As someone who was fortunate to have early to computer programming at a young age, I believe that such exposure should be an elementary part of every student’s education. Our society is becoming immersed in computers, much like how text surrounds every aspect of our lives. The key difference is that while reading and writing are universally regarded to be fundamental skills for all humans, “computer literacy” usually means only using a computer, not also programming. This is “read-only” literary, akin to teaching reading while skipping writing.

In a similar manner, digital media is changing the text we read from static, printed pages to ever-evolving documents, with no inherent restrictions on who can edit or contribute, (e.g. Wikipedia). These developments are fundamental to the nature of digital media and computing, and to ignore this in education would be to cripple our students. This should be directly reflected in the curriculum itself. No matter how brilliant the teacher, the class will always have something valuable to add to a class. Digital media greatly increases our abilities to enable such participation within the controlled environment of the classroom.

This also allows students to rapidly start contributing to the curriculum. First, starting with very simple ways, such as correcting typos or mistakes, then moving on to creating examples to further illustrate ideas, to ultimately teaching younger students using the same materials that they learned from and contributed to. Much like how students should start reading and writing and using and programming computers at the same time, students should start from early on both learning and teaching. As any teacher knows, teaching a subject is a very effective method of learning that subject in depth. Students can then be learning teach while learning through teaching, breaking down the artificial barrier between the learning and teaching that often exists in educational environments.

Why do we still have to “save” work when working with a computer? Do you have to “save” when using pen and paper, or paint? The most important question here is, does breaking out the “save” function into a manually triggered activity actually add something useful? Perhaps before there was a good undo in every application, it made sense to have saving as a manually triggered function. But now I see no benefit, and lots of detriments. Just think of all the discussions and problems around this tidbit, “shit, I forgot to save”. Or that compulsion to constantly press the save key when working on something important.

There is some software that has done away with “save” and just made it an automatic thing (like pen and paper). Two notable examples are Palm Pilots and the wonderful Mac OS X writing program, CopyWrite. Using both, I have found myself freed of all sorts of stupid compulsions and problems, and have yet to see any good reason why File->Save is still the norm.

Yes, this is a little detail, I choose to focus on it because it demonstrates how calcified the world of user interface design has come. It’s all about smoothing over warts rather than stepping back and looking at why there are so many warts to begin with. There is always the interplay between standardization, which has many benefits, and experimentation. I am a strong advocate for standards, but at this point, there is something else happening. Something more like fear of change that becomes so endemic in large organizations like corporations. Perhaps that’s why it took upstarts like Palm and CopyWrite to make these baby steps to more rational computing.