Two Slashes

If you're a student in Britain, chances are you'll be sending messages like these at some point. (Oh, who am I kidding? They'll all read "@somefriend Wanna hang out?" instead.)

Math, literature, gym, and history.  These are all staples of the education system no matter where you are.  America, Spain, Russia – they cover cover all of these topics at some point.

If you’re of school age and happen to be living in Britain, it sounds like you might be adding a more thorough understanding of computing and the Internet to your curriculum.

TechCrunch is reporting that skills and tools useful in an online/social networking context, a la tweeting, blogging, and podcasting, are to be added to the elementary school curriculum to bring kids up to speed with the Internet their older counterparts are already experts at abusing.

I remember my computing classes back in elementary and middle school (at least, I remember some of them).  There really wasn’t any point to the class, as most of the work assigned was either grunt work or designed to benefit the teacher more than the student.  (Yeah, it happens.)  There’s only so many times you can print greeting cards or type up the same lame one-page story up before you’re an “expert” at using the computers, and as most of these classes, at least the ones in elementary school, were held using near-antique systems (I mean this in terms relative to when I was 10, mind you), they weren’t even relevant when I was attending them.

But while my youth may have been wasted away word-processing tales of dinosaurs and making birthday cards for my teachers, it seems as though somebody’s finally figured out what all that computing time could be used for.  However, I’m not entirely sure that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the things to be showing first graders around.  (I’m not entirely sure they’re for older people, either, but that’s a discussion for a different day.)

Let’s think about this for a second.  Companies still add legal disclaimers to their television advertisements telling kids to ask their parents before they go online.  This isn’t just to make sure mommy and daddy sue the company for telling their kid to rack up dial-up charges (heaven forbid they’re still on dial-up), it’s to remove any liability that they might have as far as disturbing and obnoxious people who might appear on the site.  It’s not a possibility that they’ll come into contact with some unsavory character; it’s guaranteed to happen at some point, and with the state of things, almost daily, too.

I also didn’t bother with cell phones until I left for college.  Now, considering little Timmy and Tori over there are probably already text messaging each other hourly, I can see how showing them things like Twitter might seem to be a natural extension of what they’re already doing.  However, factor in that little kids tend to be incapable of discretion, and all it takes is one misplaced “I’m at the park!” for things to get ugly.  (No, I’m not talking about that.  I’m saying that it’ll be extremely easy for mom and pop to pick up on where their offspring has been recently.  Alright, maybe your idea is more valid.  Much more valid.)

Most of the Twitter arguments work with the general blogging case, too.  Unless these schools are intending to be putting up their own copies of Laconi.ca and WPMU for the students to mess around with explore while making sure the general public doesn’t get to cause too much trouble as a result of what’s posted, I have some major issues about letting these kids loose on the web.  (TechCrunch also mentioned podcasting, but I’m not entirely sure that such an endeavor is feasible enough to be worrying about it.)

Yeah...this seems more like an elementary schooler to me.

There is a positive effect to the (micro)blogging idea, and that would be that students would be encouraged to write and proofread their work (well, unless they default to “wrtng lke thyr n a phn”).  Microblogging would also be a great way to train students in how to “trim the fat” from their writing because of the small character limit.  However, I don’t see these as pros that outweigh all of the cons.

In short, I find the cause to be noble, but a school with limited supervision is not the time or place to be letting kids explore their social life, even if it’s a Web 2.0 social life.  So let them deal with their reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, because that’s all they should be working on at their age anyway.

Once again, events have left me trying to crank out a post in less than a half hour.  Whether this post makes it before midnight remains to be seen.  And yes, this little blurb counts towards my four hundred words.

Rather than come up with a regular post, I decided that I might try something different here.  Instead of ranting about one or two specific topics, I’m going to try to micro-rant about some of the things I managed to microblog about throughout the day.  If I think this works out, perhaps I’ll do it once in a while when I think my tweets are amusing and/or confusing enough to warrant more than Twitter’s 140 character limit.  (Today’s tweet selection isn’t particularly interesting, but I promise to be more selective in the future.)

Here’s a hint: A link to a password reset page is useless if it’s in the realm you authenticate to WITH that password. Common sense. (link)

Attending a college where almost every educator is expected to maintain at least some portion of their course online is one thing.  When the professor doesn’t realize that parts of his website require student authentication, then tries to be helpful by providing a password reset link inside the authenticated area of the website, you realize that someone forgot their common sense at home today.

In all honesty, while the password required can be reset elsewhere (it’s one of a few campus-wide passwords, after all), it goes to show that even the most helpful people can be made to look like the stupidest given the right circumstances.

Did I mention how much I hate public speaking? (link)

As some of you might now, this semester is my first as the chair of the campus Linux Users Group.  One of the requirements of this fun position is that I take part in any ACM events.

Today, ACM held an open house in an attempt to get at least a few new members for the organization and for the underlying special interest groups (like LUG).  Each of the SIG chairs had to give a short talk on their group discussing what it focused on and why people would be interested in joining.

Public speaking is not my thing, and this time was no exception.  Not only did I rush through my (“borrowed”, but that’s another story) slides as quickly as I possibly could, I also forgot to mention a few things.  Like my name, for instance.

My math discussion has degenerated into math jokes, terrible pickup lines, and a class discussion about gaming. Hmm. (link)

You know you’re in for a good semester when a discussion section for your math class turns from vectors to video games.  I think my partners and I spent more time discussing the merits of Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War than we did discussing anything particularly relevant to the course content.  Of course, this quickly turned into a few math jokes with the discussion TA (somewhat linked to the games) as well as a few lame pickup lines nobody should ever use.

