I've been thinking about 'zines lately, in no small part because Curt suggested we undertake a non-digital writing project. Of course, I've screwed it up already as he clearly stipulated "no digital presence" and I've just gone and blogged about the thing. Dammit.

But it's not just the excitement with the thought of opening up that manilla envelope of mine, full of newspaper clippings and images and eminently Xerox-able graphics, that has me thinking about old skool technology.

I started thinking today about Logo, a programming language that was designed in the late Sixties, in part, as an educational tool for teaching programming. I'm not sure why I've had Logo on the brain. Perhaps my subconsciousness telling me I should learn programming.

Perhaps my internal clock shifting into the pre-NECC frenzy - even though I'm not going/not worried this year.

Perhaps it's that I'm worried that I desperately need a new computer, and the choosing the lesser of evils - Windows or Apple - leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. (And yes, I know there are alternatives. Please note the folklore and literature background, mmkay?)

Since chatting with Kim Polese on Thursday evening, I've been thinking a lot about how girls - smart girls, dare I say - get pressured to put down our schoolbooks and/or get pressed down certain avenues of study. (Don't get me wrong. Folklore pwns the shit out of math every day. I'm just sayin'.)

Smart girls rock, of course, whether they study biology, Märchen, eigthteenth-century French poetry, or astrophysics. But whether it's girls or boys engaged in techno-mathy-engineering-wut-wut, I still worry that we are really dropping the ball with how we prepare kids for the future.

I know a bunch of amazing educators who are hard at work teaching critical thinking, analysis,and, o yes, programming. But I still see us cultivating a nation of tech consumers more so than a nation of tech innovators (to be clear, I am not blaming teachers here). There are a lot of reasons, of course, but it seems like we prioritize neither science nor creativity. Surely we can do better than gluesticks andTurtle, But hell, that's a start.