viz.

Image Credit: Birdsedge First School

Remember these things? It's hard to believe that kids are still learning to shape their letters according to handwriting diagrams like this one. In the first world where type is the dominant mode of textual presentation, one has to wonder how often kids will encounter a squiggly 'f' as it's drawn above or a lower case 'k' that looks like a capital R? 

The chart looks to us like an anachronism, especially next the digital text of this blog post. We're prompted to ask whether kids should be taught to write a script that is rapidly fading from the textual universe? Is handwriting a skill that is worth acquiring in an era when written communication mainly occurs through digital media, without the assistance of pen or paper?

Credit for Eedited Image of Leo Tolstoy: Sean Ludwig

Educators and everyday people alike have spent (at least) the last half of a decade in a state of ever-increasing turgidity as they speculate as to all of the amazing feats the e-reader (usually, “e-reader” means “iPad” in the popular discourse, so I might use both terms below) will achieve in the context of public education.  It is almost assumed that replacing every student’s bulky, quickly-dated paper textbooks with sleek, capability-rich e-readers is an unequivocally good, nay, downright imperative educational initiative. 

However...

Image Credits: Newscom and  Jim Henson Tribute Forum

Novelist Bruce Sterling, who gave a very hip keynote address on designer Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) at this year’s Flair Symposium "Visions of the Future," concluded his remarks with a challenge: Which of us has the courage to imagine the future like Bel Geddes did? Larger than life, impracticable, earnest, utopian, democratic, dazzling: can we still dream like that?

In this post, I give it a go with a foray into the sci-fi genre of Alternate History: What if Jim Henson (1936-1990) had lived a further ten years and had gotten involved in the Silicon Valley scene? How might computing have developed differently? 

Preparations being made for today's media event.

(Image credit: Luis Gutierrez)

Apple’s set to release some new products later today, and I thought it’d be fun to round up the most credible rumors and then we can all check back later and evaluate the quality of my intel. As a recent Secretary of State complained, “But they don’t tell us when; they don’t tell us where; they don’t tell us who; and they don’t tell us how.” I predict that later today Apple will give us a new iteration of the iPhone, stretched to new dimensions, and an additional iPad model, shrunk but with its big brother’s current dimensions. These things sound cool. Honestly, my only hope is that they don’t call the new iPhone the “iPhone 5,” as that would present a dilemma for those of us keeping track. Let’s pretend that the first iPhone was iPhone 1, then the iPhone 3G would confusingly have been the iPhone 2, which means the iPhone 3GS was the iPhone 3, and the iPhone 4 was (thankfully) the iPhone 4, all of which means that last year’s iPhone 4S was the iPhone 5. We already have an iPhone 5. Is it premature to worry that later today Apple might be giving us something that we already have?