Personal: Going iPhone and the Amazing Development Going On Today

[novak]

I just watched the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address by Steve Jobs, from the ad I got for the new (and mercifully cheaper) iPhone coming out next month. Watching this detailed conversation and demonstration between application developers just mercilessly reinforced for me just how comfortably medieval the art of teaching is compared

Comments

[friede]

The decline in base price is offset by a $10 uptick in the monthly rates for the AT&T service -- and now you have to sign a 2-year contract to get out the door with a new iPhone, no ifs ands or buts.

Besides, you with a cell of any kind is a sign of the apocalypse, non?

[novak]

Seeing the way these folks were talking about the iPhone as the third major computing platform (after Windows and Mac OS X) and putting together apps like this amazing thing I saw for medical imaging in the hand-held device was mind-blowing.

Oh, I've always been partial to computers and such, but not at the neglect of everything else. I'm slightly freaked by the way students don't get to know classmates now, but immediately pull out their phones at the end of class. That's okay, I suppose, for maintaining old friendships, but I certainly met a lot of people outside my dorm floor during undergrad through my courses....

[friede]

Oh, I've always been partial to computers and such, but not at the neglect of everything else.

Very true -- I mean, I'm of the generation that is very tethered to tech (and me more than most in my generation), but I like to think even I know when to close the screen and pay attention. I joke about "surviving" without email for most of my trip, but it's quite true -- I almost forgot about digital doodah entirely during Reunion (aside from the rampant discussion of facebook-imparted info and the usual "composing thoughts to talk about with absent friends" part, which happens regardless of tech)

I'm slightly freaked by the way students don't get to know classmates now, but immediately pull out their phones at the end of class.

Yeah, I worry about it too. I think I'm the last class that graduated before cell phones took over -- at least at BMC.

That's okay, I suppose, for maintaining old friendships, but I certainly met a lot of people outside my dorm floor during undergrad through my courses....I agree -- and the "maintaining old

[novak]

I also just have a substantial beef with the way tech is generally taught in the schools, as far as I've seen. I was horrified to find that at Saint Joe's when I was teaching there that "computer" classes were simply classes in how to use applications: Word, Excel, whathaveyou. To my mind, that's "out of class" knowledge to pick up, or simply in-class "instructions" to be done as briefly as possible, especially given the way programs evolve. I only slowly came to realize that my high school, pre-internet computer classes were the exception: learning how computers actually work, binary, machine language, putting code together in assembler and then moving up to BASIC just so that we would get the logic of it all, and even building a computer from raw components. That's knowledge I can re-apply across specifics, particularly in that that was where I learned logic, as part of programming