Technoculture(s)

Sunday Quotation "Digital fluency should mean..."

 

"Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting"

Mitchel Resnick

Mitchel Resnick develops in a recent article the rationale for designing the Scratch programming environment. As he stresses right from the beginning, this is a project aimed at developing digital fluency" at a deeper level than current approaches to teaching technology to kids. It tries to enrich the experience and abilities of children well beyond their typical behavior as "Digital natives".

The Scratch team goal was to create a programming environment that were:

- more tinkerable: i.e., extensible, adaptable, an environment where it is to try and try and try new ways of getting things done

- more meaningful, easy to relate to its users' goals, exploiting in the same environment programming, media and digital narratives so that users could express themselves and communicate through an environment that was first and foremost a programming environment. This is one of the keys of Scratch as it bridges the usually separated worlds of programming and media narratives (this is why game programming environments are also very powerful but usually lack the pedagogicla  and methodological orientation embodied by Scratch).

- more social than other programming environments: i.e., easy to share  your programs with other people and also to connect your projects with other projects. The worldwide Scratch community is really huge.

In their own words:

Since the public launch in May 2007, the Scratch Web site (http://scratch.mit.edu) has become a vibrant online community, with people sharing, discussing, and remixing one another's projects. Scratch has been called "the YouTube of interactive media." Each day, Scratchers from around the world upload more than 1,500 new projects to the site, with source code freely available for sharing and remixing. The site's collection of projects is wildly diverse, including video games, interactive newsletters, science simulations, virtual tours, birthday cards, animated dance contests, and interactive tutorials, all programmed in Scratch.

More interestingly:

It has become commonplace to refer to young people as "digital natives" due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the Web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It's as if they can "read" but not "write."

Which is something that Derrida and Stiegler almost said exactly word by word in discussing the current traits of digital culture and the "contributor culture" and how important it is for the majority of citizens to be able to "write" this new world.

Of course, here "writing" gets a stronger sense than blogging, creating wikis or else. It is in fact, "designing" and "building". That's the reason we chose Scratch at Citilab as the first environment into the digital world for kids. And that's why Jordi Deglado and his team  are currently very busy extending  it to connect it with a whole variety of robots, sensors and other devices. Because "building" involves also acting in the physical world. And connecting to a wider community of kids, parents and teachers.

Sunday Quotation: "The World is Digital"

... and in a much more radical way than you may think.

One of the biggest insights of computer science is that the world is digital

Dick Lipton

Dick Lipton is a theoretical computer scientist at Georgia Tech. He writes a blog ("Gödel's Last Letter") where he has no problems in discussing the latest theorems in his field. To put it mildly, it is not a blog for the fainthearted. It does a great work, however, in communicating the deep knowledge that computer science can offer to other disciplines.

Recently, Lipton, while at a workshop on Computational Thinking, had an insight and then blogged about it. Basically, his "revelation" was that the whole universe can be understood in digital binary terms. Take your time and read this post. Just to give you a hint of his main argument, here you have a short excerpt:

Look around you. You may see, like I do, beautiful trees outside in the backyard. You may hear wonderful sounds: birds chirping; music playing classical or rock or hip hop or another genre. You may be reading a book or watching a show on a HD-TV and seeing images of people that are almost lifelike.

Yet no matter how beautiful the images are, no matter how complex the sounds are, they all can be reduced to sequences of bits. The world truly is digital. In a sense, 0 and 1 represent computer science’s basic atomic particles. Information consists of arrangements of 0’s and 1’s. Nothing else is needed. Computer science differs from modern physics, while Physics uses hundreds of “basic particles” to build the world—we only need two.

I believe that the discovery that all things can be viewed as digital is as revolutionary as the notion that the world is made of atomic particles. But, the discovery that the WID took half a century longer to discover than even the simplest atomic particles.

The post is very long but it is worth reading. It started a flow of comments, most of them by people well-informed in very abstruse matters. But I just don't want to get into the theoretical details that popped up there. Instead of this, I'd prefer to delve into why "it took half a century longer to discover" (that the world is digital or more generally what is computing and why it is important). Or why it would take even longer to bring that into the awareness of our society. Or not.

I think all this has to do with the way that computer science is still understood as "just" a technology ("computers") or its associated knowledge creation processes (design, procedural epistemology) or the social practices around it (open source, hacking).

Unfortunately the common way to refer to this discipline as "computer science" in anglosaxon countries has shifted the attention towards the tool and away from the knowledge that made the tool possible and also from the object it helps studying. In a way, it is as if Astronomy were identified as the science of building telescopes. Peter Denning, one of the big names in Computer Science, has recently remarked, in an article entitled "Computer Science is a Natural Science Now" (sorry couldn't find a free access site), that "computer science is the discipline that studies the processes of information and computation either in natural or artificial systems". Which is why Lipton is happily making his statement about all the world being digital, i.e., based on information and computation.

Of course if you only identify the goal of computer science with one of its realizations (computers) than you may think of this as the overstatement of some overenthusiastic computer buff. But Lipton is not such one.

The idea that information may be the stuff that the universe is made of has being around for some time. Just have a look at Jürgen Schmidhuber's page or his proposals on the "Algorithmic Theory of Everything". Popular culture from Matrix to Neuromancer have flirted with the idea but probably in not such a radical, fundamental way.

I will not get into the implications or relationships that all this has for the way that our universe is understood, modeled and studied by other disciplines, most notably, Physics. My knowledge in this latter area is not as wide or deep as I'd like it to be. Instead, what I'd like to stress here is the realization that at the very basic level of reality (whatever this is) computation and information have a strong role and that neither this nor the consequences of this have barely entered our culture.  

It is very telling that Alan Turing has still to make an imprint on popular imagination and that, compared with, say, Albert Einstein, he is almost unknown to the general public. However, his work and the work of other pioneers of computer science is on a par in terms of what it means for our understanding of the world.

And this also has very practical consequences. For example, some fifteen years ago, I was appalled to see how the lack of computational categories of thinking was a barrier for many biologists to make progress in some problems of biology, for example in genetics. Simply they couldn't know that framing their problems in computational terms was the path to their solution. Compare this, for example, with pharmacologist and biochemist Craig Venter. Have a look at his interview in Seed Magazine and you'll see a kind of discourse that shows not only familiarity with computer science techniques but also with its deep concepts. He happily goes from the design aspect of computing reflected in his approach to synthetic biology to the science aspect of the underlying computing and informational processes.

In general, in our cultural "educated" environment this is knowledge that is not part of a common frame of reference. It is even difficult to find among the well-educated, people that would give some value to this computational approach. They would quickly fall through the trap of identifying computer science with computers because they know little or nothing about computing.

On top of that, let's not forget to mention the fact that many of them are happy either to ignore this or to just show an olympian disdain for all matters technological. This is related to and age-old contempt for practical work and for giving value to the knowledge derived from it. That is, the design knowledge aspect of computer science).

There is a lot of nice divulgation work ahead in order to benefit from the contribution of computer science as a science, as a practice and as a culture-changing discipline. A lot.

I have some projects in stock about this to start in the short-term future by the way ;-)