[IAEP] Funding - Full-time educator needed for Sugarlabs

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 10:30 AM,  <Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at> wrote:
>
> "Bill Kerr" <billkerr at gmail.com> schrieb am 29.05.2008 14:25:11:
>>
>> by my reading of innovative and really useful software development
>> the basis has never been the felt needs of teachers -- I'm not
>> dumping on teachers (I am a teacher) here, it arises from the logic
>> of their over worked and locked in (to "the system") situation
>
> Problem is that everybody is locked into some kind of system :-((
>
> Developers tend to have a very precise and effective way to communicate with
> each other using a lot of neologism and abbreviations. They also tend to be
> able to explain things reasonably well to non developers. But what can drive
> people nuts is that there is no common understanding between developers how
> to explain things coherently.
>
> I'm pretty sure that if you randomly ask 10 developers from a OLPC mailing
> for an explanation for things like firmware, gui, api, mesh, kernel each of
> them will give you a reasonable answer. But put together it's highly likely
> that the answers will be very confusing, because each description will be
> quite different from the other.

The Blind Men and the Elephant, of course.

> Which often leads to a situation where the developers are annoyed how much
> XYZ lags behind in using current technologies and XYZ is annoyed in how much
> the developers are behind in explaining their stuff in plain English.
>
> So I would definitely say that Sugarlabs needs a full-time educator and I
> think one of his or her major tasks will be to get more coherency into how
> we communicate things to each others.

That's the basic problem faced by all tech writers, too. I have had to
learn to adapt my language and style to a wide variety of audiences,
including novice users, developers, Field Service Engineers, system
administrators, marketing, and higher management.

One of the issues that is not often recognized is that terms should be
defined at least twice, at least once in relation to the rest of the
conceptual structure, and at least once in terms of familiar
experience. Firmware, for example, has four major interfaces: with
hardware, with an operating system, with programmers, and with users,
and for most people, no familiar experiences beyond turning the
computer on and having it work. So we have to create an experience, of
the appropriate degree of detail. Sometimes it is sufficient to use
the familiar metaphor of the bootstrapping process, "pulling your self
up by your own bootstraps." Sometimes we need to try out the firmware
operations, or read them and translate the code to a conceptual model
of its functions.

Richard Feynman complained bitterly during his time in Brazil that all
of physics education there was about theory without experience. Nobody
knew what the theory was about, so that Brazil produced many physics
graduates and no physicists.

The next question is how to make this understanding discoverable, and
not just something one is told in a definition.

> cu andreas
>
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>



-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay