Matt SchneiderApr 11, 2017
Allison Parrish

I was doing a workshop last weekend and while I was showing my work I discovered that two of the pieces in my portfolio are just... dead links. both pieces were made on commission for organizations that no longer exist, and I was reminded of the fact that if you want something on the internet to last you have to host it yourself.

(this is why I'm a mastodon fan. not that I'm hosting my own account right now, but it's good to know that I could!)

Apr 11, 2017 at 4:23pmWeb
Show threadAllison ParrishApr 11, 2017
I teach tech and I'm often asked why I don't teach some allegedly time-saving proprietary tool/environment/whatever. the answer is that the risk of that proprietary tool just ceasing to exist are really high, and when that happens, the time I spend developing curricula against the tool goes up in smoke. by contrast, notes I wrote for, e.g., python text processing are just as good today as they were ten years ago. over the long run, I think I save a lot of time by teaching only open source tools.
Show threadAllison ParrishApr 11, 2017
("only" there should come with an asterisk, I don't make a categorical exclusion, especially when teaching for a narrow audience. but "only open source" is my guiding principle)
Show threadNicolas đź’¬Apr 11, 2017
@aparrish Also, time-saving tools are just that. Time-saving. If you understand the underlying principle you can understand why toolY is helping save time.
As a student it has always been very important for me to understand the why of the what. If I don't have the why (even a vague idea) I cannot learn the what.
Show threadMatt SchneiderApr 11, 2017
@aparrish It's interesting to see how easy it is to fall into believing that the tools are at the heart of what we do, and to forget that learning overarching concepts will leave us in a much stronger position than learning the steps to accomplish tasks in a single language. I suspect that the neoliberal mentality of schools as worker prep has a lot to do with this.
Show threadAllison ParrishApr 11, 2017
@mattlaschneider I agree about the neoliberal mentality! but it's a difficult balancing act. one of the things I actually love about teaching is threading the needle just right so that students get the foundational knowledge they need but also feel like they can make cool things with what I'm teaching as soon as possible. (I teach in an art program and there is *very* little patience for boring fundamentals :sunglasses:)
Show threadCarl Friedrich Bolz-TereickApr 11, 2017
@aparrish this! all the typical CS nonsense (fibonacci etc) is a super easy way to lose students immediately @mattlaschneider
Show threadMatt SchneiderApr 11, 2017
@aparrish fun fact: this mentality is so pervasive that back in 2012 a member of our *conservative* government called businesses out for it, telling them that they needed to start pulling their own weight on the employee education front.
Show threadJeff Epler🦉Apr 12, 2017
@aparrish i agree but i don't want to be too self congratulatory about how we never lose the ability to run 20 year old software. I have plenty of 15 year old python programs that don't run due to minor compatibility problems. It's likely that in 10 years hardly anybody will run this weird old X11 thing and a million applications will not be easy to run anymore etc. Being Free software didn't help a "mere user" run treasured software after the community moves on and it breaks.
Show threadAllison ParrishApr 12, 2017
@jepler oh I absolutely agree—open source software and architecture is also subject to bitrot. but the projects in question were both less than two years old (!). it's always going to be a shitshow for "mere users" but I think especially in the high-churn world of contemporary tech culture, it's important for artists and makers to control the platforms that host their work.
Show threadJonathan McDowellApr 12, 2017
@aparrish This is a big consideration for us - astronomers tend to use the same packages for decades as languages and fads come and go - we often re-analyse old data, too, so stable data standards help. There's a big cost to redeveloping your entire system every few years.