This insight gelled for me as I read a post by William Rankin at Open Culture about The iPad and Information’s Third Age. Rankin describes the first two ages of information as pre-Gutenberg (one on one, books cost a lifetime) and post-Gutenberg (widespread access accompanied by symbolic complexity). Now the network has begun to unite a sliced up world, it has begun to lower the symbolic barriers. A third information age is emerging.

I would look at the same three periods, but through a slightly different lens, that of the author. Pre-Gutenberg authors had one on one relationships with their learners. There were a few exceptions, because history and scripture were passed along from one to many, but the costs of such transmission were tremendous and so the opportunity to become a voice in that timeless conversation was severely limited.

We’ve all lived in the post-Gutenberg world. For us the opportunities of authorship have been much more available. A person could own a printing press, or work with a publisher, and reasonably expect to reach many learners. Libraries arose to stash away this wisdom of the ages, universities arose to organize the production of these works and their utilization, publishers arose to facilitate access to the means of distribution. The limits of the physical format that allowed mass distribution also shackled authors to a linear form, to words in a row on one page after another.

Today we are in the midst of a birth of something new, though. Something that goes beyond the one to many post-Gutenberg model. This is a transformation of media. It began with the rebirth of an oral tradition in the last century, a means of mass distribution of something beyond words on a page. Radio and television brought voice and image back to the conversation. But the promise of this new media has really become evident with the emergence of the computer arts and digital media. This has both made the production and distribution of audio and video content accessible to a much wider set of authors and transplanted the written word from sequential pages to a web of related resources that one moves through with clicks and taps. We hardly know what this new media is yet, but it emerges around us nonetheless.

This context brings me back to the iPad, a device we have been anticipating for over forty years. This is a device that makes this new media intimate and mobile enough to become part of our daily lives. The iPad is not about allowing us to read the works of the post-Gutenberg world in electronic form (an “e-book reader”) though it will do that very well. Rather the iPad is about the invention of the third information age. Now that we have text, audio, video, and computing arts all available to the author, what will we make of it? We already have hints that part of this transformation will be from a one to many conversation that is linear through time to a many to many conversation that informs the author as much as any of their learners. In fact, the author becomes the facilitator of a learning experience that everyone shares.

Mary often cites Parker Palmer when she discusses teaching and learning. She shows two diagrams, derived from The Courage to Teach. They both depict the relationship of teacher to learner to their subject. One would look familiar to anyone who went to school and attended a lecture:

This “instrumental knowing” model would also be familiar to authors in the post-Gutenberg age. The author researches a topic, writes a book, and lots of readers, amateurs, lap it up and learn from it. We hope. The second model is a bit more dynamic.

In fact, some wonder where the teacher (or author) has gone in this model. Mary likes to say that the teacher has become a facilitator of each learner’s relationship to the subject. Everyone learns from one another, the teacher helps ensure the process works. This “relational knowing” model also serves to illustrate what I think may be happening to books as they are reborn in our new media landscape. The author becomes a facilitator of a community conversing around at topic. The author inspires this conversation by getting it rolling, but the tools of computing arts and digital media also allow the readers to talk back, to teach, to author. Palmer puts it this way:

It is out commitment to the conversation itself, our willingness to put forward our observations and interpretations for testing by the community and to return the favor to others. To be in the truth, we must know how to observe and reflect and speak and listen, with passion and with discipline, in the circle gathered around a given subject.

The iPad, I realize today, is at the heart of this transformation. It is a device with the power to bring relational knowing to what we have known as “books.” Apple talks about the iBookstore and is working with publishers to line up iBooks to go on those virtual shelves. Those iBooks will be cool, no doubt, but they will simply be new versions of post-Gutenberg texts. The real revolution is in the App Store. As authors and publishers realize that on the iPad there is no reason at all to stick to the post-Gutenberg rules. A “text” can be anything, it can come alive in new ways, and it can incorporate the voice of its readers as well as that of the author.

The iPad will lead to the invention of the e-book. We have not seen it yet (though there have been hints), we hardly know what we are looking for, but I am sure it is coming. I wonder how many publishers will catch on, and how many authors are ready for the challenge.

The course was taught by Richard Lytle and was, I think, largely based on the plan set out by Josef Albers in his book Interaction of Color. I wish more art departments had such welcoming courses, so many jump right into drawing and never look back.

I wanted to customize the scaffold so that I could replace the space indents with tabs (I know, silly me) and add JSON support to the scaffold. I found a post about how to accomplish this in Rails 3, but my Mac and the book both talk Rails 2. So I dug in a little bit. Here’s what I came up with for doing this in Rails 2.2.2 on a Mac.

Copy the original Ruby scaffold folder to a new folder somewhere reasonable with the name “my_scaffold”. (For the rest of these instructions you can replace “my” with anything reasonable.)

Use a symbolic link to hook your new folder back to Ruby.

Change the name of the generator script to reflect your folder name.

Edit the generator script to modify the name of the object it creates. Change “ScaffoldGenerator” in the first line to “MyScaffoldGenerator” (adjust that name as necessary).

Now you have your own scaffold. You can edit any of the templates in /Users/myhome/Ruby/my_scaffold/templates and use the command “ruby script/generate my_scaffold MyObject my_field:string” to get rolling.

Note, the stylesheet.css name still conflicts with the same file in the original scaffold. If you want to resolve that conflict you can edit another line in the generator script. The line “m.template(’style.css’, ‘public/stylesheets/scaffold.css’)” would be made to refer to your new stylesheet name and the layout template should be changed accordingly. Notice that you don’t have to change the name of the actual “style.css” file.

Fair warning, I am on day two of Ruby and Rails. I know almost nothing, so use the above hint with care. Feel free to comment if you know more and want to offer a better suggestion!

Please suspend our sustaining membership of MPR.

We are not willing to support an organization that is hindering as important a civic project as the Central Corridor rail line. We have been uncomfortable with your position for years because the Central Corridor plans were well known long before MPR renovated its space. As far as we are concerned, it is wholly MPR’s responsibility that it built studios as close to a known future rail line as it did. You should not be suing the state, but rather asking funders like us to up our contributions a bit to help you make necessary remediations.

Now that you have decided to sue the Central Corridor project we can no longer in good conscience support MPR. Maybe once this suit is over we will consider rejoining, we will see what the consequences of your action are. If this in any way leads to the demise or diminishment of the Central Corridor project, though, then you have lost us as member for good.

I enjoyed it immensely. The broken plate had been sitting on my dresser for months, and every time I looked at it, I had a twinge of sadness, remembering the whole plate it had once been. But once I started breaking it up into half-inch pieces, it turned into something else entirely. Raw bits ready to be reassembled into something new. Possibilities.

I enjoyed arranging the pieces onto the wood picture frame, like pieces in a puzzle. It required a quiet concentration that was soothing, and I soon lost track of time.

If you live in the Twin Cities, you should really stop by some time. It is a healing experience!

SubCalc is an app to help convenors of precinct caucuses and conventions in Minnesota. The Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party uses a wonderful, but bit arcane, “walking subcaucus” process that is simple enough to do, but rather difficult to tabulate.

This app calculates the number of delegates each subcaucus gets when you enter the total number of delegates your precinct or convention is allowed and how many people are in each subcaucus. The rules it follows appeared on page 4 of the DFL 2010-2011 Official Call, including the proper treatment of remainders. It makes the math involved in a walking subcaucus disappear.

The app could be used to facilitate a “walking subcaucus” or “proportional representation” system for any group.

If you don’t have an iPhone, try the “web app” version of this subcaucus calculator for at http://www.sd64dfl.org/sub/. But if you do have an iPhone or iPod Touch (or iPad!) please give SubCalc a spin!

Sorry – this is a toy. With no optical drive, a bad aspect ratio (not truly 4:3 or 16:9), rushed design elements (like the silly home button and proprietary dock connector still in the iphone legacy orientation – they s/b along the side, so it can be used for video while docked) and most of all NO REAL OS of it’s own (so it inherits shortcomings of the iphone, like no flash support in safari). All in all, I think they whiffed this one about as badly as the Air. It has to be form AND function, not form over function, guys.

Well, Stephen, we’ll see if you are right.

I agree that the lack of multitasking is disappointing. But as an iPhone developer I have some idea where they are coming from. This is an amazing amount of processing to get out of something so small and with so little memory. This is not a Mac, not even a netbook. This thing can stay in standby mode for a month, it can go 10 hours on one charge of a tiny (by comparison to laptops) battery. It is 1.5 lbs. All these constraints are real factors and while the OS (more about that later) is fully capable of multitasking (and in fact is doing it all the time, just not letting third party developers in on the fun), Apple is trying to ensure a smooth user experience. If the price of graceful performance is multitasking, I am actually willing to give up multitasking.

Yes, that means no Pandora while I write (though note that iTunes will play while I write, Apple lets itself multitask). But developers are given all sorts of tools for suspending the state of their app so that moving between apps on an iPhone (and iPad) will feel pretty much like multitasking for most other purposes.

