[Xmca-l] Re: The power of Humanities in a recursive loop

[mike cole]

Greg-- What do you make of the minecraft world? I know a lot of kids that
love to play it (and adults who
think they are wasting their time). What has impressed me is how little
live adult co-presence is needed for a group of kids to develop pretty high
level skills (the adult is behind the code, somewhere, of course).

I ask both because minecraft appears as an issue in places I inhabit and
because one of the reasons live adults give if they think it is a good
activity for kids is that it is a pathway into the world of coding.

I liked the poem as well. Thanks for that.
mike

(Martin does his flushing in Bogota, Annalisa; perhaps that accounts for
the poor advice).

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Greg Mcverry <jgregmcverry@gmail.com>
wrote:

> However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which tends to
> be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic stalinists.
>
> I think this is  a stereotype, a specialized set of discourse practices,
> and a reflection of gender inequity among coders.
>
> Nobody learns to code. You can just copy and paste better than the next
> gal. It takes a long time to generate original code.
>
> I am a self taught....actually community taught...the auto-didactic coder
> is a myth. I have been involved in a variety of open source projects in the
> last few years as a non-technical contributor.
>
> Yet every project I get involved in, I learn a little bit more. Right now
> its just html/css/javascript but its always a little bit more than I knew
> yesterday.
>
> There are amazing and really inclusive places to reach out and learn how to
> code or markup webpages.
>
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:21 PM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > Thanks Martin and Greg,
> >
> > Um... first things first. I never do the paint thinner down the toilet
> > thing. I actually make an appointment with the waste management
> department
> > on Saturdays and drive it in. Do they not have such a thing for you,
> Martin?
> >
> > And, I love your poem Greg. Just because computers "think"
> algorithmically
> > doesn't mean we do. Humans first! :) And Humanities first (too!)
> >
> > As much as code is a stinky affair for some of us non-STEMers, there is
> > something to be said of occupying the codebases. I don't mean github or
> > reddit, as I'm not a masochist.
> >
> > However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which tends
> to
> > be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic stalinists.
> I
> > myself have tried to teach myself to code more times than I can count,
> and
> > it still eludes me! If I had the right teacher, I'd do some great things
> > with code. I think it's because of my system-thinking (top-down rather
> than
> > bottom up) that it eludes me. You can't sketch with code, and then fill
> in
> > the lines (or can you?) I sense, if I were to learn to code, I'd become a
> > dialectic coder.
> >
> > Is there such a thing?
> >
> > Kind recursions,
> >
> > Annalisa
> >
> >
> >
>



-- 

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch