Planet Sugar

Finally back from vacation. It has been really wonderful travel, I got some rest and I re-energized, but now it’s time to get back to work. First up is email backlog. Already handled a good amount of it, longest and most difficult answers are left though. Tonight and tomorrow is going to be really busy.

And then I need to prepare for FUDCon and XOCamp. I would like to give one talk for each, but I haven’t prepared any slides yet, I will see if I can sprint them tomorrow. Leaving on Thursday and looking forward to meet everyone there and to make as much progress as we did at Sugarcamp.

Spending the whole day to write email made me realize once again how frustrating is for me to write in english. I’m always unsatisfied about the way I say things, because I miss the words to say exactly what I want to say. I usually have to reread and tweak an email several times before I’m ready to hit the send button. My mind is sort of screwed up between two languages. I can talk and think about computer stuff only in english (at the point that I force Bernie to talk in english even if it’s just the two of us), but I’m unsatisfied about my writings quality. And I can talk decently about personal stuff only in italian, which is frustrating when posting a blog. I need to find the time to read a bunch of books in english, I think that will help a lot.

Back to work, lots of email to answer!

Sugar Digest

I read the new Neal Stephenson book, Anathem, last week. There was one line I cannot resist sharing with the Sugar community. Raz, our hero, is a young mathematician who leaves the nest to solve any number of problems. At one point, he asks why he is the one upon whom everyone is leaning.

“But Raz, you are educable, you can learn ‘this kind of thing,’… You’ve spent your whole life … becoming educable.”

Another book I read over the holidays is a new biography of Andrew Jackson. He remains a pretty controversial figure, but he knew the importance of “staying focused on the things that matter most and not dwelling on the things that pull us apart.”

In the case of Sugar Labs, the things that matters most are creating a great learning platform and making it available to learners everywhere.

I am confident that in 2009, we will see Sugar in the hands of many more children and teachers. We’ll see an accelerated pace of development and deployment across a diverse set of platforms under an even more diverse set of conditions.

While we debate the various means towards our goals, we need to keep in mind that the most important metric we can hold up to our work is the impact on learning. On the one hand, we need to flexible and inclusive; on the other hand, we need to adhere to the core principles that make Sugar of value to the learner, putting an emphasis on quality over quantity. So while we shouldn’t be overly zealous, we need to constantly remind ourselves and those whom we are trying to reach of the value of learning to learn: the authentic appropriation of knowledge, learning through expressing, debugging, reflection, and critique. If it does not impact the learning, we shouldn’t be doing it.

Community jams, meet-ups, and meetings

FUDConF11 will be held this week (9–11 January) at MIT (Cambridge, MA).

Help Wanted

Christian Marc Schmidt has been working on a static landing page for Sugar Labs. (The wiki is a powerful tool, but not the easiest place to get started from when you are new to Sugar.) Christian has uploaded a build onto a server (See beta sugarlabs.org). This version is fully dynamic, based on an XML->XSL translation using PHP 5 and Libxslt. Christian has tested it in all major browsers where it seems to work fine, but please exercise it some more.

Christian is ready to concentrate on gathering content for the gallery and the activity sections. There is other content that needs to be prepared as well.

As far as internationalization, we are thinking of adding a simple CSS dropdown underneath the links on the top-right edge of the page. We should decide how best to handle the translations, whether through Pootle or some other mechanism.

One specific area where we are seeking help is in regard to illustrations. One project we have in mind is a comic-book-like narrative about Sugar to be featured on the static site. If anyone is interested in taking on such a project, please come forward.

Tech Talk

There are some Activity updates to report:

• TurtleArt-27.xo
• Yay!BeeSee-2.xo

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM)

Gary has also made some significant changes to the text-metric extraction code; he is trying to fully normalize the frequency of each term. He hypothesizes that this will allow the maps to more clearly show the finer details that are otherwise drowned out by heavy terms like “Sugar”, “Work”, “Use”, “Project”, “Want”, etc. He’ll be posting some examples in the wiki.

OLPC is now working hard on their 9.1.0 release, and their roadmap is very clearly outlined. Well done to all the OLPC people for their ever-increasing efforts to keep external folks in the loop.

There are two items to which interested Fedora contributors should be paying particularly close attention.

First: Rebase 9.1.0 on Fedora 10. This is a big one. OLPC has made a strong commitment to move as much of their work as possible into Fedora packages upstream. At latest count, there are approximately 25 packages in the OLPC-4 repository that are forked from their F10 counterparts. We can use all the help we can get from the Fedora community to help bring these packages into mainline Fedora. Peter Robinson in particular has been a big help, but we can always use more. Remember: every hour an OLPC developer spends maintaining a forked package is an hour they cannot use to save the world.

Second: Run Fedora applications on the XO. This is another big one. Users all over the world love Sugar, but its limitations can be painful. Many users want to run Fedora applications that simply don't look good under Sugar. There are some good approaches to solving this problem -- replacing Matchbox with a tiled window manager, for instance -- but it's a problem that can use more eyes.

If you are interested in helping with either of these problems, leave a comment and find us at FUDCon.

OLE Nepal organized a three day workshop on December 23-25, 2008 to prepare the teacher training manual for the next round of OLPC laptop deployment planned for April 2009. The workshop participants included experts from the National Center for Education Development (NCED) – Nepal Government’s teacher training body under the Ministry of Education, as well as officials from the Department of Education (DoE)’s OLPC team. Teachers from the two test schools – Bashuki Lower Secondary School and Vishwamitra Ganesh Secondary School – were also invited for a day to share their experience on using , shed light on the challenges faced so far, and give suggestions on how the training program can be made more effective and relevant in integrating the laptops and ICT-based teaching-learning method in their classrooms. Earlier on December 15^th, few of the participants had also visited the two test schools to observe how the program was being implemented in the classrooms.

The OLPC Project in Nepal will enter its second phase when the next school session begins in April, 2009. In the second phase, OLE Nepal, in partnership with the DoE, plans to expand the project to more than 20 schools in at least 5 different districts in the country. While OLE Nepal was able to train the teachers from the two test schools for the current deployment, it would be nearly impossible to train teachers in 5 districts scattered all over Nepal without NCED’s involvement. Moreover, since teachers have barely 3 weeks of break between two school sessions, the training programs have to be run in parallel in various places. With NCED’s involvement, not only can the trainings be conducted in parallel, but the project can utilize NCED’s training resources and infrastructure that are located all over the country. Following NCED’s training modality, one of its Master Trainer will be prepared on ICT-based education approach. The Master Trainer will then train other trainers from Education Training Centers (ETC) located in or near the pilot districts. These trainers will in turn be responsible for training pilot-school teachers ahead of the April 2009 deployment. However, before all of this, the teacher-training manual as well as the trainer-training manual need to be prepared.

The goal of the workshop was to prepare the framework that can be used as the base to create the teacher training manual. In addition to the valuable feedback received from the test-school teachers, the participants had last year’s training manual that OLE Nepal had prepared to train those teachers. The first day of the workshop was allocated for needs assessment. After a brief discussion on the points gathered from the school visits, teachers from the test schools answered queries that the participants had about various aspects of the test-phase implementation at the schools. Later on, participants and teachers mixed up in smaller groups and asked to make a list of suggestions that could to be incorporated in the new training package. The groups discussed about a wide range of topics including classroom arrangement, IT literacy, use of laptops in the classroom, classroom management, maximizing use of laptops at homes, non-technical issues and their solutions, parents and community orientation, etc. Suggestions from the groups were later incorporated into a comprehensive list that was used to prepare the framework for the manual.

Participants were given first half of the second day to review the existing manual, and the afternoon session began with participants expressing their views on the strengths and weaknesses of the manual. After much discussion, it was decided that the new manual should conform to NCED’s standard format so that its trainers can use it with ease during training. The training structure was kept similar to that of last year – 5 days of residential training followed by 3 days of on-site training. The teachers will be given at least few days’ time between the residential training and the on-site training in order to organize orientation programs for parents, communities and local stakeholders in each pilot-school area. This time will also be used by teachers to get familiar with laptops and raise their comfort level in using them.

Once the structure and outline of the training manual were finalized, the participants broke into four groups and set out to preparing the manual based on suggestions from Day 1, materials from the current manual, and other points that came out of the discussions. At the end of the workshop, a solid framework for the manual was prepared. It was decided that the OLE Nepal team will complete the the remaining task of filling up various portions of the manual.

In the next couple weeks, OLE Nepal team will work to complete the first draft of the manual. It will then be circulated amongst the participants of the workshop for a review before completing the final draft. The team is scheduled to complete the manual by the first week of February. That will give enough time to prepare a trainers manual and start working with a Master Trainer from the NCED. The teacher training program will take place between the third week of March and first week of April.

This workshop marked a major milestone in OLE Nepal’s effort to bring various government agencies on board the OLPC project. From its inception more than a year and a half ago, OLE Nepal has always held on to the belief that the project will fall short of its goal to reach all corners of the nation unless the government agrees to incorporate the OLPC initiative in its overall education plans and policy. With NCED’s involvement, the project can now benefit from a pool of experts who have in-depth knowledge of the country’s education system, as well as utilize existing training infrastructure to carry out the training programs. At the same time the partnership will help build the capacity of NCED’s trainers in the preparation and delivery of training programs on integrating laptops and ICT-based teaching-learning methods in classrooms.

During the course of the workshop, Executive Director of NCED Mr. Harka Bahadur Shrestha, Director of DoE Mr. Bishnu Devkota, and Deputy Director of DoE Mr. Baburam Poudel paid a visit to get an update on the workshop progress. While all three threw their support behind the project and expressed satisfaction over the ongoing work, it was particularly encouraging to hear the head of NCED Mr. Shrestha say that he wants to see this manual become NCED’s standard training manual on ICT-based education. He further stated that the training program should be turned into one of the standard training programs that NCED offers to public school teachers all over the country.

From my friend Shamashis’s blog:

We took the route down Colaba Causeway, across Metro Plaza, Food Inn, Café Leopold and then turned once again towards Gateway. It was the same scene everywhere. Santa poured out gifts to toddlers, infants, teenagers, the policemen on the street, the security guards of Taj and the shopkeepers on the pavement. Santa went to the kid who sold vada pav and gave him his share. Everyone smiled, everyone was happy. We had achieved our goal. Every moment was turning out to be priceless.

His entire experience is narrated in two parts (1, 2).

I have been travelling during the last week, with sporadic internet access and anyway with very little time to read and answer email. Even less to write code, duh! I will be back home only on 5 January, but I’ll try to deal with my email queue earlier, hopefully in the next couple of nights. Apologizes to everyone for the delays!

What I didn’t put into the last post about the textbook was how much stumbling I had to go through just to squeak out a first chapter. I was originally doing this for credit, but found the process (of figuring out how to write, not getting credit) rocky going. My summary of how I did at the semester’s end, when I was horribly behind on everything (and contemplating dropping out of college, actually):

Overall learning has been fantastic but mostly non-apparent to people other than myself. Learning according to plan has been abysmal. I will now turn my attention back to submitting deliverables.

The goals I had when I started writing the textbook changed dramatically over the 5 months I struggled to pump out just one chapter.

Initial goals: “Under the assumption that the current model of how textbooks are created and used for learning is no longer the most efficient method we have available for facilitating student learning, how can we create a new type of textbook that will take advantage of the technologies and theories we have around today in such a way that it helps students learn better than they did before1? Also, what is the process one must go through in order to write a textbook?”

By the end, that had boiled down to a much simpler question: “How can we understand what goes through a student’s mind when they’re reading a textbook and how can we use that information to redesign what textbooks are and how they are used?”

I also saw my personal philosophy about teaching and learning shape itself into much more clarity during the time I worked on the textbook (and indeed, whenever I pick it up to work on it again). For instance, on “coming from a place of abundance”:

First of all, there must never be shame. Students work best when they come from a place of playful empowerment rather than one of intimidation and inadequacy. At the project’s start, and during brief periods of glory within the semester, I felt that sense of empowerment and freedom. I proposed my project largely because I thought that if I initiated a project, I’d feel that sense of freedom all the way through it. However, I soon learned that it wasn’t enough to statically define your project at the start. In order to have a sense of playful empowerment, one must be free to change, rewrite, scrap, delete, wreck, rebuild, and tinker with all aspects of the project at any time during its course.

And on teaching as the creation of an environment (as opposed to ’stuff from my head goes into your head’):

If we want students to be able to roam freely within the intellectual culture they are studying, we need to let them wander the countryside with a dictionary in their back pocket speaking to as many different natives as possible; teasers and references are the equivalent of giving the student an address-book of helpful native speakers to (optionally) look up.

The most important thing I learned was about… learning.

I would say that while I have learned a great deal of what I needed to learn, it was not what I had set out or planned to learned. In one sense – the checkbox of requirements sense - I’ve mostly failed in fulfilling my goals. In another sense – the formative learning experience sense – I’ve gone far beyond what I originally expected.

It’s pretty neat to look back on how much this has shaped the subsequent education-related things I’ve done. Yeah, I know I could have tried to copy-paste somebody else’s textbook-writing process onto myself, but that… first of all, I looked for that, but it was hard to find people who can teach that kind of thing.Second, I figured that (1) for a non-standard textbook, I’d probably want a non-standard process - which is not necessarily true - and (2) I would learn a lot by trying to work a process out myself - which was very true, and I’m ultimately glad I did it.

Here’s a sample chapter on feedack from the book - comments highly encouraged. Intro to the whole book is below. And yes, this is the one that started as my humanities capstone (AHScap) - the textbook for Engineering of Compartment Systems (ECS), which is an introductory freshman engineering class at Olin. (Note for non-Oliners: NINJAs are Olin’s version of TAs.)  I need to find a way to put the actual book chapters online (tricky, because I want to allow people to comment on them / edit them, but they have tons of pictures and footnotes and later on, code and math and circuit diagrams).

The question for me right now is not “do I keep writing?” (the answer is yes - I can’t not write this stuff), but “what do I write about next?” I could match the ECS syllabus, or I could go for other topics… also, the textbook needs some kind of funky title. I’m taking suggestions. Finally, if there’s some way this kind of thing could be useful within the context of OLPC/Sugar, I’d love ideas. I am uncharacteristically drawing a total blank right now.

Welcome.

You stand on the brink of a new world. Maybe you’ve heard of it before, even started to learn it, and you have something you’re anxiously waiting to find out. Maybe this is your first exposure to it and you have no idea what you’re in for but you’re curious to find out. Maybe you’re just reading this book because someone told you to - that’s all right, we’ve all got to have some reason for starting – but it’s my hope that you’ll find your own, more powerful reason for exploring the ideas in this book and using them as a way to explore any aspect of your world you like. It doesn’t even have to be explicitly engineering, because everything is related to engineering (trust me on this).

The important thing to know is that this is yours. This class is yours; it’s ultimately your learning experience and your life, and that’s your own to shape. I can’t tell you how to do that. This textbook is yours; scribble on it, argue with it, fold it into origami cranes and ignore it; I won’t be offended. You don’t even have to finish the book; if you’re not getting something out of it or if you think something else is more interesting, go for it! You can always come back to this later.

I want to help you learn what you want to learn in the way you want to learn it, and in order to do that you’re going to have to teach me how you learn, how you want to learn, and how I can help you learn better. Education is a bidirectional process; what I do affects you, and what you do affects me. We’ve got a lot to learn from each other, and I hope you’ll take the time to email me or at least strike up a dialogue with some of your friends or other students who are reading this book online.