Silly home button and proprietary dock? I guess you are not an iPhone fan either. If you don’t like the iPhone and iPod Touch, then the iPad probably makes little sense. Stay away! But if you are already a adopter of the iPod ecosystem, then the iPad fits right in. Proprietary connector? Sure, but licensed to thousands of hardware manufacturers whose stuff will “just work” with the iPad. Need a car charger? A speaker system? An extra connector for your computer? The ones you have will work (well, the charger if it put out enough of a charge, similar to the transition from iPod to iPhone). This is a huge ecosystem unmatched by any other vendor. And any time the ecosystem starts to weaken Apple always has the option to license the connector to other device manufactures too. Proprietary, yes, but so were “RCA” audio jacks once upon a time.

And finally, no real OS? The iPhone has a real OS. Actually, OS development is arguably Apple’s strongest suit here. Alex and I write code for Macs and iPhones. The Mac OS and iPhone OS share the same foundation, and more importantly the same development tools and frameworks. The magic of what Apple has done, though, is to keep the developer side so familiar and seamless while allowing the user-facing side of the OS to change radically. The iPhone OS does not feel like the Mac OS, even though it really is the Mac OS. The iPad OS has clearly different flourishes that will distinguish it from the Mac and the iPhone. Apple is in a position to create an OS tuned to the device at hand without overwhelming the developer community. Developers will be able to write iPad apps today, a little new stuff to learn, but no need to throw away what you already know about Mac and iPhone programming. This is no toy, and developers who write iPhone and iPad apps will soon find themselves writing Mac apps as well (see Tweetie and many others). In fact, this is Apple’s trojan horse for Mac development. They are getting developers to buy into their world view, into Objective C, AppKit, CoreAnimation, and all the other underpinnings of the Mac OS.

Maybe by “no real OS” you mean that there is not a “desktop” with “files” to manipulate. That is true (though the filesystem is fully in place, it is a developer-level tool in the iPhone/iPad OS, not a user-level tool like in the Mac OS). But I would argue that for 80% of real people out there, this is a benefit of the iPad, not a drawback. You can’t lose your files. They get backed up automatically. The apps always know where to find them. They are always in the right format. Those of us who grew up with the suffering that computers typically entail don’t even notice the decisions we make every day about where to store files, what to name them, what formats to keep them in, when to back them up. We just do it. But our elders (hi Dagmar!) and kids (hi Nathaniel!) would rather not be bothered. And even most people of our own generation, truth be told. Apple is well on the way to abstracting this whole confusing layer of using a computer right out of existence. I celebrate that.

In the end, the things you diss about the iPad I think are exactly the things that will make it fly. It is simple (home button, no real OS) and will just work with everything (proprietary connector, no multitasking). Creativity is born of constraints. Apple understood the box it was working in, pushed itself to the limit to press on the boundaries of that box, but the creative genius of their work the past few years has been in not trying to be everything. They are being something, something focussed, something fun, and probably something very very successful.

Acolytes not-withstanding, this was rushed. They could AT LEAST have moved the dock connector and home button to a long edge, so it’s “native” orientation would be landscape. This was under-designed and an obvious ploy to try and lock people into their channels (App Store, Book Store, etc.)

Indications are that this product was first conceived over eight years ago and that Jobs killed the project at Apple at least four times since then. In fact, is may be that the iPhone itself is the derivative of this product, rather than the other way around. From an internal perspective, that would make a lot of sense. The developer SDK for the iPhone was always an insanely thorough affair, hardly what one would expect to support simply a phone. This product was anything but rushed. You may not like it any more than you may have liked an iMac without a floppy drive or a Mac without a two-button mouse, but this is exactly the product Apple (read Jobs) wanted to bring to market. Don’t imagine they were force to hurry it, not even for the print market.

I am also very disappointed by the lack of a camera. I would have liked at least a forward-facing “web cam” for Skyping. That’s the biggest lack in my book.

Note, though, that the iPad does have a microphone.

No treatise to the contrary, forgiving some things (like multitasking) and ignoring others (like no microphone, camera, or FLASH SUPPORT PLEASE), can “unring” the bell of truth.

I think Flash is a religious issue with Apple. You won’t see it. Flash has many drawbacks and Apple is doing what it can to kill it. Note the recent YouTube beta with HTML5, Apple is a big believer in HTML5. Flash and Silverlight are doomed on Apple mobile devices, we’ll see if they fade altogether or if Apple has to relent. Don’t hold your breath! (I know, I’ve been holding mine, hence no iPhone in my pocket.)