lib.u-toyama.ac.jp/~hearn/CHIRIMEN/list.html

This fable is common knowledge among the Japanese. Not only does it provide a metaphor for Ubiquitous Computing and its advantages and dangers, it might help explain why some are attracted to it, including the Japanese. Croquet's constructivist capabilities parallel the story pretty well.

Read the two-page story before continuing. Because of plot spoilers, I’ll post the parallels I find between the story and Ubiquitous Computing as a comment to this blog entry.

While I don't consider this story as proof in and of itself, it suggests to me where further research could be directed.

Massive Multi-user 3D Dentistry

A friend of mine owns a company that has been developing a Dental office management app. He has successfully developed, and sold a point-of-sale app business to a major software company.

I’ve tried to describe in the following way how Croquet could, and eventually will, be used in the dentistry field where his application is deployed.

Every communication medium has a different strength. Novels describe character and situation. Radio focuses on dialog. Movies enhance action. 3D's strength is modeling "process". It shows "who" did, should do, or is doing "what", "where", "when", and "how" all at a glance. Examples of an application of this aspect of 3D can be seen in the 3D enactments used in the court of law.

Not knowing the current real needs of the field of dentistry; I've made some assumptions. I realize that current user interface style is finely tailored to the record keeping part of office management and that there are serious privacy & confidentiality concerns in the medical field that don't lend themselves to a massive multi-user presence environment.

However, I can imagine a few other possibilities.

1. Replace Webex for conferencing at all levels
   Use Croquet for remote expert medical consultation, remote patient consultation, office-to-office communication for large organization, and even remote equipment control. Instead of showing sheets of papers and slides of pictures one at a time, participants can walk through something like an open-air museum of documents, photos, video, and 3D models of places, replacement parts, medicine chemical structures and reactions, etc. all while talking to each other in conference. Lines and pointers can connect difference media and words or lines of text in different documents together to overtly show relationships and causality. Participants with the proper authority can leave comments and "annotations" that can be hidden or revealed to each individual based on each individual's personal criteria. One can even remotely control other 2D apps in different floating 2D "windows" while in session via VNC. (Though I hope it will never be needed (God willing), this also promotes a rich, instant communication medium where participants do not wish to be physically present together, as in the case of a possible avian flu epidemic.)
   
   
2. Training new staff on processes and procedures
   3D promotes the visual demonstration of why the procedures are important and their consequences. Even though each office may have policies and procedures different from each other, Croquet is flexible so it can model each one per their needs.
   
   
3. Replace 2D workflow applications with actual working 3D models or simulations of what the workflows try to describe
   This allows rapid dynamic updating of the process to reflect actual practice by those individuals involved, rather than training all the staff to an unfamiliar "flowchart" metaphor with "and/or/loop" logic control. The flowchart metaphor allows exceptions to be missed if they are many pages away in a complex process. A simulation can reveal what to do next based the current situation, and the consequences, while still allowing one to roll back in to an try other possible outcomes.
   
   
4. Educating the patient
   3D demonstrations of medial procedures to ease patient's anxiety. These demonstrations can use actual photos and models of the patient's own physical attributes. This information can help the patient make more intelligent and informed decisions that can serious affect their health, evaluate the level of risk, and the evaluate corresponding personal fiscal consequences.
   
   
5. Zooming out to look at the big picture
   Examine and analyze equipment distribution and consumable supply distribution, waste disposal, demographics, epidemiology, patient migration patterns, marketing, and state of the art practices to foster more communication, awareness of problems, and cooperation between dental offices. This still maintains the capability to zoom-in to examine, share, and communication about specific details. This might also have homeland security implications.
   
   
6. Whatever needs that the dentistry field might use or might already be using Google Earth for 3D information
   
   
7. Modeling the transition from one complex business procedure to another complex business procedure
   Complex business procedures can greatly differ from each other -- of the likes that hospitals face from time to time. Better modeling and education (at a visual level that individuals who do the work can understand) can lead to a faster, smother, less traumatic, and less expensive transition.
   
   
8. Any and all of the above applications working together
   in a continuous, deeply interconnected way including connections to the databases of the 2D applications.
   
   

A Few More Points I Think Julian's Presentation Needed

I believe Julian Lombardi and Preston Austin's presentation on the Croquet Project at an event sponsored by Accelerate Madison on October 13th, 2005 ( here ), while surprising comprehensive for the time they had, could have been significantly enhanced by adding just a couple more points.

