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

[Costello, Rob R]

for effective learning of tech materials, the HeadFirst stuff seems to
have a lot of runs on the board - 
eg this summary of the learning theory involved in the production of
their popular programming texts is interesting 

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/01/crash_cour
se_in.html

great style for getting started for many people - and for kids learning
something new, the general approaches work pretty well I reckon  - 

The e-toys tutorials, scratch tutorials etc, are like this - give an
easy heads up for getting started - and for some of these concepts and
approaches (using IT to enrich approaches to maths / science /
modelling) , getting started is the key - a low threshold to get
something 

can complement with more detailed references later 

cheers 

rob 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: its.an.education.project-bounces at lists.lo-res.org
> [mailto:its.an.education.project-bounces at lists.lo-res.org] On Behalf
Of
> Edward Cherlin
> Sent: Friday, 30 May 2008 7:44 PM
> To: Andreas.Trawoeger at wgkk.at
> Cc: its.an.education.project; Bryan Berry
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] Funding - Full-time educator needed for Sugarlabs
> 
> 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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> > Its.an.education.project at lists.lo-res.org
> > http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> --
> 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
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