Software

Amish Paradise

Last week's column on education clearly struck a vein. Whenever reader comments go over 200 I know I've hit upon something that probably deserves a book, that is assuming people actually read books. Well of course they do, as the Harry Potter series proves over and over. But Harry Potter isn't just a book, it is an immersive virtual reality that kids relate to as an even better video game, if a low tech one. And that leads us to this week's follow-on to last week's teaser: so what do we DO about our kids, our schools, and a seemingly inexorable generation change that still isn't clearly good OR bad, just different?

I grew up in the time warp that was Wayne County, Ohio, in the 1950s. Back then at least the majority of the population of Wayne County was Amish, which is to say they didn't go to public school (or school at all after age 14), didn't drive cars or use electricity except to keep the dairy milk cool, didn't vote, bought as little as possible, sold as much as possible, and barely paid taxes. Wayne County was NOT the middle of nowhere, however, since Rubbermaid was headquartered there as was the Wooster Brush Company (world's largest maker of paint brushes), and Smucker's jams and jellies were just across the Holmes County line where there, too, the Amish were the silent majority.

Very little has changed since I was a kid. As my friend Henry from down the road in Mansfield, Ohio, points out, the Amish have been on this same "new" educational path forever. Their ability to produce nearly 100 percent productive citizens (and very nice furniture) for about fifty bucks per student per year is especially galling to those government schools that spend $16K and turn out a lot of slackers.

Most people would see the Amish as an anomaly, but I don't. I see the Amish as a particularly successful minority that picks and chooses how it will participate in modern life. We see a lot of this, especially internationally. Yes, the Amish have no army, but then neither do, in practical terms, many countries including some of our old enemies. The Amish do not suffer from avoiding public schools OR McDonalds. They live the life they have chosen to create.

Let's consider for a moment what many readers will find to be a politically incorrect position: because of cheap computers and the Internet, the ability to solve problems ad hoc has become more efficient than teaching kids about problems and issues that will never face them. As a result, the United States has let itself become less competitive by putting so much money into a product (a kid) making both its cost and its ability globally uncompetitive. So, instead of putting more effort into making globally competitive products, we put more effort into blaming those who are smarter at using technology that was mostly invented here.

If the idea is to give everyone a nice comfortable pension, if the same money invested each year in a typical kid's education was instead invested in an IRA, it would give that kid a very comfortable living upon reaching age 65.

Well this is a terrible position to take, don't you think? It treats our children like capital goods and denies them any ability to excel, dooming them to mediocrity.

Really?

My Mom (Mrs. Cringely to you) once said, "I may not have been the best mother, but at least I got all my kids through school."

"No you didn't," I replied (this is a true story, by the way). "We would have made it through school with or without you." And we would have.

Not wanting to put too much of a Libertarian spin on it, because I am certainly not a Libertarian, this is a fact that is missed by so many people. There will always be achievers, whether they go to public schools, private schools, home schools, magnet schools, charter schools, or no schools at all. While it is fine for society to create opportunities for advancement, what's more important is removing BARRIERS to advancement. And for the most part that's not what we are about.

What we tend to be about as a society is building power structures and most of those power structures, including schools and governments, are decidedly reactive. This is not all bad. After all, the poster child for educational and government proactivity in the 20th century may have been the Taliban in Afghanistan.

There will always be governments willing to take our money and then deciding to spend some of it in ways we wouldn't approve. That's probably an inevitable social cost of avoiding anarchy. But the idea that government has a lot of power to MAKE our kids become one way or another is only true to a very limited extent.

Our society will continue to create great artists, writers, scientists and engineers because people will be internally driven to greatness in all those fields. How many Picassos do you need in a society? How many Frank Lloyd Wrights? How many Einsteins? How many Bechtolscheims, Knuths, and Brins?

When high tech executives claim that we don't have enough visas for importing programmers from Asia, they are looking for talent by the ton, not by the neuron, yet neurons are what really matter in these things. So they are wrong, too.

Yes, it is important to go to MIT and, along with losing your pants in the Charles River, make social and professional connections that will help you later in life. But how do we measure the strength or efficacy of those connections? If it is in terms of monetary success, as we tend to measure things, then we'd be better off going to some big state school in the Midwest, because more top executives -- more top earners -- come from those schools than from MIT. If we measure success in terms of patents or awards or endowed professorships, there are schools that rate higher than MIT, too.

