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

[Alan Kay]

If that is a question to me, I will choose to hold my tongue ...

Cheers,

Alan


----- Original Message ----
From: "Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at" <Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: Education <its.an.education.project at tema.lo-res.org>; its.an.education.project-bounces at tema.lo-res.org
Sent: Friday, May 2, 2008 9:20:48 AM
Subject: Re: [Its.an.education.project] Another set of thoughts


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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