The recent Year of Code debacle has had me looking back at the work of the first great coding educationalist, Seymour Papert. If you're not aware of Papert's work, but you are of a certain age, you may have come across his programming language invention Logo - a syntax to control the actions of … Continue reading Purple turtles
Category: Technology
I always enjoy my conversations with Andy Law because he's one of those people with whom I can have a chat and leave feeling that I've learned something, but without feeling stupid for not knowing it before. Yesterday we caught up and he introduced me to the French sociologist Bourdieu's "Four Forms of Capital" (for … Continue reading Why Apple are so powerful – a sociological view
There's been a heck of a lot of advice being bandied around to new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the past couple of weeks. And almost all that I've read has been focused on the Windows 8/Windows 9/Windows Phone dimension of the company. The company has three big revenue pillars, and the Windows operating system … Continue reading Out of office
About six months ago I started writing a series of observations about how the world of technology and marketing and communications are being changed by one another, and how many of the industries that have built up in those fields don't feel to be a particularly good fit any more. It then sat in my … Continue reading /marketing TheNewThing
Some years ago I wrote, rather cruelly, about how the relationship between Apple and its customers sometimes resembled the gaoler/captive relationship present in Stockholm Syndrome (where the captive falls for the charms of their gaoler). It strikes me that the same sort of relationship, in much more dangerous form, also exists between analyst companies and … Continue reading Stockholm Syndrome (Part II)
One of the things that has been most striking in re-reading Negroponte's being digital is the belief that he had two decades ago that the rise of digital channels would lead to new, multi-media content forms. The book was written at the height of the CD-ROM multimedia craze, when Encarta was going to supersede Britannica and … Continue reading Multiple media
When I was a kid I had the opportunity to learn to code. It wasn't a "right" - I was just lucky to be in a home where there was a computer (a BBC Micro that my dad had supplied by his work). In those days in the mid-Eighties, coding was pretty much synonymous … Continue reading A fuller appreciation
Two themes in my Twitter stream today that have been fused together in my mind. 1) the government's Universal Credit benefits reform, turning into a great beast of a disaster. At it's core (from where I see it) "IT disasters" resulting from ineffective change management, an over-confidence that technology in its own right can deliver … Continue reading Would learning to code help?
https://twitter.com/furtherfield/status/431407949672480768 In my lifetime I've known three meanings of the word "hack": to go at something with a sharp implement; to (criminally) break into computing resources that you shouldn't; and to botch a bit of programming to get it working, or just to see whether something might do. None of those definitions are particularly positive. … Continue reading Hacked off
Imagine the scenario. You're running late for a meeting. You need to let the person you're meeting know that you are running late. You reach for your mobile phone. What channel do you choose? My experience over the past few months is that most people choose to send a text message. We have learned, somehow, … Continue reading Tech preferences
mmitII 