As to “Computational Thinking”.. isn’t that a bit like putting the cart before the horse? I mean, what came first, the human or the computer? The idea of teaching “computational thinking” is to educate people to think like how a computer is programmed. Programmed by another – therefore to think like another or how another wants you to think, not to forget that in some places there are software patents where you might then be expectd to not infringe or pay a licensing fee to ….think???) Instead of being the creator you become the created.. And “Computational Thinking” doesn’t seem to require what is typically expected in learning… the verification of understanding feedback loop.

Microsoft is not known for educating the end user, but rather dumbing down the user base and supporting anti-trust against the consumer. Is there evidence of change enough?

So we get to be in a forest of thick underbrush and gotta be careful of traps all over the place in how we think?

Maybe thats a bit extream, but I believe there is a fundamental failure in all this. A failure to recognize and teach the fundamentals of abstraction creation and use. Just as math requires teaching the numbering symbols and what they mean along with basic addition, so is there fundamentals to teach regarding Abstraction and Automation of. And in so doing provide the fundamental computer based functionality that anyone can enable their own feedback loop of verification of computational matter.

Generally its an established understanding that to honestly learn computing concepts you have to apply them through computers (a feedback learning verification loop).

I know a little about Tagging, how it can be done in different ways and at different levels.
See foot notes at http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html regarding the “Open Source as Prior Art” project.

In this case, the tag is an agreed-upon protocol that’s used intentionally to coordinate a request for service. I expect to see lots of ad-hoc protocols arising that coordinate this way.

It’s very easy for the service consumer to request service, and the service provider to respond to that request. Really, it’s just a half-turn of the crank from the now-familiar practice of announcing, at the beginning of a conference, that the tag for the conference is, say, mix07. Agreeing on that tag makes it possible for a whole bunch of producers (of blogs, photos, etc.) to coordinate with a whole bunch of consumers (aggregators, etc.).

Great article and link.
For me, “programming” is just a synonym for “talking to a computer”.
As for humans, to talk to computers, we use “languages”.

All the history of “programming languages” is a run to near the gap between Machine’s Language and Human’s languages, from Assembler to Python or Javascript.

In the end, someone will invent a language that can approach nearer from natural language, maybe by encoding properly all the natural languages constructs (Proper Nouns, Common Nouns, Verbs, Prepositions, Declarations, Questions…).

With this language, a human won’t need a translator (=programmer) to tell the machine what things are or have and how to do things.

One day…