I stumbled upon this article at AmericanHeritage.com, that describes the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ personal special effects company, makers of all cool films (especially Star Wars). This article also describes another sort of paradigm shift in the film industry.

Personally, these types of effects are my favorite. Using real things in innovative ways. I think it’s unfortunate, in a way, that so many of the stunts and effects are digital. I like the good, old fashioned effects where objects are real, made from real things, like the mother ship on “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” (the movie I haven’t seen, but the ship I have).

Anyhow, it was a good article.

And, just as a side note, I always fear losing these web articles, until now. I use Zotero which allows me to store, sort, tag and view web pages, books, and all sorts of stuff. I’ll be using it to collect data for my research projects this year. It’s also made by the good guys at the Center for History and New Media, where I work. – Shameless plug!

I just skimmed through this interview with Con Kolivas a major Linux kernel developer who has quite the Linux development world in frustration. What caught my attention was his ‘history’ of computers. His recollection of the computers history is truly different than I had ever learned or thought of. Basically, he paints the picture that computers could have been extremely different if the hardware had ruled instead of software. While computers were in their nascent state, the hardware being developed was ever changing. New and different ideas were used in each computer company. Then a software operating system came out that changed all that. By becoming the default OS, there was no more need to create better, different, new hardware. Instead all of the hardware was built and developed to suit the software.

It makes one think, what would computers be like if hardware ruled? What would they look like, how would they perform, how would they work, if they were not limited to one operating system?

This post from William Turkel at Digital History Hacks about the history appliance was just down-right awesome.  How cool would it be, even if just in your browser or on your computer, to have everything (all types of media) display a certain time period or year.

What I thought was most interesting is the immersion effect this would have for historians. It would be a great way to see what was available at that time, what was not, what was popular, what was in the news… Pretty cool.

Discussion in class tonight was a discussion about a paradigm shift in teaching. The conclusion that comes from research (spawned by scientists who wanted to improve physics teaching) on cognitive psychology. The conclusions show that people can only learn 7 facts and 4 ideas at a time. This works for history classes as well. “The less you teach, the more you learn.”

Redefining Traditional Education

Read the article here by Tom Green at digital-web.com.

In the beginning, motion pictures were basically filmed versions of plays which were enacted on stages, with a set and props. After a while the movie people realized, hey, I’m not bound to the stage! I can take my camera anywhere! So instead of making fake trees I can film real trees. Instead of creating a set that looks like the beach, I can just go to the beach!

They had a paradigm shift. They started out using new technology to do the same thing they had always been doing. But once they realized a far better potential for the technology, and broke out of the old mold, they were able to do great and wonderful things (and also terribly awful things – think of the immorality pervasive in movies nowadays).

How many other paradigm shifts are there in history? Countless, I’m sure. A very cursory search (“history paradigm shift” as a google search) turns up very few references to a historical look at paradigm shifts. A book by Thomas Kuhn seems to be it, and it’s limited to scientific revolutions.