(2005-04-29) Udell Multimedia Communication

Jon Udell on the values of Multimedia communication, coming from his Screen Cast experience as a form of Story Telling. My program of study was Science Writing, but that was a tiny subspecialty within a larger MFA (master of fine arts) program dedicated to Creative Writing. When I taught this class more than twenty years ago the term "refactoring" wasn't commonly applied to software. Yet that's precisely how I think about the iterative refinement of prose and of code. In both realms, we adjust vocabulary to achieve consistency of tone, and we transform structure to achieve economy of expression... In the pre-internet era, none of us foresaw the explosive growth of the internet as a textual medium. If you'd asked me then why a programmer ought to be able to write effectively, I'd have pointed mainly to specs and manuals. I didn't see that software development was already becoming a global collaboration, that email and newsgroups were its lifeblood, and that the ability to articulate and persuade in the medium of text could be as crucial as the ability to design and build in the medium of code... It's undoubtedly true that an audiovisual narrative enters many 21st-century minds more easily, and makes a more lasting impression on those minds, than does a written narrative. But it's also true that the interactive experience of software is fundamentally cinematic in nature... The New York Times recently asked: "Is cinema studies the new MBA?" I'll go further and suggest that these methods ought to be part of the new freshman comp. Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we'll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles--consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement--will be familiar to programmers and writers alike.

(There's an interesting example about Michael Tiller's interest in Modelica, an open, object-oriented language for modeling mechanical, electrical, electronic, hydraulic, thermal, and control systems. (Simulation))