Re: SEUL: Re: Are teachers really so unwilling to learn?

[bickiia@earlham.edu]

Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net> wrote:
>Eight combinations
>of 1s and 0s can give 256 variations, which allows us to start
>representing useful information.  For example, one combination might
>represent a capital A, while another combination might represent a
>question mark.  We have enough variations to be able to have separate
>combinations for all the capital letters, all the lowercase letters,
>the numerals from 0-9, all the punctuation marks, and various other
>useful meanings like carriage return, new page, etc.  And we still have

>combinations left for other uses like special instructions to the
>computer itself.

That last part is something that would need to be expanded on.  Things
like newlines, form feeds, and the like don't fit with the rest.  They
aren't characters you can see and understand like you can letters, or
even spaces and tabs.

I've noticed a lot of people struggling with reformatting their
documents when they are working with paragraphs and the sort.  They
understand how to write stuff by a sort-of behavioral approach -- you
hit enter and the cursor goes down -- but they don't understand the
notion that there's this new character that can't see but can delete,
that seperates the paragraphs.  A lot of people come to understand
what's going on, but a lot of people don't quite get it -- even after
they've become proficient with a word processor, they don't understand
*why* they are doing what they do.

This notion of representation and abstract symbols, of which the newline
is a good example, is not intuitive and really deserves more attention.
Especially since it doesn't get nearly any attention at all. 
Representation as a whole is a big part of computers, and not well
understood.

  -- Ian