*shrug*  Hopefully this post makes some sense.  Must…click…Publish!

Technological advancement is great, isn’t it?  After all, it paves the way for an easier, more-enjoyable life, and it often does so in comfort.  It’s not every day, though, that said advancements are labeled terrorist tools by the U.S. Army.

According to a draft of one of the Army’s latest reports, Twitter, GPS, and voice-changing software are among the newest and hippest tools in a terrorist’s arsenal.  Yes, that’s right, things you probably wouldn’t find your neighborhood technophile without.  (Alright, maybe the voice changer is a stretch…)  Given this, the typical “terrorist profile” must include compulsive tweeters who have a tendency to get lost and then use one of those toy voice-changing bullhorns to ask directions of random strangers.

Considering the ridicule the U.S. Armed Forces is probably facing for a lack of their common sense, I’ve decided to list off a few of my own believed “terrorist tools.”  These are things that probably should have made that list as well for the sake of completeness.

• Just as Twitter allows one to follow to-the-minute updates of what their friends are saying and doing, why couldn’t RSS FEEDS function in a similar manner?  After all, they’re more or less the same thing (without the social aspect).  Subscribed to a feed put forth by their superior, your terrorist can act on whatever orders he’s been sent in seconds.
• For things that aren’t text or would be better consumed client-side, BITTORRENT would be a plausible option.  WIth the BitTorrent protocol now featuring encryption, the ability to run through Tor (and other anonymous proxies), the infinite file size limit, and the lower distribution costs resulting from its use, it’s already a great method for distributing intelligence.  Combine that with the RSS feeds I mentioned above, and BitTorrent becomes the ultimate way to keep your undercover operatives fully informed.
• To prevent any information from being leaked to the world at large, a private virtual network would be a great way to make sure information stays “in the family.”  Therefore, tools like HAMACHI are terrorist tools as well.  In addition to allowing remote support or remote LAN matches in your favorite video game, Hamachi provides a great end-to-end encrypted virtual network perfect for those building blueprints.
• There’s nothing like immersive training to make sure the trainee knows what things are going to be like in the field.  The NINTENDO WII provides a reasonable platform for combat training, given that it’s a cheap motion-sensitive platform with plenty of combat-oriented accessories available from your local GameStop.  Who said the Wii was just for kids?

Considering I use Twitter, RSS feeds, BitTorrent, Hamachi, I’ve messed with GPS systems, and I’ve played the Nintendo Wii, I should probably be looking behind my back everywhere I go at this point, as should at least three-quarters of the company I keep, lest we be mistaken for some terrorist cell and wake up in a detention center for questioning.

@bomb Countdown 5 minutes.

A few days ago, I was sifting through my referrer logs in a bored attempt to see which sites were bringing in readers, and which were nothing more than blogspam. In the course of this work, I naturally happened upon a cache of hits from sites like Plurk and Twitter, places where I’ve previously plugged my site. One of the referrers stood out to me, inherently different from the others; this one had not been posted by me, but in fact by someone I had never met (and probably never will), and had started a short but legitimate discussion about my writing here at Two Slashes.

The source: A post on Plurk linking to my thoughts on the service.

When I saw the thread, I practically fell out of my seat laughing, partly in celebration and partly at myself. No, there’s nothing particularly comedic about being linked to; it’s cool, but not humorous in any respect I can think of. No, my humor came mostly from realizing the primary shortcomings in my post.

I’ve always berided MySpace as being the collective “emo” scourge of the Internet, and apparently I’m not alone as the very first response notes my failure to mention MySpace in the usual (or the blogosphere equivalent of “politically-correct”) manner. Perhaps part of the reason I failed in this respect is because I’ve all but let MySpace fall from my thoughts anymore; it takes direct mention to even let me know that the site exists anymore as I’ve tuned it out almost completely from my thoughts. (I have my account still, but I can’t even tell you the last time I logged into it, and they don’t bother me with notifications because I registered with an e-mail address at a domain I no longer have.)

While Twitter’s had some ups and downs as far as availability, overall it’s been more than accessible enough for my taste (especially when I seem to miss their outages by not being around to experience them), and I don’t find the interface as wasteful as I do Plurk’s. To me (and I’ll throw in the obvious-but-mandatory opinion warning for safety), I find Plurk’s timeline idea to be novel, but not as efficient at using screen space as Twitter’s uniform list layout. Plurk’s timeline requires a lot of scrolling to be useful, and while the timeline gives you a more visual idea of the time spacing between peoples’ updates, it can also be a nuisance if that person (a la myself) has a lot of free space between two updates. Plurk’s idea to include threading was definitely a smart move, though.

Perhaps a directed post at the people from that Plurk link might be suitable here, so I’ll try this:

• Ecin: Thanks for noticing my faults in reviewing Plurk, and helping to point out that I might have been a little biased in my review, but remember that it’s more of my personal opinion than a professional review. All the same, I don’t find the timeline conducive to the way I would use the site as it leaves too much empty space for my liking.  I also don’t think you’re defending Plurk outright so much as simply offering the idea that you seem to be more of a Plurk than a Twitter fan. There’s nothing wrong with Plurk or Twitter, really; it’s more of a matter of preference, and I’ve chosen Twitter for reasons that may be completely different from the reasons for which you chose Plurk.
• Daicoden: I appreciate that you like the design of my site, even if my content isn’t up to your desired level. If you have any suggestions as far as design, pass them along.

To the both of you, if you’re reading, you’re welcome to leave comments (as is anyone else).