Alchemical Musings

Originally published on theploneblog.org

Open source software as pedagogical scaffolding, and F/OSS ecologies as a dialogical knowledge communities.

This is a fun post recognizing the role of open source software and breaking routines in learning new programming patterns and paradigms.

7 Reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say”
paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.
I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.
But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language
thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because
he’s a better programmer now!

This story articulated an idea that I have been thinking about for a while – the ways in which developers working on open source software enter into an educational relationship with the software and the community (sometimes indirectly, mediated through the code).

I have often appreciated all that Plone has taught me about the domain of content management, component architectures, extensible software design, internationalization, test driven development, responsible release management, etc etc. I know that it has taught me well since when I walk up to new pieces of complex software like Sakai or Drupal the concepts are familiar and often isomorphic. I can vouch that exposure to Plone has helped designers I know with stretch their CSS skills, improve the accessibility of their sites, and more cleanly separate presentation from logic.

I have also made the case that for an organization to work on software in isolation is bit like having a conversation with yourself. At first you might arrive at some new insights, but its really hard to learn anything new in a hermetically-sealed vacuum chamber. The software world transforms so quickly that it is a Sisyphean task for any one person or organization to track. Joining a community, even if it is through the indirect, intermediary object of code, is a great way to continue learning and stay on top of emerging trends. The notion that learning happens through dialog is an old one; the notion that working with open source software is a form a dialog with the authors is a bit less obvious.

My main critique of Derek’s post is that he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge the fact that Rails is open source, which is precisely what enabled him to learn so much from the framework. This isn’t just a matter of attribution, it has practical implications for being able to continue learning new tricks over time.  If he had realized that Rails-the-software embodied the knowledge of the Rails-the-community, he might not have been so quick to venture off and write his very own framework. I am not arguing that he should have steered clear of php, but he does not explain why he decided to roll his own framework as opposed to joining forces with Cake or another existing php framework, or at least using an existing php templating system. With a more explicit understanding of the origins of the knowledge that Rails-the-software captures, he may have appreciated the potential future gains of remaining part of some community.

While it is possible to learn something from proprietary frameworks, “learning” is fundamentally about the open exchange of knowledge and meaning, which are values intrinsic to F/OSS. While you can learn something from a .NET api, you can’t step through the entire stack of software in the debugger. Perhaps more importantly, the cultural tendencies on an open project support constructionist poking and prodding (dare I say, hacking?).

Filed by jonah at 9:21 pm under earth,epistemology,plone
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Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. — E.B. White

I don’t want to spoil the punchline of this Onion story, Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite, but let’s just say that there is nothing like the power of irony to drive a stake through the distinction between empirical observations and value judgements.

This is really the best argument I have come across to explain what’s wrong with the psychiatric medical model. It’s not that mental conditions aren’t correlated with changes in biochemistry or neural brain state. Its the value judgment that is implied in labeling the phenomena an illness. And this little Onion article does a great job of conveying that.

It’s got me wondering what other naturally occurring conditions can be explained/judged in more than one way?

Filed by jonah at 11:44 pm under epistemology,ethics,fire
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The state of health coverage in the U.S. is absolutely appalling. Consider the recent incident involving Blue Cross/Blue Sheild that my friend at Interprete has had to endure, at great expense of her time and patience – Blue Cross, Blue Shield Chronicles. The notion that a latent condition is a preexisting one is preposterous – it’s like saying you were fated to have this condition, so it was pre-existing.

The citizen journalism angle to this story is interesting too. It is quite remarkable how powerful google alerts can be in the hands of a PR rep or an investigative journalist, and how a mouse can roar in a way that demands a response (let’s hope that we can help insure a positive one).

Subversive tactics which emply tools like Google alerts and ad-words style targeted advertising potentially refute Sunstein’s argument in republic.com about disjoint sets of users in cyberspace. His argument basically discounts the ability to spam for your cause and the value in tracking all communications around a particular issue or theme and confronting opposing viewpoints where they occur.

Filed by jonah at 8:31 pm under epistemology,ethics,fire
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My visits to the Informedia lab have consistently generated futuristic ideas (and corresponding posts), and my trip this spring was no exception.

This time I was thinking alot about what kinds of schemas will be employed after their prototype moves beyond watching grandma? When this kind of a system is inevitably rigged up to a school or a prison, or fed raw streams from live surveillance cameras?

My money is on the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an instrument that is arguably becoming the de-facto catalog for the full range of human behavior and experience.

In some respects, this progression parallels the notion that nobody dies of old age anymore – they die of heart failure, cancer, or other diseases. And, as the title of this post cheerily states, we are all dying, we are all sick, and we are all crazy.