1. Point out the multilingual capacity of Squeak, and therefore, Croquet's potential global reach.
2. Show the “3D Portal” which shows how the avatar can carry around an interactive, real-time, mini, self-referencing 3D map of the 3D world that the avatar is in. This helps the audience visualize the real time modeling and process modeling capabilities of Croquet for business and academic scenarios a bit better than just showing the molecule model.
3. Mention how application distribution is as simple and automatic as 3D object, text document, and 3D world distribution.
4. Reference Google Earth to show the pent up potential for 3D integrated and juxtaposed with a wide area of disparate data thereby presenting new meanings. Google Earth also nicely illustrates the concept of "download or share just the content you need when you need it."
5. Show the “Coriollus effect” world space (TSolar class that combines earth rotation, gravity, friction, and a particle emitter) to underline how an interactive model can often visually convey the understanding of an idea faster and more completely than a lot of time reading a lot of text.
6. Show the "annotation viewing portal" to illustrate the ability to create and access many more layers of information while remaining in the same environment and the same user interface.
   
7. And, perhaps mention how to prevent “instant, worldwide crash distribution” if we allow instant, global program update distribution.

BIM (Building Information Modeling)

BIM (Building Information Modeling) seems to be a very good overview of what many of us can expect from Croquet. BIM might be a harbinger of what benefits Croquet & its "modeling" & "communication" emphasis will provide, but Croquet would work for the general case.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?id=4749500&siteID=123112

Building information modeling (BIM) is a building design and documentation methodology characterized by the creation and use of coordinated, internally consistent computable information about a building project in design and construction.

This makes available a reliable, coordinated, and consistent digital representation of the building for design decision making, high-quality construction document production, construction planning, and performance predictions.

Having the ability to keep information coordinated, up-to-date, and accessible in an integrated digital environment gives architects, engineers, builders, and owners a clear overall vision of all their projects, as well as the ability to make better decisions faster—raising the quality and profitability of every project.

Being "Autodesk" they refer to this "model" as being an "interactive 3D model" of the building as well as statistical facts.

Croquet as a Superfluid Superplatform

Jon Udel talks about superplatforms and the recently observed blending of the “cathedral” and the “bazaar” as they continue to develop and adapt to the pressures of demand.

The changing cathedral and the evolving bazaar

Superplatform politics

I still think Croquet will be the superplatform of the bazaar.

It blurs or eliminates the boundaries between all these:

"Web services are useful for tying together autonomous systems;
components for coordinating the process distribution within a system;
objects for organizing the code within a process"
Fuzzy Boundaries: Objects, Components, and Web Services

Croquet would make data, code, and UI movement/transmission for sharing/distribution … superfluid.

But that makes security & licensing Croquet’s biggest bugaboo.

Nevertheless, security is a known quantity to solve.

But what about licensing? When data and code stay as objects and not files or streams … and flows from system memory to system memory w/o pausing on the hard drive (other than as raw memory objects in a cache swapfile), how do licensing laws apply?

The streams between systems would contain a flurry of message sends (multimedia content, text, procedures, heartbeats, system/hardware/user status, timing, etc.) all blended together. This would make it difficult to describe what bytes to consider as evidence.

Programming is Not a Stealth Fighter

Why dynamic languages for me...

a response to Greg Buchholz at:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/5591

A stealth fighter is an engineering problem and solvable with tools for the engineering mind.

Here are more dynamic scenarios for a stealth fighter.

What if there is a flaw found in the controls while in flight (a light bulb? simple but critical)? Could one fix it in flight?

What if a new enemy strategy is discovered while in mid flight that can only be recognized by satellite, reacted to, and piloted by the speed of a computer. Can the stealth fighter be reconfigured in flight to avoid certain destruction by the new enemy strategy, if the adjustment to the new remote-controlled-maneuver passes all onboard unit test?

What if the enemy implements “ground bounce radar” in mid flight so that all the fields and methods labeled “hidden” or “now in stealth” need to be relabeled as “formerly hidden” and “formerly in stealth” while in flight?

Can you add a yet another set of controls and a another pilot while in flight if the first one or two are determined to only have a limited set of skills after a sudden change in scenario?

Are unit tests for all systems deployed with the stealth fighter?

Today’s stealth fighters probably assume almost all parameters are known in advanced.

Business systems need to react faster and morph more completely than stealth fighters in the business battle arena because there are more factors (other entire markets, long term natural resource variances, short term weather, human employee health, new sci/tech discoveries, new laws, new disruptive innovation, etc.) and more people looking for more advantages and weaknesses non-stop 24x7.

Perhaps programming during an entire war, from beginning to all possible ends, with thousands of people at a thousand different controls, might be a better analogy. This day in age, we probably need to keep reevaluating fundamental assumptions every day.