The fact is that going to MIT can be a life-changing experience and worth any price, but then so can be going to Champaign-Urbana or San Jose State. It's what you do with it.

In my book Accidental Empires I wrote about young Bob Metcalfe who, as an MIT undergraduate, was intimidated by a fraternity brother who could complete the entire New York Times crossword puzzle during breakfast without having to look up a word or linger over his coffee. He was master of his domain. Bob, who went on to invent Ethernet, found 3Com, and is now a rabid VC, was no slouch, either, but he was not the master of any domain, which actually came to be his strength. Because he wasn't the best and the brightest (while still being very bright), Bob had to learn how to work with people and ultimately had to create his own domain that he could master. Sometimes that's the way it is.

The key to last week's column and this one is generational change: it is happening and can't be avoided. The next generations will use technology even more than we do and they'll use it differently. This difference will form a feedback loop that will in turn alter the very structure of our society and its institutions. It may be no better to learn to write on a computer or by firelight on the back of a shovel as Abraham Lincoln was said to have done, but I'll stake what little reputation I still have on the fact that not many people in the future will be taking the shovel route.

As our wealth becomes less physical and more virtual, so will its disposition. Twenty years from now, when my more successful peers are getting old and starting to die, will they be putting their names on university libraries? Will there even BE university libraries then, I mean new ones? Google or Microsoft or Yahoo will have put all the books on disk and all the disks will be networked together and accessible from my house or yours. Then the library becomes, at best, a study hall. And since it is quieter to study at my house and the food is cheaper, too, maybe the library becomes just a place to hang out. This transition will not happen overnight, but it will happen, and then who will give millions to build new libraries? Nobody.

The fact is that we can't really predict with true accuracy what changes will happen in our society over the next 20-30 years, but we can make a good guess that technology will be involved with many of them. Yet there will always be a place for good old common sense.

A doctor in my town back in Ohio had built for himself a grand house, a real mansion, with a huge entrance hall and a sweeping staircase that floated down from the second floor to the first like some set from Gone With the Wind. The house was all built to the highest level of quality by the best craftsmen, only nobody in town (or even out of town) could build the sweeping banister for that grand staircase. It had to be laminated in a single piece of mahogany that somehow matched the curve of the staircase, a curve that had been drawn more by art than science. Nobody could build it.

So they called in the local Amish furniture maker. He came with his son and they spent a couple hours measuring with a ruler and a yardstick then went away and two weeks later returned with the completed banister on the back of their horse-drawn wagon. It slipped into place as if built on some CAD/CAM system, perfect in every way. How did they do it?

They took their measurements back to the farm and spent two days building in the barn a rough-hewn replica of the entire staircase, then laminated the rail in place. Of course it fit and without an algorithm in sight.

links for 2008-03-25

• Official Gmail Blog: Newest Gmail features now available for Google Apps users
  (tags: gmail google googleapps domain)
• Internet Sharing over WiFi - WMWifiRouter v0.97 (Mar 13, 2008) - xda-developers
  (tags: wifi mobile pocketpc router phone hacks networking tools windowsmobile internet cell hack)

Daily sending quota exceeded

My wife has been having a problem sending email.  We currently use Google Apps for our domain, and when she sends email, she gets the following message:

5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded

This message is supposed appear if an account has sent more than 500 messages, or more than 100 when using a mail client.  The problem is that she has only sent 2 messages within last 24 hours.

 I have filed a trouble ticket, and have posted a message on thir Google Group.  In the mean time, I have set up one of our Godaddy email accounts, to allow her to send outgoing mail.

War of the Worlds

There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven't yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many people think of as their very way of life. It is a war that will ultimately and inevitably change us all, no going back. The early battles are being fought in our schools. And I already know who the winners will be.

This is a war over how we as a culture and a society respond to Moore's Law.