As crazy as it sounds, the DSM is poised to become the lens through which we interpret all of human behavior. Given its breadth of coverage, I challenge anyone to find me a normal, healthy individual. It’s ambition reminds me of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, except in our generation, the full range of human experience has been radically pathologized.

BTW – the folks who brought us Sexual Orientation Disorder are hard at work on V 5.0 of this catalog – and there is a call out for diagnosis suggestions.

Filed by jonah at 12:18 am under air,dangerousgifts,epistemology
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At last month’s incredible Teach Think Play Conference I was fortunate enough to borrow an OLPC laptop from a good friend. As usual, the tangible green machine was a Pop Star (though in this educator crowd, most were not familiar with the project), garnering interest and attention wherever it travels.

Sadly, the machine I had borrowed had some serious power issues, and I could not demo Sugar – the linux-based, free operating system developed specifically for the OLPC – to any of the attendees.

Since my employer CCNMTL is a participant in the OLPC developer program (thusfar we have only received a raw motherboard, not a complete laptop), I decided to attempt a field repair of the OLPC in the vain hope I might be able to swap boards and get the unit running again.

I discovered that the OLPC hardware (at least at this stage) is not quite as easy to disassemble as one would hope – you really need more of a clean room than a Third-World repair shop to work on this model. Still, a few iconic cues directing disassembly, like on a Thinkpad or Apple, would go a long way. Amazingly, there were no moving parts!

In any case, I visually documented the disassembly process, but I don’t think I am going to be able to put humpty dumpty back together again any time soon. I guess I owe my friend $100 (well, now $150), since that is the list price of the OLPC.

Filed by jonah at 12:41 pm under aesthetics,earth,epistemology,fire,olpc
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Today I attended day 1 of this year’s amazing Cultural Studies conference at Teachers College – Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teach, Think, Play.

The morning kicked off with a Keynote by Taylor Mali, a spoken word philosopher-poet who perpetrates lyrical homicide against those who judge others according to their salary instead of the difference people are making in the world. I highly recommend taking a listen to some of his work, as he is working to inspire 1000 new teachers, and is only up to ~160.
I presented a hybrid of my SXSW talk, Teaching in the New Vernacular, and Chris Blizzard’s OLPC introduction in a session called:

Portable Culture Machines: One Multimedia Studio Per Child (the proposal had been published on OLPCNews).

The talk was well attended, and the conference attendees were very excited to see/touch/feel/smell the XO device I borrowed from a friend.

Ernest Washington gave a great session on teaching w/ hip hop, but for me the real takeaway was a perspective on education as the “cultivation of emotions” – this talk really connected alot of dots I have been working on lately, especially the “chemical swaddling” conversation I have been having with Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons.
The Media About Youth Consortium, a group print and film journalists (Alissa Quart, Jennifer Dworkin, Maia Szalavitz, Joie Jager-Hyman) spoke about their work and issues they are facing on the publishing front.

Jan Jagodzinski gave a fabulous and fun (but substantive and deeply critical )reading of everything from Borat to South Park, and of designer capitalism through the eyes of a Kynic (not to be confused with a cynic).

Art Spiegelman, the creative force behind Maus gave a wonderful history of the comic strip (and more generally, the genre of narrative storytelling with text and images) and his wife, Francoise Mouly, the Art editor of the New Yorker, gave back to back talks.

Finally, Will Pearson the President of mental_floss (a magazine in the spirit of highlights which entertains while it teaches) closed out the day with a lively talk explaining their history, and why Einstein appears on every cover.
And tomorrow’s schedule is jam packed too!

Filed by jonah at 2:09 am under aesthetics,epistemology,ethics,fire,metaphysics
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An emerging breed of collaboration tools, born and incubated in the free software world, is radically improving the ways that people work together. These aren’t just toys for techies anymore. Just as the word processor became an essential tool for every writer to master, the network is the new medium that advocates and activists need to embrace in order to be effective.

Organizations who fail to recognize this opportunity will waste valuable resources wrestling with the torrents of information they are responsible for managing. How many groups continue to collaborate on press releases or grant proposals by sending around multiple versions of word documents? How many organizations share a single email account to manage constituent relations and their common contact information? How many emails must be exchanged for a small group of people to schedule a meeting?

The “writeable web” has spawned a new generation of networked, web-based authoring environments that can significantly increase an organization’s ability to realize its goals. These environments are not a panacea – at best, they will catalyze and facilitate an improvement in communication and processes. While technology alone will not guarantee a change in a group’s culture, it can play an instrumental role raising the self-awareness around an organization’s processes, and in turn, help improve them.

