- Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever – The Verge
—Gets a bit hyperbolic (you can’t understand instagram? really?) but does get at some of the tension between skills/understandings that are needed vs patterns that might be changed
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
- Tears in Rain – by Damon Krukowski – Dada Drummer Almanach
A second news item points toward an answer. This one is a hopeful, we-can-fix-the-system story from Pitchfork: over on SoundCloud, switching their accounting for streams from the prevailing “pro-rata” system to a “user-centric” method resulted in a 500% increase of income for a track by Portishead. On the same number of streams.
- Components AI — A new way to explore generative design systems
- FOIA.gov – Freedom of Information Act
- Relating Natural Language Aptitude to Individual Differences in Learning Programming Languages | Scientific Reports
The research described herein is motivated by a conceptual paradigm shift, namely, that learning to use modern programming languages resembles learning a natural language, such as French or Chinese, in adulthood. Specifically, we argue that research on the neurocognitive bases of programming aptitude has largely missed the fact that computer programming languages are designed to resemble the communication structure of the programmer (human languages), an idea that was first formalized by Chomsky over 50 years ago9. Although this idea has been revisited in recent reviews10,11, only a small number of studies have investigated the predictive utility of linguistic skill for learning programming languages3,12,13.