Compared to society’s skill and knowledge of physics and engineering, our knowledge, tools, and skills of human nature, morality, psychology, changing market patterns, and politics, and our predictive ability in those areas, are still back in the Middle Ages.

We need tools that can quickly represent, reflect, and leverage our rapidly accelerating increase of knowledge and rapidly accelerating changing vocabulary in all these areas.

Are you able to write programs in non-roman alphabet based languages as the world keeps shrinking and flattening? Do your compilers understand non-ascii files? Are you willing to change your compilers to do so? There are just too many assumptions in the compiler. Speakers of other languages consider current int'l character standards too roman language biased already. Will an accent mark in a variable name kill your program?

Can you even write comments in your code in Taiwanese, So. Korean, or friendly Arabic? If they pick dynamic languages that can, and you don’t, they’ll be able to read your code but you won’t be able to read theirs… a competitive advantage.

"Long live Rome (ASCII) & the Emperor" … but barbarians are at the gate.

Croquet vs. Will Wright's Spore

Better link:

http://www.gamasutra.com/gdc2005/features/20050315/postcard-diamante.htm

Will Wright's Spore is a bit similar to Croquet on these points:

1. Multi-user, synchronized, 3D environment - scaleable by both number of users and zooming from the macro to the micro in the 3D space

2. Algorithm created content (optional in Croquet)

3. User created content is the best content because it encourages "ownership"

Spore advantages over Croquet:

1. Everything is algorithm generated so it’s fast, compact, easy to distribute.

2. Ease of 3D content creation due to predefined pallet of construction resources from which to choose

3. Physics is automatic and inter-object physical interaction behavior is extrapolated at runtime

4. Hard to reverse engineer, so easier to protect Intellectual Property if you have any

5. Efficient generation/memory-storage of textures

6. All 3D content exists in one single universe, so all content can be located by a single 3D position in the universe for it

7. Articulated avatars with preprogrammed, realistic motion & behavior

8. Hard for the user to crash the system

9. Less need for security in insulate users' behavior from each other

Croquet advantages over Spore:

1. Not all content can be expressed by algorithms, especially in education, where the domain to be learned has already been expressed in other multimedia

2. Users can create their own programming logic/behavior as well as their own content

3. Lots of new non-algorithmic content can be created

4. Open source

5. Easier to enhance with add-on extensions which are automatically distributed

6. Hard to derive content from algorithms, so hybrid approach helps in transition

7. Can easily record and play back the user stories

8. Easy to reverse engineer, so easier to enhance or build the next big thing

9. Multiple user-created worlds can exist separate from each other, so easier to focus on specific communication activity or learning activity, and easier to create/duplicate a world & its content

10. Can search content data for values, labels, or code used by the active content

11. Can represent the chemical tools of biological organism as well as structural tools

I'm sure others can think of more advantages and disadvantages.

Elevator Pitches

My Effort to Summarize Croquet’s potential as an "elivator pitch" per Julian's challenge:

http://jlombardi.blogspot.com/2005/01/elevator-pitches.html

First try. Too abstract, but an platform or envirnment is really a structure to host abstractions. :)

Everyone working with computers do so because they are creating, changing, and communicating content (business data, text, analysis results, art, sound, video, controlling software, and so on) or because they are learning something.

Current PC consumer and programmer environments make us “jump through hoops” on the way to creating and understanding PC content. “Croquet changes the hoops into doorways… intimately and simultaneously connecting people to their ideas and people to each other,” all without any of the usual barriers at every level in the PC. If we want to deeply understand and control math, we want to live in a “mathland” creating math stories. This is true with all the content we create. We want our metaphors or computer models to perfectly match or simulate what we intensely care about and be able to touch them in just that format.

The current PC experience is frustrating for most, prohibitive for others, and time consuming for the rest. This all takes away from what we, who use the computer, really want to do… create the content or build on top of what we’ve learned.

Croquet removes these typical barriers:
• conflicting visuals, poor metaphors
• major differences in how you create any multimedia content
• complex programmer tools and languages and the over complex logic they represent
• diverse, incompatible data formats
• saving/storing/sending of the data
• underlying operating system platforms
• social & technical barriers to rapidly sharing new advances and discoveries

In Croquet, the visual models, data models, and behavior models of your ideas and your PC content “just live there together” to be molded by you and everyone in your team, group, department, classroom… simultaneously, as we do in real life. The software programs or content behaviors are “just there” for you to mold in any open computer language. You can create, share, or use other’s tools for finding and viewing on the fly. No separate applications with incompatible ways to see and change your content (though it can still share its content in legacy formats with those legacy applications).

