worldatways

many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg's invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther's use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word.

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other.

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau.

Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.

Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.

In craigslist's gradual shift from 'interesting if minor' to 'essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Second, they will stay focused on producing the best digital news products for their audience, products that take full advantage of the Internet's unique properties — its ability to combine immediacy and depth, its ability to offer highly personalized experiences, its ability to offer instant access to useful information from obscure public records to mundane event listings, and its ability to form networks so that users may form communities that mirror and extend the ones that exist in the physical world. They will learn how to engage their users to create and contribute content to enrich the experience of reading online, and not overwhelm their readers with a cacophony of undifferentiated noise.

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

How about next year, when your first batch of new recuits come marching in the door, you hand them a brand new iPhone, and encourage them to use it to connect, learn, share, and experiment? I know what you are thinking, where is the budget for that going to come from? I would bet the extra productivity you will get from the program will more than fund the phones over the year. Ask Abilene Christian if the investment was worth it, they have gotten more mileage as the 'iPhone College' than they ever bargained for.

I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer

Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."

Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?

The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.

The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what concepts could bear reinforcement. For example, if a statistics professor notices in the data he receives from activity in the open-learning program that a great number of students struggled with the assessments the program gave while teaching conditional probability, the professor could use the class periods to hold a discussion with his students about that concept until he is confident they get it -- a preferable alternative, Thille says, to rolling through concepts didactically and hoping they stick.

Lectures and the classroom spaces built to accommodate them, she explains, represent academe’s first attempt to do higher education at scale after new waves of students started flooding into America’s universities following World War II. With technology having evolved to its current state, such a method is primitive, she says. “You have this poor faculty member,” Thille says, “who’s sitting there as an expert in their area trying to figure out how to transfer their expertise to this large number of students, who are all variable. And it’s a horrible task. The affordances of the technology and also the learning sciences… for the first time enable us to really think about how to scale in a much more effective way, so we truly can serve many many many more students."