On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Gary Schiltz <g...@naturesvisualarts.com>wrote:
> A big problem with teaching internet literacy is that it would amount to > teaching moving target: change is so hard to teach, since it keeps changing > :-) > Good point, but I think it would also provide inducements for the industry itself to be saner. For example, I'd get rid of at least 80% of the accounts out there that simply are not necessary. Why do I need a login to buy stuff for example? Yeah, I'd have to retype my address .. which the browsers seem willing to do for me. They also remember the logins .. but we could make that illegal, or at least much less easy to opt-in for. The credit card is LESS exposed during an atomic transaction than in laying around in a server. So just like internet tax moving us to saner tax reform, internet licensing would move us toward saner hygiene. Another simple move would be to simply better security. A 2-factor standard would help, as well as OpenID or o-auth protocols. I don't mind getting a silly pin from Google when I need to login, it works just fine. Mozilla and others are slowly working on a login-less world. So I think the education remains pretty basic: The basic computer: libraries, accounts (root/usr), file system, along with tools for rootkit/malware. The basic network stack, simplified. DNS. Internet protocols for web (http/https), mail (IMAP/POP) and so on. The core is pretty solid and teachable. > On a tangential note, I'm trying to come out of retirement (sabbatical :-) > after about five years, and whoa, it's incredible how much has changed, > even though I've tried to stay more or less current the whole time. Forget > SourceForge, it's all on GitHub now! Does anyone even consider the > possibility that a user might have JavaScript disabled in their browser? > You wouldn't get very far these days. What's this cloud thing again? Makes > me want to give up and go back to watching X-Files reruns :-) > I hear you! Steve G and I have been discussing this relative to SimTable and AgentScript. Its a race to just stay in place. But even here there is a core that is pretty solid. Git has replaced source control and is pretty understandable, more so than the others when you get that it really is a file system of sorts, with all the usual create, rm/mv, file/folder, etc components. Github does throw in a wrinkle or two. This is one of the reasons for wedtech. We need to know what we don't know. And then we need help distributing the load. We've gotten so there are local experts on git, webgl, html5/css3 and so on. More importantly, there is one huge simplification if you fit it: javascript. It is now the client (browser & apps & phones/tvs), the server (nodejs), and the network (async IO with JSON). I recently experience this when I wanted to make AgentScript.org more easily managed. I graduated from a simple coffeescript build command and a few bash scripts, to a coffeescript based "make" called, naturally, cake. It was completely familiar because it was javascript/coffeescript all the way down. So in one area, programming, its actually getting less complex. -- Owen
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