This book is about python, slopefields, and electric motors, but it’s actually about math modeling, programming and electrical and mechanical engineering. Actually, it’s really about thinking like an engineer and applying certain mental toolsets to the solution of problems. Actually, it’s really about learning, learning how to learn, and starting to chart your own way through an educational experience. And actually, this book is really about… life, however you want to live it. You’ll just happen to be learning about it through hooking up wires to each other and observing the effects of Ohm’s law.

Above all, have fun.

Got this via email from my mom.

morgs

The Year 2008 is drawing to a close. It was a hectic one, with the rising of Sugar Labs early this year. It was not always easy to communicate to OLPC that Sugar needs to be independent and that it would be beneficial to OLPC in the end. And having been under contract with OLPC did not make it easier.

With the 0.82 release we proved that Sugar Labs was able to provide a stable release even though there is still much room for improvements. One issue with the 0.82 release was too late testing during the development cycle. We hope to coordinate this better in the future. Now that Sugar is available in many distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo we have a need of being responsive to the downstream bug reports - that missing part we want to lute with the Sugar Labs BugSquad and collect all that viable information to make the Sugar product better.

The 0.84 release will bring again many improvements. We are still in the big hole fixing period, the end product and the envisioned one are still a bit apart from each other. Collaboration and the Journal are two main parts that are important to the experience that need some love. The Discovering aspect has seen some improvements with Tomeu’s work on View Source, that is a great start into that direction. I agree with the Walter’s request in the last Sugar Digest that we need to invest in engaging teachers, parents, and children in learning learning. The tool itself is nothing without the users.

Last I want to highlight that I was very delighted with the working atmosphere in the Sugar Labs team. Our basis of living the paradigms like critique, sharing and exploration is a quite good one and i hope to see more of that in 2009.

Let’s go this road to the end, and make it happen!

tiezemans

As 2008 comes to an end, it gives me an excuse to do some reflecting on what we are doing as a project and foundation. Most of the following you’ve read before, but it is helpful—at least to me—to revisit these ideas periodically.

The world faces many seemingly intractable problems: war, a faltering economy, an energy crisis, global climate change, to name just a few. My generation has failed to solve these problems. Our children will inherit them from us. But we can leave them something in addition: the means to become a generation of critical thinkers and problem-solvers. The investment that we can make on their behalf that will have the most return is learning. It has a bearing on all of the challenges we face and is essential if our children are to excel in an ever-changing world. Providing every child with the opportunity to learn learning will allow them both to achieve a clarity of purpose and to develop independent means towards their goals.

What should children and learn and how should they learn it? Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs. Of course learners should have access to power ideas (I won’t debate here which ones we should teach). But they should also engage in exploration and collaboration, appropriating knowledge while engaging in authentic, open-ended problem solving. This can be accomplished within a framework of accountability, one that complements rigorous national standards where learners engage in a process of reflection, public expression, and critique—a “portfolio” approach. What am I learning? How did I learn it? Why is it important? Can I teach it to others?

We have some simple, universal points of leverage:

• Everyone is a teacher and a learner.
• Humans are social beings.
• Humans are expressive.

You learn through doing, so if you want to learn more, you want to do more.

Love is a better master than duty—you want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. Internal motivation almost always trumps external motivations.

These ideas are not immiscible with current norms within schools, but too often we fall back on what we “know”. I challenge you to think of a great learning moment in your life: was it sitting in a classroom, all eyes forward, listening to a lecture or was in when you were trying to solve a problem that was important to you?

We know of no better tool for learning than a computer—it is a “thing to think with” when it is used as a means of knowledge creation. (Unfortunately, it is too often thought of and used as simply a mechanism for information retrieval and rote learning in our schools—the modern equivalent of the mimeograph machine, AKA the “purple” plague.)

