Dave Humphrey, a Mozilla developer and teacher, writes about web tools, open source education, and an open letter to Twitter.
HN commenters quote his writing on learning to be productively lost and link his Popcorn.js teaching example.
Very cool research. Not exactly the same, but somewhat similar to what the sikuli group at mit (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/sikuli/) is doing regarding visual programming. They can take their code, but they can not take their output.
The future is bright for post processing programs that modify one programs output in some way. Note greasemonkey that modifies html/dom within a browser, this research which modifies drawn pixels, sikuli which does programmatic image recognition and the new javascript audio research within mozilla which allows one to create and record audio within the browser (http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=974). How will music labels react when it becomes easy to record audio output to mp3 from html5 video within the browser via a javascript library?
"I won't be able to answer all your questions. Rather, I can show you how to be lost productively, and how to become comfortable not knowing things and teaching yourself." -- David Humphrey, Mozilla developer, http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=60
It's one of the most valuable skills you'll need to excel in a technical field, and when mentoring others its one of the most critical skills to impart.
Here's a practical example using Khan Academy's library and Wikipedia articles to teach about the scale of the Solar System with Popcorn.js: http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=1309