By far the biggest news is that “university professors” and “college and university film and media studies students” may rip DVDs for “educational uses”. This has a direct impact on my household, where we have found we had to do this to support media work by my partner, a college professor. Even better, this kind of use is also allowed for “documentary filmmaking” and “noncommercial videos”! There are limits, but they seem reasonable. Mainly this circumvention of DRM is only allowed “solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment”.

Other interesting classes of circumvention allowed by this rulling…

• You may circumvent ebook protections in order to enable software or screen readers to read the ebook aloud.
• You may jailbreak and/or unlock your own cell phone.
• You may bypass an obsolete dongle that prevents the use of software you still need.
• You may test, investigate, and correct security flaws and vulnerabilities in computer games you own.

Thank you, Librarian of Congress!

Many months back, soon after first starting to use the iPad, Alex and I wrote a simple little program for the pad that got rejected Apple’s App Store. After some back and forth with the App Store I wrote a note to Steve Jobs because I wanted to go on record about the danger of Apple’s tight fisted approach to development and plead for a more open approach. I was particularly worried about the impact on kids.

I am worried that we are making it impossible for kids
to fall in love with the creative side of computing. I believe that computers are instruments, like a cello or a pen, they are tools with which we create, not just consume. I have tried to raise my kids to look beyond the surface of these wonderful devices, to reach in and learn to create with them. My eldest son has come through Lego, to AppleScript, to Cocoa. My younger son has learned to experiment with Scratch. Both love their Macs, iPods, and have had a blast with the iPad.

I lamented the banning of Scratch from the App Store, and the expense kids faced if they wanted to write iOS apps. I never did get a response, but I’ve reproduced the letter itself below the fold in case you are interested.

Meanwhile, last week I started using an Google’s Nexus One phone and started paying attention to Android development options. Low and behold, today I read about Google’s App Inventor for Android project. App Inventor is a visual programming environment to allow kids to write Android apps.

I think Google understands something Apple has forgotten. It is vital that we nurture our kids’ curiosity about the devices they use. The best way to do that is to let them have some agency, to give them tools to create with those devices. Even Nathaniel, the non-coder in our family, has told me he wants to write games for his iPhone. Maybe I’ll have to get him an Android device some day if Apple does not come to its senses.

My full letter to Steve is below the fold, if you care to read it.
Before I get to the letter, I’d like to give a shout-out to Hal Abelson and MIT for their involvement in this work. It is great to see MIT also continues to value the urgency of growing minds.

Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:48:51 +0200
Subject: EveryPixel and inspiration
From: Eric Celeste
To: Steve Jobs

Steve, I was a campus consultant for NeXT in Ohio, and you also stayed with my family in the Governor’s Residence once in Columbus. I’ve evangelized Apple products since the Apple ][ and Mike Boitch, bless him, even sent me one of the first Macs. I am a huge fan of everything Apple has accomplished, and especially of the depth of commitment and grace you bring to the products at Apple, NeXT, Pixar, and beyond. Thank you.

That said, I am very concerned about the App Store and the future of the iPad in particular. I am worried that we are making it impossible for kids to fall in love with the creative side of computing. I believe that computers are instruments, like a cello or a pen, they are tools with which we create, not just consume. I have tried to raise my kids to look beyond the surface of these wonderful devices, to reach in and learn to create with them. My eldest son has come through Lego, to AppleScript, to Cocoa. My younger son has learned to experiment with Scratch. Both love their Macs, iPods, and have had a blast with the iPad.

Below you will find a rejection message that my older son and I just got from the App Store this week. A few months back we set up a small company so that we could develop some small apps for the iPhone and iPad. One small app for the local Democratic party has already made its way to the App Store. Last week we tried our hand at iPad programming and created a very simple app to help us take a close look at the iPad screen, a simple pixel checker. This is a genre of app that is common on the Mac and iPhone, and we wanted to see every inch of the iPad screen in its full red, green, and blue glory. We also noticed that there were no pixel checkers out for the iPad yet, so we were excited to get this app out to other users who might be looking for such a tool.