The real power of Moore's Law lies in what the lady at the bank called "the miracle of compound interest," which has allowed personal computers to increase in performance a millionfold over the past 30 years. There's a similar, if slower, effect that governs the rate at which individuals are empowered by the technology they use. Called Cringely's Nth Law of Computing (because I have forgotten for the moment what law I am up to, whether it is five or six), it says that waves of technological innovation take approximately 30 years - one human generation - to be completely absorbed by our culture. That's 30 years to become an overnight sensation, 30 years to finally settle into the form most useful to society, 30 years to change the game.

The key word here is "empowerment." Technologies allow us to overcome limitations of time, distance, and physical capability, but they only empower us when they can be gracefully used by large, productive segments of our society. The telephone was empowering when we all finally got it. Now it is the Internet and digital communications.

Let's be clear about what we're measuring here. It has very little to do with specific technologies and everything to do with our adaptation to technology as a culture. What Cringely's Nth Law of Computing predicts is our rate of adaptation to technological life. This happens not at the rate technologies are developed but at the rate we are capable of broadly absorbing them. We've seen this sort of thing before, of course. I used to work in user interface design and noticed long ago that it took about a decade for every new interface standard to be absorbed by technical culture. This dates back a lot longer than most of us might guess, all the way back to microfilm readers in the 1960s. Older engineers couldn't stand reading microfilm while younger engineers found it effortless. Same for microfiche, which followed microfilm. The same effect could be found in typing: older people - mainly men - wouldn't adapt to it, but those who used a typewriter in high school or college quickly learned they could not live without it. Ditto for computers, first with batch processing, then time-sharing terminals, then command-line PCs, then graphical user interfaces, and now emerging mobile platforms. Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I'm just too damned old.

Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.

I started writing educational software in 1978. The role of instructional technology has changed since then from a gimmick to a novelty to an effort to an essential component of any curriculum. Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools. Keeping kids from instant messaging, then text messaging or using their phones in class is a big issue as is how to minimize plagiarism from the Internet. These defensive measures are based on the idea that unbound use of these communication and information technologies is bad, that it keeps students from learning what they must, and hurts their ability to later succeed as adults.

But does it?

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn't the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what's wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained - a view that doesn't work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we're getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

This is an unstable system. Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn't even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. There's only one thing missing to keep the whole system from falling apart - ISO certification.

I've written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

Well reputation still holds in education, though its grip is weakening. I know kids from good families who left high school early with a GED because they were bored or wanted to enter college early. Maybe college is next.

MIT threw videos of all its lecture courses - ALL its lecture courses - up on the web for anyone to watch for free. This was precisely comparable to SGI (remember them?) licensing OpenGL to Microsoft. What is it, then, that makes an MIT education worth $34,986? Is it the seminars that aren't on the web? Faculty guidance? Research experience? Getting drunk and falling in the Charles River without your pants? Right now it is all those things plus a dimensionless concept of educational quality, which might well go out the window if some venture capitalist with too much money decides to fund an ISO certification process not for schools but for students.

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn't I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?

Because that's not the way we do it, that's why.

Well times are changing.

Steve Jobs rejects the idea of Apple making or distributing e-books because he says people don't read books. He's right, book readers are older. Young readers graze. They search. Look how they watch TV. Steve didn't say people are stupid or we're all going to Hell in a handbasket. He just said we don't read books.

Technology is beginning to assail the underlying concepts of our educational system - a system that's huge and rich and so far fairly immune to economic influence. But the support structure for those hallowed and not so hallowed halls has always been parents willing to pay tuition and alumni willing to give money, both of which are likely to change over a generation for reasons I've just spent 1469 words explaining. We are nearing the time when paying dues and embracing proxies for quality may give way having the ability to know what kids really know, to verify what they can really do, not as 365th in their class at Stanford but as Channing Cringely, who just graduated from nowhere with the proven ability to design time machines.

OpenDNS and Verizon Wireless MMS

As soon as I got my Samsung SCH-i760, I configured the phone to use the DNS servers from OpenDNS.  Everything seemed to be working fine, and web browsing seemed faster.  A while later, I tried sending an MMS message, and it just didn't work, but an error messages was shown.

I finally, got around to tracking this down today.  It looks like Verizon uses a MMS server that has a host name that only resolves from inside the Verizon Wireless network.  So OpenDNS is not able to resolve this hostname.

Once I switched back to the default servers I was able to send picture messages again.