[Its.an.education.project] Another set of thoughts

[Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at]

Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> schrieb am 02.05.2008 15:33:50:

> At the risk of trying to talk about education, here is another 
> little essay with a few observations...
> 
> http://www.vpri.org/pdf/human_condition.pdf

Personally I think one of the most fundamental question that is still 
waiting for an answer is: How are we going to teach 8-10 year old kids to 
become sysadmins?

Sugar is great and it is about to become a wonderful environment to do any 
form of collaborative work. But it?s also one of the most complex and 
challenging systems I have seen to date from a sysadmin perspective.

Making it very, very hard to transition from the lovely Sugar-Gui world 
too the harsh reality of Open Firmware boot prompts, Linux kernel 
messages, SysV runtime levels, xorg.conf files, wifi standards and Avahi 
multicasts announcements.

So you could end up with a system that is wonderful in teaching almost 
everything except computers.  Because the only thing kids will learn about 
computers is that sometimes they break, make you feel like a complete 
idiot and that it's better not to change anything too avoid feeling like 
being an idiot.

This ultimately leads to a situation where you either have to enable young 
kids to understand pretty complex and high level system administration 
stuff or need one dedicated computer geek per school you can offload any 
computer related problem within a school (which would be the less ideal 
solution). 


cu andreas

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