John Sener's criticism of Marc Prensky's proposal for education threw me for a loop. He writes, "The idea to distribute 55 million tarballs is extremely expensive and highly impractical." At first I thought he was talking about open source software, which is distributed in compressed packages canned 'tarballs'. But when I reviewed Prensky's proposal I realized he meant actual tarballs. Well, count me as among those opposed to spreading the Gulf oil spill across the entire nation by mail. But Sener's criticism, applied to software, gave me pause for thought. He writes, "such an effort would be seen as a 'Trojan horse' attempt to impose federal control over education, and face broad resistance as a result." This is, in fact, an excellent point. Software colonizes. It imposes order as surely as statutes and police. Which is why distributing 55 million tarballs would also be a bad idea.
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