Stone Aged Computing

In some talk somewhere I heard John Bransford use a "stone age" metaphor in some talk. I can't quite remember the context, but the idea (that I remember) was that it's often helpful to come up with the simplest possible way to do something. Here I argue that what we need are not more sophisticated computers and applications, but more ubiquitous access to computers and applications.

Yesterday in 669 we were discussing Becker and Cuban. Perhaps most striking about both of these works is the definition of "frequent" computer use in schools. I can't remember exactly now, but it's like once or twice a week. This suggests two questions to me: (1) Is there any educational intervention that in an hour a week will yield any significant difference of anything? (2) How would businesses function if people could use computers for only an hour a week? (And how would I function if I used a computer only one hour a day?)

The Hi-Ce recognize this problem. Their solution is PalmOS hand-helds. From what I can tell (most recently from "Ubiquitous Handheld Technology in an Urban, Inquiry Science Classroom: Understanding Professional Development Support" by Richard J. Vath et al) this takes a fair amount of training. And the cheap hand-helds break after a year or two. But the big problem is that they aren't quite computers. Sure, I was once convinced that Palms were computers when I first saw one running Space Invaders and bought one soon thereafter, but I don't consider anything a computer that can't run a web browser. OK, my Treo has a web browser, but it's not the same. The screen's too small; the access is too slow, and too expensive. This palm thing seemed like a pretty good idea ago when I first heard Soloway talk about it 6 or 8 years ago, but I'm no longer convinced.

K12LTSP is another way to get computers into schools. People who use computers productively aren't using tools like Accelerated Reader or Jasper or whatever, they're using email, web, and office apps.

Hand-held people argue that laptops are too difficult to maintain, I agree and say that thin clients are easier. It's pretty easy to maintain one computer or a couple running Windows, but maintaining even 10 is a challenge. You have to use complicated tools like DeepFreeze and Ghost. After a small learning curve, Linux is much easier to maintain. I've maintained 15 machines at a school for 1.5 years with monthly trips. The affordances are many: consistent files and bookmarks. Perhaps more importantly kids can customize their backgrounds, themes and so on. These things may seem silly and like a waste of time, but chances are that if you're reading this, you do these things and they are a part of how it is you use computers, why should we expect kids to work differently?

But maybe they will. Maybe the desktop is dead.

In Paul Graham argues that web-based apps are much easier to develop and distribute than are traditional computer-based apps. I was arguing this while he was making millions, developing an online assessment system, Webliographer, and an online proposal development and review system, which pre-dated the first one that AERA used and, I would argue was more usable.

Counter to the web-is-better argument is that web-based apps suck compared to their desktop equivalents. Thunderbird beats the web mail systems provided by most universities and web-based mail from Yahoo. But that was before, now Gmail provides affordances unmatched by these desktop-based systems, like being able to search 2 year's worth of mail in seconds from anywhere in the world. If you're at a university, you've got only tens of MB before you have to start deleting mail. After that you have to sequester it to your desktop, and that's if you're a power user. Gmail's user interface does much of what a desktop-based version can, without requiring deep and dangerous hooks into one particular OS.

Web 2.0 apps are really stone-aged apps. Writely is a simple word processor. Blogs are simple HTML editors. Web-based mail systems from Yahoo! and Hotmail are rudimentary compared to their desktop equivalents. But the fact that they're available anywhere and aren't sequestered to your computer, makes them much more valuable.