What is the future of art? What media will it use? Computers, obviously. Information technology is very good at imitating old media: drawing programs, music programs, word processors designed for playwrights or authors. But none of these tap into the intrinsic strengths of the computer, able to do something no other medium can: simulate. Bret Victor, [...]

The Khan Academy dashboard is meant to provide students and teachers with information that can help them target where a student is struggling, and improve. Unfortunately, the data given isn’t what’s useful to teachers, just what’s easy for computers to measure. These metrics include time spent watching and rewinding videos, time spent on different topics (broken [...]

Tufts is an activist’s college. You can hardly walk across campus or read  The Daily without encountering arguments about the Middle East, sexual assault, racial or class privilege, the LGBT movement, or any other social movement. Don’t get me wrong, these are worthwhile causes and injustices worth correcting. But nevertheless it becomes grating. Everyone at Tufts wants to [...]

The Jewish holiday of Passover requires adherents to not consume or possess any leaven during its eight days. Leaven symbolically represents excess, to be puffed up and arrogant. As I became increasingly aware of the time I was wasting on social media, I hit upon the mechanism that sites like these use to identify you: cookies. [...]

“With a few simple lines of computer code,” boasts Moriarty in BBC Sherlock, “I can crack any bank, open any door”. (Paraphrased from memory, shh.) Without any spoilers, I can tell you that Sherlock’s nemesis is portrayed as controlling every detail, forseeing every possibility, and manipulating a web of individuals through blackmail, bribery, snipers, and sowing [...]

I recently reread Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age . It’s a work of science fiction that depicts a future infused with nanotechnology, set in Shanghai and the surrounding areas. It offers some great material for a discussion on the role of technology in education and the limits of computers. Its themes are also relevant to edtech, which is [...]

A generation ago, computers only understood text. You would program the computer in English text. You would ask your questions on punchcards encoding text. Your answer would be provided as monospaced, unadorned text. Since the early 1980s we have refined the graphical user interface, or GUI, to allow humans to communicate with computers on more familiar terms. Although [...]

In a previous post,  This is You: Agency in Education , I argued that we need to create educational software that, through extremely limited tools, forced its users to think in new and powerful ways. I used the term agency to refer to having an avatar (or agent) in a larger system with which one can identify. I’m sure [...]

I came across this 1996 paper that, as a thought experiment, took the principles of Macintosh user interface design and inverts them, just to see what would happen. For example, by accepting the Mac’s point-and-click interface, “it’s as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced [...]

This is the opening of the ambient puzzle game Osmos, by Hemisphere Games. “This is you,” is all it says, as if you’ve always been a glowing blue orb. Most games start by introducing the player to their avatar, but it’s usually a human character with a backstory. Puzzle games are an exception: they rarely give [...]

Pop. Sizzle. Spark. The unmistakable smell of burning electrical parts. “Shoot shoot damnit!” I say, doing the best I can to keep my voice down and not swear while the DJ is on the mic. I unplug the ethernet jack but it’s too late. The cable tester, a handheld device that tells you what conductors in [...]

I spent the last weekend celebrating the wedding of my cousin Albert. (All names have been changed.) It was great to see my family, and I’m quite happy for bride and groom, but this is not his story. This is the story of his brothers, Nathan and Donald. Nathan ran into trouble as a teenager. I’ve never [...]

Recently I was struck by just how true an xkcd comic is:

But there is more on the internet than crazy straw aficionados. (Understatement of the year.) There are groups for any interest you can think of, and subinterests within them that you can’t think of. You can buy anything. You can sell [...]

Let me tell you about my day today. Tonight is the first day of the Jewish new year, and my housemates are having a festival dinner. They didn’t ask me to make anything, but I decided to bake a desert my family traditionally makes for the holiday. I’m quite fond of the dish, a chewy honey and [...]

“To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do.” So begins [...]

Today the Khan Academy launched new computer science content. The centerpiece is an interactive editing environment with Processing and JavaScript, with real-time updating and number scrubbing in the style of Bret Victor. Anyone can make their own drawings or animations, and there’s the obligatory social component. The system is remarkably light-weight and does a good job [...]

Jim Waldo, Chief Technology Officer at Harvard University, gave a talk at a private corporate event I attended earlier this week. My company builds some of the boxes that help make the internet work. Although there’s a lot going on from a technical perspective, it’s not very glamorous to the general public. Jim, I suspect, was [...]

What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly, 2010) is a sweeping history of technology as a unified force which he calls “the technium”. Kelly starts slowly, drawing ever larger circles of human history, biological evolution, and the formation of planet earth from starstuff. His scope, from the Big Bang to the Singularity, is unmatchable. But the purpose of this [...]

Prompted by a video of math teachers watching Khan Academy , another math teacher and a media theorist have put up a small prize for similar critiques of the Khan’s educational videos. The first such video appeared hours later, by physics teacher Joseph Kremer. Watching it, I realized Khan’s approach is more flawed than can be fixed by an [...]

I wrote this piece in high school and have posted it here at the request of one of my Twitter followers. It was originally published in the school’s humor magazine. The school, Stanton College Preparatory , is an academic magnet and ranked highly in national surveys. We’re Stanton students. IB and Honors alike, we all take ridiculously hard classless, pull [...]