Reviews for Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America

The average rating for Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-23 00:00:00 Marvin Tahmahkera This was a very exciting book about how technology is transforming us, particularly the first two-thirds. I had a feeling that the author was padding a little bit in the last third. Or maybe my enthusiasm was winding down. Almost as exciting as reading Seymour Papert, I don’t think there is anything as exciting as reading Papert, the author claims, as does Papert, that education as we know it is obsolete. I am convinced of that. Perhaps the reason everyone loved simulations in my classrooms is because that is the way they learn these days, thanks to the Internet. The author talks about Furby and what it means to have a toy that responds to a child and learns from the child. He also then discusses Mindstorms, the Lego toys, named after Papert’s book, that give the children toys that make it possible for them to program their own robots. Merce includes a lot of history in his discussion, of how this world came about and what it means to have the world wide web affecting us all with the richness of material available to us. He says that we have to get smarter to deal with the technology. He talks about nanotechnology and some of the problems we will face if we continue to produce robots that can then reproduce themselves. He talks about swallowing a physician by having gadgets that can enter the body and make cancer cells healthy. The future looks quite wonderful. He also claims that the web will create children who live with a sense of the shared globe. I only hope this is true. I felt that I haven’t explored the web sufficiently. When I say that the VCR has changed children’s lives almost as much as television; so has the computer. Merce would say particularly the Internet. He talks about Sim City which I don’t own and which I ought to explore. This was great background reading for Outside the Classroom. He also got me interested in Sherry Turkle. What I objected to about this book is that the author did not include a bibliography. He refers to books and to web pages but does not have them listed. He would get points off for that if I were reviewing his book. The background was interesting and I guess the woman who does three-dimensional art using the web might be someone worth knowing about. What has happened just recently is wonderfully exciting and on balance I found that the book pretty much fulfilled the initial promise that it held out.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-06-12 00:00:00 Yoss Yosser Would have been better to read this closer to when it was published back in 2000. The author talks extensively about furbies, lego mindstorms, the introduction of the world wide web and virtual reality. If you want history and context for these, then you'll like the book. The author aluded to how this technology is impacting our kids and their world view (ie, why should they memorize something when the web is available to look it up at any time from their cell phones). I would have enjoyed him discussing this more, but it remained a footnote in what was otherwise a drawn out history lesson on a few select technologies. Those technologies did fill us with awe at one time, but today are a commonplace, and so the book has lost much of the punch it may have had when it was first published.