A classmate of my daughter was too shy to present her social studies final project. So my daughter offered to record her presentation at home, boost the voice, and give the recording to the teacher. Brilliant. The teacher has accepted.
It’s wonderful that this is not a particular remarkable use of technology these days. But in this case, my daughter and her classmate are special-needs students. I try to take to heart Alan Kay’s maxim that if technology works well for kids, it will work well for everyone, and doubly so for everyone who faces challenges. I cannot express how very proud I am that my daughter is using technology to give her friend a voice.
It takes a lot of work by technologists to make a success like this possible at all. It further takes a lot of work by technology advocates to make the possible a more commonplace part of our everyday culture. We all benefit when every one of us has the widest possible set of tools available to us, and it is advocates that make that happen. It makes me sad that critics of what they call technology solutionism would fail to do everything possible to enlarge everyone’s toolset.
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About Stearns
Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse.
Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation.
Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.
