[IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 15:12, K. K. Subramaniam<subbukk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 02 Jul 2009 5:19:58 pm Alan Kay wrote:
>> Knowledge - On the other hand, Henry Ford was not nearly as smart as
>> Leonardo, but was born at a very good time and in a good place, so he was
>> able to combine engineering and production inventions to make millions of
>> inexpensive automobiles.
> As I look out of my window at the smog hanging over the city, I wonder if this
> is really progress :-). But I digress ..
>> Being around adults who have interesting outlooks works the best for most
>> kids.
> This was the crux of the point that the farmer raised. He didn't want his kid
> associating with people whom he thought were ineffective as guides. BTW, his
> feedback was crucial in fixing some of the lacunae in his school and helped
> raise the bar. The kid is back in school and making good progress.
>> I was brought up on a farm (a somewhat unusual one), but the farms in the
>> region were not at all conducive for learning powerful outlooks, nor were
>> the schools particularly. However, my grandfather was "a writing farmer"
>> and had a huge library of books of all kinds in his farmhouse.
> Parents set a minimum bar. As I pointed out earlier, a school is relevant only
> to the extent that it can do better than that level; much better.
>> But, if I were trying to make things happen with IAEP, I would try to do
>> just a few main things, and one of them would be to make a
>> program/user-interface which could do a great job of teaching a child to
>> read and write their native language without requiring any more from the
>> adults around them than a little encouragement.
> This is exactly what we do (sikshana.blogspot.com) but in a way that differs
> from Sugarlabs. Kids use computer as a tool to discover, to create, to
> simulate ideas; not as an appliance to be owned.

I don't think Sugar Labs has much to say about who owns the computing
device. I would personally be happy to work on Sugar so that people
with differing views on that aspect benefit from it.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Their projects are
> accumulated on a personal flash chip, but the tool itself is shared (and
> changes every year) and augments other learning aids in the schools. We don't
> know if this is the best way to use a computer. We started with this
> assumption and will tweak it as we learn more about its effectiveness.
>
> Subbu
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