- I have no doubt! Says the physician.
- Mine is the
oldest profession. When creating Eve from the rib of Adam, God carried out
a surgery.
- And no, says the physicist, separating the day from the
night, the water from the land, the rhythm of the seasons means giving
some order in the initial disorder and that is the typical work of the
physicist.
- You're right, points out the computer analyst, creating
order from disorder is essential but... who do you think invented
disorder? -
There is a lot of truth in this little story that I heard
from students in the corridors of the Faculty of Information Sciences. But
disorder is one of the most important values in computer science and it is
what led me to love this discipline to the point of making it my
profession. To put order in bits, those 0s and 1s of the computer, means
seeing things in a different order and, mostly at the beginning, it leads
to restraining the new order, unrecognizable because apparently in
disorder, in more familiar old models but not doubt limiting the power of
technology. When electronic mail came around it was a simple technological
reengineering of the written letter, but right after that came disorder.
Chat, SMS, MMS, the instant messaging of social networks. I could
write as much about word processing with its incredible potential,
initially limited in imitating the typewritter, or the GPS developed to
solve the problem of plane and ship positioning and objects in movement,
and today basically used as an orientation aid for the general public to
find
commercial centres, tourist attractions, hotels and
services.
Even school, the temple of tradition, has not remained
insensitive to the charm of new technologies. The examples are many:
ebooks instead of printed texts; Internet, mobiles and smart phones on
campus. But in an issue of Vedere Oltre dedicated
essentially to young
people, I could not avoid speaking about the well-known and remarkable LIM
(Interactive Multimedia Blackboard). It was inevitable. Throwing in the
bits in the main tool of teaching was a temptation that could not be
overlooked.
But to what other entropies would this lead? Many, but...
Gosh! All of them in disorder. Multimedia,
multimodal, distribution
beyond the classroom walls. All doubts translated in fears and in the
resulting initial need to re-establish order in things other than
technology.
It is the inevitable defense mechanism that at the
beginning caught much more famous technologies: cinema, obligated to begin
as a theater distribution, or to present a train like a "steam coach". The
chalk has been replaced by the electronic felt-tip pen or the teacher's
finger on the wide touchscreen instead of the slate. An icon instead of
the erasor and an iPhone app to transfer
At the end of class, pressing on a key can transfer the written explanation in a document immediately passed on the school's social network portal.
He can read over his own notes now in a digital format taken from the blackboard as documents that can be forwarded to colleagues inside or outside his educational institution and seeing his own productions gathered under the aegis of the Creative Commons group. Today, there is only the blackboard, but the rest will come from the imagination and the real needs of students and teachers for whom the disorder in bits is giving an incredible strength. Not only are the self-help communities for disabled people seriously thinking about innovations. You only need to go on a search engine with keywords like "smart wall" or "distributed blackboards" to realize that LIM's destiny is to yield the passage to Wii, to the distributed desktops and the increased reality of solutions in marvelous disorder and incredibly more functional and less costly. Unrecognizable? Maybe, but will school be more recognizable maybe with its old and friendly traditional blackboard on the wall on which an anonymous hand will have written with the definitely white chalk: "BTW 2nite pub meet x Rick's b-day. Dtls on bak.