The rejection our EveryPixel app received mystifies us and was quite discouraging to my son. We could find nothing in the SDK license that we had violated, and the explanation of the review that somehow a red, green, and blue screen could be “potentially inaccurate” and “confuse users” seems silly. There seems to be no recourse or appeal.

I worry for the future of these wonderful devices if the hurdles to creativity are so high. Not only do Alex and I have to pay $100/year for the ability to move code onto devices, but when even trivial programs get rejected for reasons that are not spelled out in the contracts we agreed to, the joy of developing for the platform starts to seep away. I will grant you that the iPhone and iPad currently are attracting new developers, and NeXTSTEP/Cocoa is a jewel in Apple’s crown and a key asset in that attraction, but I fear that young minds are being shut out, the hurdles are quite high, the arbitrary judgements quite discouraging.

As I said, my younger son uses Scratch, a Smalltalk-based development environment from MIT. Today I learned that the Scratch player which had been available on the App Store is now banned. What avenues will be left open for young minds? How will you create the next generation of engineers and artists that populate the halls of Apple and are responsible for the current richness of apps on the App Store?

I realize that I am but one small voice and you have many forces to hold in balance to nurture the growth of the iPad and all of Apple. I appreciate the difficulty of the task and the magnitude of the accomplishments to date. This is just a poke from outside the bubble. Apple’s control of the App Store is critical, but the current degree of restriction and defensiveness feels dangerous out here. It is not a sign of the Apple I love. I hope that it can change.

Best wishes,

…Eric

Getting up in front of a roomful of (essentially) strangers is something that many librarians confront every day. We are teachers, among other things. Today I came across a very helpful post by Carrie Donovan on In the Library with the Lead Pipe. She talks about being authentic in the classroom:

In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) discusses identity as the evolution of all the forces that come together to form a person, including: background, culture, experience, and anything else that shapes the self. Recognizing that we bring all of these aspects of ourselves to everything we do, including our instructional activities, is key to finding your teaching identity. Librarians have pursued neutrality for a long time in their provision of organized and accessible information and knowledge, but this philosophy does not serve us well in the classroom.

We have to find (and share) ourselves in order to convey the richness of the experiences we want our students (or audience) to grasp. Not easy, but very rewarding when we pull it off!

There are a number of Logo interpreters written in Java, but my favorite to date is a Logo interpreter written in JavaScript. This should run in just about any modern browser. Joshua Bell, the author of this Logo, also links to Curly Logo written in JavaScript. That one may be more appropriate for kids since it takes the trouble to appear more fun to use. Plenty of Logo without any install. Now I just wish it were being used in N’s school.

Enjoy!

Here’s what it was like:

Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism.

John Belcher, a space physicist who arrived at M.I.T. 38 years ago and was instrumental in introducing the new teaching method nine years ago, was considered an outstanding lecturer. He won M.I.T.’s top teaching award and rave reviews from students. And yet, as each semester progressed, attendance in his introductory physics courses fell to 50 percent, as it did, he said, for nearly all of his colleagues.

And now:

The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

Very telling are some of the comments on Slashdot:

Personally I don’t think this is the best approach, but it certainly isn’t forgiving of a student’s absence from class.

As a side note, when I was a freshman, many of my classmates did not find the TEAL lectures to be terribly effective in teaching the material. Frequently they would go back into the video archive after class and watch recordings of the “traditional” lectures from years past to actually learn what was being taught. They just went to the TEAL lectures because they didn’t want to loose their participation credit.

MIT OpenCourseWare to the rescue! Put the old lectures online, take advantage of proximate atoms off line.

You can buy copies or play with this new online puzzle version.

Any language is constantly evolving, so it’s not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what’s happening to English may be its own thing: It’s mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it’s on a path toward a global tongue — what’s coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own.

Update: Infosthetics may also be worth keeping an eye on.

From the first screen it draws the reader into unaccustomed involvement with the “text”. Take some time for a of the gallery of articles at Vector.

A few to check out: Public Secrets shares the voices of incarcerated women and those around them, WiFi.Bedouin suggests you insert wireless signals into unexpected places, and The Stolen Time Archive immerses you in an archive of text worker artifacts.