[IAEP] Sugar benefits

[Bill Kerr]

from walter, in the recent digest  2008-10-27:

2. What would creating a Sugar Activity require from me and what
> benefits would it bring?
> I was asked this two-part question from a software developer. The
> Sugar Almanac is a good starting point for answering the first part
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac). The second part is complex
> and rather than giving a glib answer, I want to take some time to give
> it some thought. The obvious answer, the chance to touch the lives of
> hundreds of thousands of children, is OK, but I think we need to
> develop more of a case.



from my reading of some of alan kay and john maxwell's history of the
dynabook, I developed this perspective:

What sort of user interface is suitable for learning?

We have become very used to a certain style of user interface, one which is
"user friendly" and which gives us access to the function of the computer.
The user friendly user interface has been designed by experts to not demand
too much of the end user. Some systems take this a step further and actively
discourage the user from becoming curious about how things work under the
hood.

It is not just a matter of "user friendly", in itself that is not serious
grounds for complaint. It is the idea of users as users of clearly defined
applications that have been developed by "experts". In large part this state
of things has arisen through commercialisation. A marketable commodity
requires a clear definition. So proprietary applications are developed as a
black box as an expression of "efficient software engineering". In this
commercial vision the "personal computer" is not really personal because
most of its interfaces have been standardised which transforms the actors
into docile agents who respond in predicatable ways to stimuli.

"my life belongs to the engineers ... we hesitate to exist" (Latour)
"The self evident state of the art blinds people to other possibilities"
(Andy diSessa)

If you start from a more philosophical perspective of amplifying human
reach, of computer as a meta medium for expressing the creative spirit then
the attitude to the user is different. The user, as well as being a user, is
also a potential constructionist designer and developer who eventually will
be able to create their own tools. So, the tools for exploring the system
should be powerful and easily accessible. This is one of the features of
Smalltalk.

The ethic is one of mutability and simplicity. Every component of a system
is open to be explored, investigated, modified and built upon. The tool /
medium distinction is blurred and so is a lot of other false clarity. Rather
than a world of reified "experts", "engineers", "designers", "end-users",
"miracle workers" and "plain folks" it would be better to blur these
boundaries, particularly for learning environments.
http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/alanKay+talk

more succinctly:
Sugar offers a creative pathway without some invisible person trying to
control you


reference:

Tracing the Dynabook: A Study of Technocultural
Transformations<http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/dissertation>(PhD
Dissertation) by John W. Maxwell
This pulls together a lot of scattered information about Alan Kay into one
place, very valuable from that point of view. Start with Chapter 4 to obtain
an overview of Alan Kay's educational vision. Maxwell correctly stresses the
importance of a historical perspective, going back to the 1960s, in order to
understand how educational computing got to the place it is now.
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