Steve Jobs wouldn’t have been the serial entrepreneur we knew him to be, if not for his partner in crime, Steve Wozniac.
I make this point to my students, when teaching them the power of collaboration, something lost in our education system that, until now favored the individual over the group; the bubble test over the team project. Common Core standards, adopted by my school (Arizona is one of some 45 states adopting them) urge us to break out of that mindset, and get kids to discuss more, debate, confront, and work as a hive mind.
So I use this example of Woz, where he describes how he stumbled over a piece of fiction about the ‘Blue Box’, and showed it to Jobs. They wondered if this device were possible, but didn’t stop at that. They snuck into a library one Sunday, and looked it up in a stack of journals.
In other words, Steve and Steve were doing their ‘research.’ Something that sounds anathema to today’s kids who like to imagine search = research. That supporting ideas will always be within a few keystrokes or clicks.
I particularly like how the Apple co-founders got started not in a garage, but a library.
Because I teach a computer and technology class I see a large cross-section of tool literacy alongside media illiteracy. This is in no way meant to blame the digital natives as much as put the ball back into the court of educators. There are no Media classes in a typical elementary school because we always thought that Media was something people opted in to learn later.
THOMPSON talks of Ambient awareness as if it were some rare gift that comes with augmenting (saturating?) our brains with feeds and Tweets. He calls it “the experience of knowing what’s going on in the lives of other people — what they’re thinking about, what they’re doing, what they’re looking at — by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online.”
It worked like this: A farmer sends an SMS to a knowledge hub using a particular short code, providing details of what he has to sell. Buyers or whole-sellers also subscribe to the service, and the portal matches the buyer and seller. The mobile device is just the tool that enables that digital hand-shake between these two groups of people.
Ever since I stumbled on Chat Apps, and discussed it toward the 
I found a great example of a ‘technologist’ who comes from an a non-tech space, and adds a layer of humanity to objects. She’s not from Silicon Valley, and I don’t believe she’s been featured in Fast Company. Bangalore-born Aparna Rao infuses technology with a sense of humor and humanity, letting us find our own meaning in inanimate objects such as a phone, a typewriter etc. The one on the left, for instance, was designed so that her uncle could send email, making him feel he was typing a normal letter on a piece of paper. But it gets funnier, and, deeper, such as when she uses a camera to make people disappear — the reverse of what we do now in our desire to put ourselves into every conceivable screen-captured image of life.
Hoipolloireport 