News and Views from the Institute for End User Computing, Inc.

Rarely does a company have the opportunity to remake an industry and create the Next Big Thing.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Apple Newton, the technology isn’t quite mature enough to deliver on its potential until the marketing damage caused by a poor first impression is irreparable to the brand.

Other times arrogance, avarice, and a failure of vision conspire to cripple a new device, before it even reaches the hands of its potential End Users. Such is the case of Apple’s much vaunted iPad which is only a worthy successor for the Screen of the Newton.

With a decade to improve on that truly innovative creation, we expected no less than a new OS with multi-touch support, as well as a stylus to drive state-of-the-art handwriting recognition, a forward facing cam for video-conferencing, preemptive multitasking, a zoomable interface, a full compliment of standard USB, ethernet, firewire, and solid state memory card ports, a core of deeply integrated notetaking, sketching, and communications modules with an open architecture allowing them to be extended in unforeseen directions, a fresh platform-wide programming language to simplify such development, User Swappable power packs, and an option for wireless video out to an optional transceiver that could be plugged into industry standard projectors.

We expected the freedom to purchase or develop additional software, without paying to join an Apple Developer Program or having to purchase only Apple Sanctioned content through an Apple Store that will probably add to our costs. We would have gladly paid a premium above even laptop prices for the kind of game changer Apple could have offered.

What we were offered was little more than an oversized iPod Touch optimized to act as a mobile cash register to fill Apple’s till.

The old Apple Computer understood that its End Users wanted power and freedom and were willing to pay a premium to have it. Perhaps even more importantly, it believed that we were intelligent individuals and not stupid drones needing to be coddled and told what to think.

How ironic that the face on the giant video wall dictating to the unwashed masses should be none other than that of Steve Jobs himself. Welcome to 1984.

Yet again, Apple has betrayed its core values.

At the IEUC, we still believe in End Users and Open Innovation and look forward to seeing what the rest of the industry will develop to leapfrog this latest affront to common sense.

On the 4th of July, we celebrate The Founding of the United States of America.

For all peoples of the world, this holiday represents the potential for individual freedom to triumph in the eternal struggle between Liberty and Tyranny.

The Founders were very much the Hackers (in the constructive sense) of their day, using the best technology of their age to spread the radical idea that ordered liberty and the civil society could empower every individual to reach their full human potential. They knew that as human beings, those serving in office aren’t perfect, and that on the broader scale, to achieve the consensus necessary to launch the new republic short term political compromises would have to be made.

But they never lost sight of the ideals espoused in The Declaration of Independence. This is why they crafted our system of checks and balances between the branches of government. It is why they established Constitutional mechanisms by which the deeper defects of our founding documents could be cured and why countless American’s laid down their lives to end Slavery and establish racial equality.

Such epic statecraft is very much like programming and those entrusted with governmental authority could learn much from the lessons of good software engineering principles — since code, be it legal or computer, shares many of the same qualities and ought to be approached with a similar mindset.

Sadly, it is hard to convey the sense of exhilaration and personal mastery that one can derive from the act of programming. There is no greater sense of freedom than realizing that aside from a very few fundamental limits on what is “computable” by any machine, you have the power to make a computer do nearly anything you can dream of and thanks to cheap hardware, Open Courseware, Free Software, and the global community of professionals and hobbyists eager to help you, anyone anywhere on the planet can teach themselves how and by so doing amass the skills and knowledge needed to elevate their lot in the *real* world.

Tyrants everywhere quake at this potential of Personal Computing and Ubiquitous Communications to educate and rouse their citizenry to enlightenment. This is why it is so threatening to authoritarian power which would filter The Net and censor The Press.

Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution along with our technological innovations in Personal Computing that have made so many other advances possible are our gifts to the world which we most joyously share with you on this 4th of July.

Over the weekend I read yet another dower article on the percentage of students who self-report using Google and/or their cell phones to cheat on assignments or shortcut homework assignments by downloading prior semesters’ solutions.

Such concerns are not new, dating back at least as far as 1958 with Williams & Abrashkin’s publication of “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.” — which optimistically posited that programming a computer to do one’s homework would have at least as much pedagogical value as doing such work by hand.

Sadly, most students have their schedules so heavily overloaded in an attempt to woo collegiate and grad school admissions committees that they lack the time to pursue their own research interests. And even more sadly, many feel that not taking advantage of a search engine to avoid re-inventing the wheel and stashing a few key notes in their PDA to compensate for the vagaries of memory will grievously disadvantage them vis-a-vis their peers.

In short, lazy assignment and test designs that lend themselves to regurgitating stock answers invites an arms race in ways to avoid doing such ultimately pointless work. Students are not entirely wrong to view the memorization of facts or hand calculation of readily computable values to be utterly worthless skills in the modern age.

Herein lies the challenge for faculty. It is no longer acceptable to recycle past assignments of a “write a program to implement a binary search tree” or “write an essay about the Turning Test” variety. Instead we need to figure out ways to invoke today’s skill set of integrating the results of multiple discreet searches, reading and analyzing other people’s code, identifying bias and gauging the quality of others’ research.

Demands on today’s students are considerably higher than they were in previous generations as the sheer volume of human knowledge has exploded. Thus, the tools and skills that matter today have changed, as to must our approach to teaching.

It will take a few days to catch up after last week’s CHI 2009 Conference & Walking Tour of Area Labs. Stay tuned for comments and observations as time permits.

Last week I had the honor of attending this year’s Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2008) and Hypertext 2008, both co-located in the renaissance city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania which was once the heart of the coal and steel industries and now serves as a nexus of corporate and high tech interests that in some areas rivals Boston’s Route 128 and New York City’s Silicon Alley as a cradle of innovation.

After six days of non-stop conferencing and two for travel, I am once again safely ensconced in my personal library with time to reflect. I’ll be posting more about the conferences in the days ahead as I resume working on the restoration of our legacy web content.