Three experiences can characterize a computer-enhanced learning platform:

Sharing: The interface should always shows the presence of other learners. Collaboration is a first-order experience. Students and teachers dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas.

Reflecting: A “Journal” should record each learner’s activity. The Journal serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress—the basis of a portfolio.

Discovering: We can accommodate a wide variety of users, with different levels of skill in terms of reading, language, and different levels of experience with computing. It is easy to approach, yet it doesn’t put an upper bound on personal expression. One should always be able to peel away layers and go deeper and deeper, with no restrictions. This allows the direct appropriation of ideas in whatever realm the learner is exploring: music, browsing, reading, writing, programming, or graphics. The student can always go further.

These are the core ideas behind Sugar. By embodying these ideas directly into the affordances provided by the user interface, we can skew the odds that teachers and learners will engage in more than the accumulation and transfer of information.

In Sugar, have in hand the tools to reinvent how computers are used for education. Collaboration, reflection, and discovery are readily integrated directly into the learning experience. Children and teachers have the opportunity to use computers on their own terms, reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content into powerful learning activities. Learning can be focused on sharing, criticism, and exploration. We have a lot of work ahead of us to refine these tools and to refine the practice around them, but we have a solid beginning.

We can raise a generation of critical thinkers, armed with the complementary tools of science and the arts. (Relatively speaking, it is a trivial investment—probably less than the cost of a single “bridge to nowhere”. All of the necessary tools are freely available under free software licenses. But we do need to invest in engaging teachers, parents, and children in learning learning.) So let’s make it happen.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated another SOM from the past week of discussion on the IAEP mailing list (Please see SOM).

Ayushma and Astha have transformed the OLE Nepal office in just two weeks from an almost all male enterprise to one that can tolerate the musical ‘genius’ of many a time platinum and eighth best-selling female recording artist, Britney Spears (Courtesy of: wikipedia.org).

The two, who are recent college graduates and part of the informal Rato Bangala ‘mafia’ at OLE Nepal, are working on the e-pustakalaya (e-library) project together. The project was developed following the philosophy that improving the education system in Nepal must go beyond simply improving traditional teaching methods and adding to available course material. Being true examples of this philosophy in action and avid readers themselves, Ayushma and Astha have had books and other reading material be a major part of their lives, academic and otherwise. They believe that creative and analytical skills can be restored in the Nepali education system, which rarely seems to encourage them.

The library aims to include literature as well as to serve as a resource centre mainly for students in Nepali schools who have been left behind in this regard. The library is not just a collection of digital material but intends to incorporate more interactive features as well, so that it has a community-like feel for children who do not have access to a physical counterpart. In no way does this project suggest that this should be an alternative to physical library spaces where children can access books as well as interact physically with one another but it acts as a supplement. The library will not be a static one-way stream but ultimately aims to encourage readers themselves to creatively apply themselves and contribute to a growing collection of literature and other material.

The concept isn’t without its hurdles, with copyright issues and others to overcome but the two are working endlessly to make the free online library a reality! Ayushma and Astha are excited to make e-pustakalaya not just another online library but a transformative experience for its readers. They welcome your suggestions and ideas.

1.

You’ve no doubt heard of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the 17th century German philosopher and mathematician who invented calculus, and whose mathematical notation we still use today. But you probably haven’t heard of his friend and contemporary Denis Papin, the French physicist who invented the steam digester, a crude predecessor to the steam engine. In 1705, at year’s end, Papin wrote to Leibniz to tell him of his plan: he would use steam to run a boat. And true to his word, a year and a half later, he had built the world’s first steamboat, a paddled side-wheeler, in the city of Kassel, Germany.

His plan was to sail from Kassel, which lies on the river Fulda, into the Weser river via the city of Münden, then to Bremen, from where the steamboat engine could be transshipped via the North Sea and finally to London, for a triumphant demonstration of his invention on the Thames. The trouble was, the boatmen’s guild in Münden had a monopoly on moving ships from the Fulda into the Weser — a monopoly enacted to protect their business interests with regard to freight ships. Papin’s ship carried no freight, of course. It was a technological proof of concept. But the distinction, alas, proved irrelevant.

