[IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers

[Alan Kay]

Four questions for your consideration ...

1. Would you encourage students of yours to create unsupported opinions, and to express them without doing any checking?

2. Have you put in the effort to learn about the psychological, anthropological, neurological and educational sources that were drawn on to invent both personal computing and the "powerful ideas" curricula which have been done and carefully tested over the years? (Hint, most of this information has been published and is readily available ...)

3. Do you know who did this work, and what they actually did? Were they "techies" in your sense of the term? What kind of rigor and review were they subject to?

4. Can you appreciate the difference between "rigor" and "review", and that of "good experimental design"? To just pick one example, our extensive work over the years has consistently shown that it takes about three years of *testing* a curriculum idea and process before you can get a good experimental result. There are almost always too many artifacts in the first several years to get strong enough results. Very few "rigorous" and "reviewed" studies in the educational literature have enough of a longitudinal range to weed out the real artifacts (which include insufficient teacher experience with the process, mechanical flaws of various kinds even in eventually good ideas, etc.) Very few funders are willing to fund the extra two years of testing, and longitudinal transfer experiments really take a long time to pull off.

To pick another example (from "computer science" this time), most of today's "CS" published material has a kind of "rigor" and is definitely "reviewed", but if the actual field has developed deep fundamental flaws over the years and most of the reviewers have drunk the same Kool-Aid, the rigor can have as little significance as that of St Thomas Aquinas. In my opinion (comparing against typical work of 40 years ago), if the problems chosen are not particularly interesting and are not likely to lead to real advances, then all the rigor and review in the world is not going to make a mediocre paper better.

The deeper scientific questions in soft areas like educational theory and curriculum design have to be concerned first asking important questions, and second with whether all the relevant cases have been identified and considered and factored into the actual designs and experimental methodology. (And I'm a big fan of being really careful and getting real criticism from real peers too)




________________________________
From: Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>; Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>; IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
Sent: Sat, June 12, 2010 7:36:35 PM
Subject: RE: [IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers

 
Alas, 

This is just one more example of the growing digital divide... between the "techie" community  and the educational community.

It is time the techies give some respect to educational research and research in neuropsychology and learning theory.**  The guidelines for research in these areas are very rigorous, and experimental design goes through careful review before, during, and after it takes place.  Results are reported in scholarly journals and professional meetings.

If the "techies" know so much more than the educators and neuroscientists, why don't they share their knowledge in a scholarly fashion and subject it to the same rigorous scrutiny?

Sorry for the rant, but it sometimes seems we aren't speaking the same language. Yet I know we all want the best for our real clients... the students.

Caryl

** The same thing could be said about the government officials who still believe that standardized testing is a measure of learning.   
________________________________
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:59:00 -0700
From: alan.nemo at yahoo.com
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers
To: cbigenho at hotmail.com; bert at freudenbergs.de; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org


Steve didn't forget anything -- he caused the iPad to be redeveloped and put out as a product (that was what I was referring to).

It's not just small type -- it's small page size, not enough pixels for great antialiasing, and also trade-offs between visual angles due to the conflict of sampling between two discrete mechanisms (display and retina).

And visual angle is also very important younger ages, and for drag and drop construction, visible resources, etc. For example, the excellent Scratch interface is not nearly as effective on the XO despite the large number of pixels.

I'm not putting out unsupported or internally generated random opinions here. (And I would be very leery of "educational" research in general. They are trying to look for the lost keys under the lamp post rather in the inconvenient dark down the street where they were lost.)

For example, it is still that case that the better reader you are, the harder it is to read on any computer screen, still today, and even the ones that don't flicker at all. We put a lot of effort at Xerox PARC to do the experiments and observations to understand what it takes to make readable electronic media (among other things, I was the original type designer and tester there for both bit-map screens and the early laser printers). One part of the story can be found in Tom Cornsweet's book on the modulation transfer function of human vision as related to stable reflective media. Another has to do with the tradeoffs between visual acuity, light sensitivity, saccades, scanning, and several other factors in the way human vision works.

I don't think anyone would accuse me of having tried to reinvent the wheel, or admonish me to try not to (but the range of random opinion out there is wide indeed). 

However, I am worried that the big propensity today is that so many people in both computing and education are "reinventing the flat tire".

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>; Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>; IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
Sent: Sat, June 12, 2010 5:12:43 PM
Subject: RE: [IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers

 Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:43:14 -0700
From: alan.nemo at yahoo.com
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers
To: cbigenho at hotmail.com; bert at freudenbergs.de; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org


The reason I told Steve a few years ago to make the iPhone screen at least 5" by 8" is that the small screens on phones are *really really bad* for good use in education (especially for children). This is amazingly not at all understood by a vast number of "educators".

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________

Well....

Evidently "Steve" forgot to tell his developers and marketing departments. This is just a small sampling of what is out there:

http://www.apple.com/education/ipodtouch-iphone/?gclid=CK6QlN_fm6ICFQ4BiQodWRR3xg

http://projects.minot.k12.nd.us/groups/chris/weblog/5ce29/Why_an_iPod_Touch_in_education_.html

http://www.squidoo.com/ipod_education

Actually I would love to see some recent hard data from real educational research about the effects/affects of screen size (or type size?) on children.  We all know that primers begin children with large type and that the books progress to smaller type as the child gets older.  

However, some very bright children move to smaller type books ahead of their age cohort.  Is this harmful?  Should these children be held back for fear of damaging them? What does neuroscience and educational research have to say about this?

As an aside to developers, I notice Apple is already touting the "educational apps" that are available. Be sure you don't re-invent the wheel... unless, of course, it is a much better wheel! (Which I'm sure it will be.)

Caryl


      
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