Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 13 (07) 1960

published or submitted for publicatio

Yukichi Fukuzawa and the Making of the Modern World

My book The Making of the Modern World; Visions from the West and East was published by Palgrave in 2002. It discussed the work of two major writers who had dedicated their lives to trying to answer the riddle of how our modern world originated and what its future might be. These were F.W.Maitland and Yukichi Fukuzawa. The book was only modestly successful and never went into paperback. By combining these thinkers, the distinctive contribution of each one may have been somewhat muffled. This long and expensive book did not reach a wider audience who might be potentially interested in one or other of the authors treated, but not both of them at once. So I have decided to re-issue each part as a downloadable electronic book. This book on Fukuzawa was originally published in a section of five chapters, which have now been broken down into smaller chapters

The development of a handbook for Nashua Junior High School students

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

On the Algorithmic Nature of the World

We propose a test based on the theory of algorithmic complexity and an experimental evaluation of Levin's universal distribution to identify evidence in support of or in contravention of the claim that the world is algorithmic in nature. To this end we have undertaken a statistical comparison of the frequency distributions of data from physical sources on the one hand--repositories of information such as images, data stored in a hard drive, computer programs and DNA sequences--and the frequency distributions generated by purely algorithmic means on the other--by running abstract computing devices such as Turing machines, cellular automata and Post Tag systems. Statistical correlations were found and their significance measured.Comment: Book chapter in Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and Mark Burgin (eds.) Information and Computation by World Scientific, 2010. (http://www.idt.mdh.se/ECAP-2005/INFOCOMPBOOK/). Paper website: http://www.mathrix.org/experimentalAIT

A Rule Set for the Future

This volume, Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected, identifies core issues concerning how young people's use of digital media may lead to various innovations and unexpected outcomes. The essays collected here examine how youth can function as drivers for technological change while simultaneously recognizing that technologies are embedded in larger social systems, including the family, schools, commercial culture, and peer groups. A broad range of topics are taken up, including issues of access and equity; of media panics and cultural anxieties; of citizenship, consumerism, and labor; of policy, privacy, and IP; of new modes of media literacy and learning; and of shifting notions of the public/private divide. The introduction also details six maxims to guide future research and inquiry in the field of digital media and learning. These maxims are "Remember History," "Consider Context," "Make the Future (Hands-on)," "Broaden Participation," "Foster Literacies," and "Learn to Toggle." They form a kind of flexible rule set for investigations into the innovative uses and unexpected outcomes now emerging or soon anticipated from young people's engagements with digital media