Article from the New York Times, about a school that's bucking the trend.

link at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

GRADING THE DIGITAL SCHOOL

A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The Waldorf School in Los Altos, Calif., eschews technology. Here, Bryn Perry reads on a desktop. More Photos »

By MATT RICHTEL

Published: October 22, 2011

LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home...

Slide:ology and Here Comes Everybody

I've finished Nancy Duarte's "Slide:ology" now and as I said in the last post consider it an excellent book on not just using PowerPoint but using it thoughtfully and with style; a good follow up to Burmark's "They Snooze You Lose".


Started "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky, which if it doesn't relate directly to the problems and questions we've gone over so far in 6340 does provide good  background about the mushrooming growth of today's web technologies, how they change social relationships, and what kinds of problems they can and can't solve. Shirky views the changes in online capabilities and the way web tools are used with the eye of an economic and a social theorist. 


Many of the author's points are too complex to describe in detail here, but a few important ones are:


"Mass amateurization" as he terms it of web input. Most contributors aren't journalists or from similar occupations which follow an "edit, then publish" model. Tools are now available to the public at low to no cost to publish anything anytime, leading to a "publish then edit" model. This influx of content at all levels of quality has led to:


The ongoing collapse of the professions, notably journalism but affecting everyone whose job is posited on the ink on paper system of publishing. (I have very mixed feelings about this as I am sentimental about the paper world of newspapers, books, what have you).


The fact that the number of relationships between people in a group increase much faster than the number of people in a group makes it increasingly hard to organize the members - the most successful online communities are the ones that self-organized spontaneously, e.g. discussion groups on Flickr or contributors to Wikipedia.


Very good book but denser and slower going. I don't hesitate to recommend though.


Shirky, Clay; Here comes everybody; Penguin Press, New York, 2008

More on Duarte's Slide:ology

Almost thru Nancy Duarte's book now. Take a look at her online examples of some work by ND and her firm, which raise PowerPoint to something of an art form. As with all art forms the key is restraint:


http://www.duarte.com/books/slideology/www


I found her use of the push transition to suggest panning across a larger terrain than the screen will hold at one time to be a very good use of PPT's built in functions. Conspicuously absent are animated text and logos. 


The section on how to use color theory to select the signature colors of a presentation is very well done, with color wheels showing complementary, analogous, and so on combinations of colors. Another dimension is the saturation of the color, which has an effect on its visibility especially against a colored background. The fact that red-green color blindness is fairly common also has to be taken into account in planning color contrasts. ND gives the RGB color values of all the examples illustrated.


There is also a good brief intro to typography, covering the essential points (serif vs. sans-serif, how to choose point sizes, use two fonts at most - restraint again).


Grids to make the elements fall in predictable locations, dividing the screen into proportions like fourths or fifths, or even divisions based on the Fibonacci series (!), are a system ND recommends. Slides created according to a regular pattern look more pro and avoid having elements jump around from one to the next.


Very educational book, highly recommended.