As a historian, tell me, did education reformers during european industrialization advocate for schools that had actual factories in them so students could make sure to learn real-world skills? Or this real-world kills a new phenomenon?

Have you seen this 80s American kids’ show clip showing Julia Stiles explaining the internet to her school newspaper colleagues?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA
“It’s a world where you’re judged by your imagination, not by what you look like. A world where curiousity and imagination equals power,” she says as she strokes the CRT screen with a tremble that seems at once lustful and wounded.

“Software is like magic. All you need is ability.” Wendy Chun’s causal pleasure has done the best job of anything I’ve read of explaining the magic. I was learning some Ruby on Rails last night and reminded that it exists, but magic is more about surprise, and a promising glimmering of agency (that dissipates when you realize it would take 40 hours to code the simple thing you want). The “all you need is ability” part is insane to me. One of the things most surprising to me trying to learn Ruby with a group last night is how much the internet has made programming even *more* something that requires someone have a community around them to keep up with the rapid changes in open toolkits and frameworks. It’s like someone is inventing new kinds of legos every minute and the only way to keep up, to evaluate, and to select the lego modules that might be around in a week or a year is to give your life over to being part of that community of practice. We absolutely do not need a society only composed of such people. In fact, a society composed of such people will as the means of its survival keep a huge service class that can feed it and clothe it while it makes money out of its magical realm with high barriers to entry.

You, or we, or difference engines should co-author something and get it published in the Guardian. Janet Vertesi recently published an opinion piece in Forbes calling out the Forbes 30 Under 30 list:
http://janet.vertesi.com/node/35

Thoughts?