PC’s have changed our social/business/home life because they are general purpose, understandable, improvable, and available everywhere we are in life. Croquet makes the current crop of PC’s more much more general purpose, more understandable, more quickly improvable, and more universally available… all working together to even greater benefit.

Legacy developers were limited by hardware and their technical training about working within those limits. Technical advances have removed those limits but the software environments they create have not advanced beyond those limits.

To save us and our children frustration and time, we must help everyone move to the next level where we all comfortably live with and be surrounded by our content, any time we choose, and thereby become masters of our content at home, in business, and as participating members of an advancing society.

User Interface with 3 planes - Instant input, Narrative output, plus more

I've felt for a couple years that a more flexible interface has 3 planes that fill your screen, superimposed on each other, and alpha blend into each other.

The three planes are interdependent. The content in any other plane may be navigated to, changed, revealed through another plane, or hidden by another plane depending what one is clicking on, hovering over, or highlighting in a given plane that has your input focus.

1st Plane: Is for text entry, form/data entry, command entry, and source code entry.

• It has a list with text that represents EVERYTHING in the system (only rendered when visibly navigated to or scrolled to).
  
• It's a grid, collapsible, searchable, and also navigable locally with arrow keys.
  
• It's akin to the spreadsheet, but not with fixed columns, so it's more flexible.
  
• It's like the heads-up-display in a 3D game.
  
• It would also be used more for filtering & sorting.
  
• It’s like the table in a HTML page.
  
• It’s like a Wiki with every page stacked together into one page, but collapsible, and editable at the paragraph/cell level instead of the page level of granularity.
  
• Everything above a certain line is considered private, everything below is shareable, and visibly distinguished so one never confuses the two.
  
• You don’t e-mail a copy of content. You just label that cell or group of cells sharable to a certain person or group and even for a limited time. The recipient then decides if they want to copy, reference, link to, or share in turn to others your cell. This includes scripts, methods, and classes too. (Sharable to web browser user, XML parser, and RSS consumption would be nice too but not necessary.)
  
• Like OOP, the cells have the properties & classes, which to can be expanded and collapsed into lines/columns in the grid akin to a pivot table.
  
• The cells could also be nesting like the tiles in the Squeak tile view of the code Browser.
  
• This design is also less taxing on the OS and hardware infrastructure.
  
• It allows immediate entry of commands without depending on how you get to a certain 3D space to enter the command, just any empty cell is a “command line”. It’s a place to automatically save and display those commands for logs & history, also shareable.
  
• It’s also a log of generated code to recreate your movements/activities to create a flythrough or script.
  
• It's also your menu system and help system.
  
• All in the same modifiable, shareable, consistently navigated, consistently collapsible, consistently linkable interface.
  
• 1st plane screens would be “shared” to Croquet portals as projects are today.

2nd Plane: Is more like the 2D graphic, art, drawing, and painting.

• It is more like the layout format that Morphic & web pages have made us familiar with.
• Content is placed on a Cartesian grid.
  
• This plane is used less for user input, more for output, and more for “drag & drop”.
• Screens in this plane “blends” with certain grids the 1st Plane to make visually appealing forms.
  
• 2nd plane screens would be “shared” to Croquet portals as projects are today.

3rd Plane: Is for 3D. This is the Croquet shared space.

• It is used even less for input than the other two planes but dependant on the other two planes.
  
• It’s for the collaboration, telling a story, demos, narratives, touring a data set, quick overviews, simulations, and immersive experiences.
  
• Snapshots, movies, or camera views can be shared with the 1st plane cells and 2nd plane image graphics.

As a student’s education progresses,

1. They will spend most of their time in the 3rd plane (simulations and stories) and as they develop more abstract thinking
2. They will change to spend more time creating and manipulating in the 2nd plane (schematic type thinking)
   
3. With more abstractions they wil spend more time in the 1st plane (words becoming labels and symbols of & for complex ideas).

Nevertheless all planes should be available for all students all the time whatever their skill level so they can seamlessly, instantly move from one to the other when mentally or socially ready.

In essence, your GUI experience is one where you live in all three planes simultaneously. Your input focus is determined by quasi-modes on the keyboard or very temporary modes for the reasons Jef Raskin describes.

I enjoyed reading Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface - New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems". It's also affordable.

His site is at http://humane.sourceforge.net/home/

Here he also shows what advantages "leap" has over icons & lists. He espouses ZUI but I think he has forgotten how much time a ZUI takes to navigate. ZUI seems to work best with a known fixed data set like that of http://www.keyhole.com and where behavior, visual experience is predictable like flying in this case.