I popped into four out of the five 10am sessions. I was most surprised by the one on CSS, by far the most heavily attended. The panelists were trying to convince us that style sheets are a good thing. They had excellent demos of how easily you could transform an ugly page into a pretty one just by using CSS to define and re-define the elements. 100% agreement. But why would this audience of Web designers need to be talked into the value of CSS? I hope that the panel was just aiming too low. (One of the panelists pointed to favelets, small utilities including some that will help CSS designers; it requires the use of Microsoft IE, preferably on a Mac.)

I ended up spending the last half of the time segment in the discussion of computers in the classroom. Interesting hard-to-summarize conversation with a lot of healthy skepticism about the effect of plopping computers into schools. E.g., a panelist points out that kids’ non-educational experience of computers encourages speed: “Hurry and get to the next level.” That, she points out, isn’t exactly conducive to learning.

Philip Tarlow, the co-author of Digital Aboriginal, suggests that kids are learning to multitask in a PhotoShop sort of way, i.e., with “layers.” Interesting simile.

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