When Papin sailed his steamer into Münden, the boatmen’s guild asserted their privileges, and not only barred the boat from entering the Weser, but demanded that the local magistrates impound the ship and turn it over to the guild. This did not come to pass: in the space of hours, the boatmen realized the ship’s steam engine spelled ruin to their entire business model, and decided to put a quick end to the matter. They pulled the engine out of the boat and smashed it to pieces. Some accounts claim Papin barely made it out of the incident alive; what’s known with some certainty is that he never recovered from the loss financially, and died a few years later in London, poor, unknown, and buried in an unmarked grave.

2.

Innovation and technology have been fueling social change for as long as we can remember, and they’ve had their detractors for just as long. But seldom is resistance to change as strong as when money is at stake: obsolete business models do not go quietly into that good night. They go to war.

I know a few people who work on technology just for technology’s sake. Yet the most passionate and competent hackers I know are attracted to computing because they are builders and tinkerers, people who understand technology as a powerful medium for driving social change. Change in how we learn, how we create, how we communicate — change that, if tended to carefully, can ultimately be for better rather than for worse. But here’s the thing about change: someone always gets left behind. And they don’t usually take to it kindly.

Three hundred years ago, when a business model found itself threatened by change, its keepers destroyed a steamboat. Today, a dying business model hires a few hundred lawyers and comes up with a terrible catchphrase.

3.

In a charming historical coincidence, the Statute of Anne, the first ever serious piece of copyright law, was enacted only two years after Papin’s misadventure in Münden. This bears note because our modern computing revolution made it essentially free to copy bits, thus pegging the marginal cost of digital content at zero. Unsurprisingly, how stuff gets copied became one of the most prominent hot-button issues pitting technological innovation against existing business models, and ever since, an army of lawyers have been dragging copyright through the courts six ways to Sunday.

The further technology and innovation get in their efforts to create change, the more people they piss off, and the more existing business models they upset. And much as it warms my heart to think of former RIAA head Hilary Rosen breaking into a nautical museum and taking a crowbar to the engine of some unsuspecting paddlewheeler, in actuality she took out her frustration with Napster in court, seeing the DMCA passed, with a victory in MGM v. Grokster, and getting a handful of other legal acts and treaties passed strengthening legal protections favoring the music industry’s established business models.

Copyright is far from the only high-profile battle being fought, however. The FCC, for instance, has been deliberating for six years whether to allow unlicensed public use of the unused TV broadcast spectrum, with the National Association of Broadcasters rallying all their legal and lobbyist might behind making sure such liberty is not offered to the public. (That story has a happy ending: a month ago, FCC gave the go-ahead.)

There are countless examples everywhere you look.

4.

There’s a wider point in all of this: if you’re a technologist that cares about the intersection of technology, innovation, and social change, you can no longer afford to focus on the technology alone. Innovation and the status quo each have armies, but the battlefield has become increasingly legal. The bodies are buried in the court of law.

I’m not a lawyer. I don’t want to be. But keeping up with major developments and leading thinkers in cyberlaw is something I now regard as a necessity, and there are three key people I follow: Larry Lessig (blog), Jonathan Zittrain (blog), and Yochai Benkler. They are, without a doubt, among the very finest minds studying the collision of law and technology today.

Technology is my passion, and this essay is ultimately a plea: too many of my friends, world-class hackers and tinkerers, do not understand the degree to which the legal arena impacts our field, the innovation within it, and the social change stemming from it. I’ve been for some time on a mission to convince them to pay attention, and I’m telling the same to you: take the time to learn about what the guys above are thinking. Subscribe to their blog feeds. Think carefully about what they have to say. For if you don’t, one day the magistrates may come knocking on your door, telling you your passion is against the law.

Merry Christmas, and don’t let the boatmen win.