These alternatives have the potential to help fulfill some of the Internet’s early promise by significantly improving the efficiency and productivity of non-profits, NGO’s and activist groups alike. Such tools can dramatically improve the management of knowledge, communities, and projects, and enable coordination and collaboration across thousands of participants. They are rapidly being adopted by corporations eager to move beyond the e?mail inbox as the primary task management and collaboration platform. Organizations of all shapes and sizes need to evaluate and embrace these technologies, or risk falling behind in differential efficiency, victims of an organizational digital divide.

A simple mailing list combined with a wiki can thoroughly transform workflow and hierarchy within an organization. But this is just the start. Project management tools, collaboration platforms, and content management systems are transforming the functionality of intranets. By better balancing flows of communication and power, these collaboration tookits can boost an organization’s productivity, and increase the return on a philanthropic investment. With the proper tuning and
training , web-based collaboration tools can help an organization achieve important strategic objectives such as transparency, accountability, and sustainability.

Like the telegraph and the railroad in their time, the Internet has been heralded as the promoter of equality, freedom, and democracy. And like the technologies that preceded it, its impact will ultimately derive from the ways we choose to use it. We need to be more deliberate in our choices of communication technologies, since these tools shape the dynamics of the connections between us. Software has gone social, but it’s not just for socializing. There is important and hard work to be accomplished and we need to be using technology intelligently so that we
can communicate and act more purposefully and efficiently.
[I originally wrote this piece for an op-ed assignment in a class on Media and Rights in Development]

Filed by jonah at 1:51 am under epistemology,nptech,water
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Monday night I went to the ITP’s end-of-semester show. A friend of mine is in the program and I went to check out the scene. ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is part of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. ITP has been around since ’79, and lies somewhere concetually between the MIT Media Lab and Mary Flanagan. When I visited the MIT Media Lab this summer I began to understand how it was really operating as a pooled R & D lab for corporate interests (with plenty of military funding). I got the vibe that ITP is coming from a different place with different priorities, but I don’t really know the full back story.

Here are some of the highlights of the many many projects I saw the other night:

• The Stuff Project
• We Rock NYC
• Network Journaling
• Whales in the Sewer
• The ‘Is our machines learning?’ Machine
• Witness Human Rights Video Hub Pilot
• Turing Machine
• Action at a Distance
• Aura
• Solar Jelly
• Urban Sonar

Emerging themes continue to suggest that we are indeed embarking on a era that can be described as “The End of Forgetting“, and that epistemology itself is transforming beneath our feet. That is, the way we know what we know, the kinds of things that we know, and our relationship to knowledge is being transformed by shifts in memory, computational possibilities, simulation, and visualization. Going to a show like this really reinforces these bold predictions.

Filed by jonah at 5:45 pm under aesthetics,air,earth,epistemology
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In keeping with the Alchemist’s recent “free” disambuguation theme, here is my latest installment on the OLPC project:

In this essay/story I leave wise ‘ol Plato behind, and tried for a straight up, journalistic take on the project. Except there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism, so in this piece is explicitly infused with subjectivity and ideology. Conversations with Ian Bicking helped convince me that believing in this project is a ultimately a matter of faith, in which case our optimism or cynicism go a long way towards shaping reality. And our perceptions are often shaped by media, so lets start advocating for this project instead of kicking it in the shins.This is one reason I am starting to think that olpcnews should seriously ease up on the project, stop taking cheap swipes and jibes, and start offering more constructive criticism, or even better, apply for some grants so they can fix the project as they see fit.

Happy Holidays!

Filed by jonah at 1:39 am under earth,epistemology,ethics,fire
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While we continue to arm the robots at an alarming rate, the real transition of power and control is far more subtle and insidious. Humanity is ceding power to the machines, but not at gunpoint. Rather, we are relinquishing our will to the machines through the kinds of bureaucratic machinery Max Weber and Terry Gilliam would have a hard time imagining.

I am talking about the reification of bureaucracy in the form of software – the rules that we all live by are being carved into stone, or more accurately, etched in silicon. Code == Law?

Some industries have already made this transition. From the sympathetic bartenders unable to extend happy hour a moment past 7pm, to the tele-tellers who inform the customer that “the system” will not allow them to exercise any judgment or compassion, some systems are already being governed by the machines. But this is just the start.

In the corporate world, IBM is banking on the tight relationship between software and processes. I recently attended a talk presented by their VP of Services, Stu Feldman, and he relayed an anecdote about certain contracts in the financial sector which are no longer governed by legal documents. The final word on maturation and vesting is expressed in a crufty old C program… Considering some of these deals are worth billions, the impact is suddenly more significant than an overpriced cocktail or an unwaied late fee.

The starkest example of this trend to date, is the recent announcement by the chinese government that software issue judgments in criminal cases. While they justify this system on the grounds that it will help eliminate the effects of corruption and bribery, reality’s reassemblance to pulp science fiction is growing by the day.

Filed by jonah at 1:52 am under epistemology,water
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