Innovation

My marketing director's twitteration induced me to click on a link to a ZDNet article which asserted that Linux desktops, have missed the boat; Good though they are, blah. The article was fine, but what is this obsession with the GUI?

I have clicked a lot of mice since that rainy day in 1985 when I wandered past a department store and saw a funny little one-piece computer being demonstrated by a girl (gasp had computers come to this) clicking away on what was, it turned out, a knitting pattern program (double gasp). Of course I had to have a go and clicked away on words and menus and icons.

The success of the Open Source software development model, with its culture of 'gift giving' has undoubtedly taken the world by storm. It has inspired both the anthropologist and business guru to pontificate endlessly on 'non-hierarchical loose networks collaborating towards common goals'.

Open Source ideas have been cloned and cloned again in different contexts. It has even inspired a generation of criminals and insurgent terror groups, leading to the coining of terms like 'open source cyber crime' and 'open source warfare' which are now appearing in US judicial reviews and learned papers. Apparently individual hackers tweak each other code (for free) and fighters help improve each other weapons and strategies. All very criminal.

The Credit Crunch and subsequent recession, is nothing to celebrate particularly if you are someone who faces unemployment as a result. I say this because I want to present aspects of the economic landscape positively without descending into "a bit of hardship will do us all good" rhetoric.

The area that I think will benefit from a new realistic attitude to consumption is computing, in particular computing in an educational context.

The current edu-ICT model is unsustainable. It simply costs too much and wastes too much. Don't take my word for this, BECTA the Government's educational technology quango has been saying so publicly for years.

or how the future is being 'Windows Proofed'

The one thing that you really need when teaching something to a group of children, students, adults, whoever, is to ensure that they are 'singing from the same hymn sheet'. Put less metaphorically, they all need to be accessing the same text book or work sheet during the lesson. If not chaos is sure to follow. Any teacher who has blithely asked a group to 'turn to page 22' only to find there are two versions of the text book in the class will know what I mean. If in an ICT context for example you are demonstrating the use of formulae in a spreadsheet or mail merge in a word processor/database with the aim of transferring these skills to the class, then this means everyone needs to be able to continue using the same spreadsheet/word processor.

A recent post has introduced me to a term with which I was previously unfamiliar. 'Click-bait' was the epithet used by a US reader to describe the title of my blog and it both intrigued and disturbed me. It means self-evidently that the title is more attractive in a sensationalist sense than the article merits. The post below is hardly sensational, it's all about how Linux can speed up your computer hence the sub-title 'Linux feels the Need for Speed'.