[IAEP] [squeakland] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric

Sat Feb 5 22:04:54 EST 2011

On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 14:11, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi Chunka,
>
> I've been challenged on this point more than once, and have challenged back
> to come up with one invention that was done after 1980 that matches up to
> the top 10 done before 1980.

Second the motion. The Internet comes from DARPA. Interactive,
collaborative computing comes from Doug Engelbart's group at SRI, with
government funding. Alan's work on Smalltalk at Xerox was founded
directly on Doug's. The Apple Mac (and Lisa) GUI and Windows are just
high-budget, low-concept retoolings of parts of Smalltalk, without the
good stuff.

The innovations in education that I use come from Maria Montessori,
Jean Piaget, Georges Cuisenaire, Caleb Gattigno, and others in the
early to mid 20th century. The pioneers of computers in education
include Omar Khayyam Moore (who supplemented the computer with a
graduate student), Ken Iverson, and Seymour Papert in the 1960s.
Almost all of the rest of us are working out details from their great
insights, or more often ignoring most of their work to concentrate on
some tiny part of it.

Men of one idea, like a hen with one chick, and that a
duckling.--Henry David Thoreau

Alan has asked what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug
Engelbart's ideas. I don't think the situation is globally that dire,
but I do think that the next wave will not come from Silicon Valley,
but from somewhere unexpected, quite likely some place where our XO
children are allowed sufficient freedom to innovate, or find ways to
do it regardless.

However, there is a substantial movement now to replace printed
textbooks with less expensive computers with Free Software and
Creative Commons content. There is a substantial movement to create
unencumbered content, particularly in academic publishing. There is
not a very rapid uptake of these tools in school systems, but it is
early days yet.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,
then you win.--Mahatma Gandhi

Then they claim that it was their idea all along.--Edward Mokurai Cherlin

I am in discussions with Dan Cohen the Mathman, mathman.biz, over his
Calculus By and For Young People, and with the company that Caleb
Gattegno founded to commercialize his Silent Way of teaching
languages, for donations of content to Sugar. I will be talking with
the Squeakland list about putting their approaches into Etoys
software.

> This has not happened. I've been able to show the prior art for all
> suggestions.
>
> Essentially everything in the last 30 years has been commercializations and
> other forms of "innovation" based on what was funded by ARPA, ONR, and by
> extension, Xerox in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
>
> The important point here is that there are many new inventions needed, and
> they can be identified, but no one has been willing to fund them. It's not
> that the early birds got the worms, but that most of the needed worms out
> there are being missed.

The problem in education research goes much deeper than lack of
funding. It is deeply political, and touches many people's sense of
who and what they are, including parents, teachers, school
administrations, and politicians.

There are worms that got initial research funding, but the political
environment is so toxic that we cannot use the results.

An example of a toxic dispute that is not overtly political is whole
word vs. phonics in teaching reading. Both are required in English,
which has many variant spellings for its phonemes, and words such as
'once' that conform to no rule at all. One of the political dimensions
of this and related disputes is that teachers refuse to discuss
linguistics research. In part it is a status thing, a Thorstein
Veblen/Theory of the Leisure Class phenomenon, because teachers want
to teach the high-status version of any language, not the vernacular,
and because teachers have been losing status in the US for decades,
with shrinking pay, benefits, and rights, and constant attacks from
political grandstanders.

An example of a purely political dispute is evolutionary biology vs.
Creationism, where some Creationists have convinced themselves that
Darwin is the Apostle of the Antichrist, and most agree that science
is part of a plot to destroy all that is good and true in human
society. Sex education is to them the clearest symptom that this moral
decay is deliberate.

> Cheers,
>
> Alan
> ________________________________
> From: Chunka Mui <chunka at cornerloft.com>
> To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
> Cc: Carlos Rabassa <carnen at mac.com>; "america-latina at squeakland.org"
> <america-latina at squeakland.org>; squeakland.org mailing list
> <squeakland at squeakland.org>; Maho 2010 <maho at realness.org>; IAEP SugarLabs
> <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios
> docentes <olpc-sur at lists.laptop.org>; olpc bolivia
> <olpc-bolivia at lists.laptop.org>; OLPC Puno <olpcpuno at gmail.com>
> Sent: Sat, February 5, 2011 10:53:44 AM
> Subject: Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
>
>
>
> On Jan 30, 2011, at 9:21 AM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> GE is being congratulated for recognizing that the iPhone and iPad are
> pretty good ideas and technological realizations. But isn't this like the
> congratulations Bill Gates got for finally recognizing the Internet (about
> 25 years after it had started working)?
>
> Seems as though Apple had a lot more on the ball than Bill Gates or GE here
> (they used to do computing in the 60s, but couldn't see what it was).
>
> And most of the ideas at Apple (and for personal computing and the Internet)
> came from research funding that no company or government has been willing to
> do since 1982.
>
>
> Alan -- Could you say more about this point?  Surely there's been tons of CS
> and IT funding since '82, both govt funding to universities and massive
> research budgets at msft, hp,
> Regards,
> Chunka
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>
> ________________________________
> From: Carlos Rabassa <carnen at mac.com>
> To: america-latina at squeakland.org; squeakland.org mailing list
> <squeakland at squeakland.org>; Maho 2010 <maho at realness.org>; IAEP SugarLabs
> <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios
> docentes <olpc-sur at lists.laptop.org>; olpc bolivia
> <olpc-bolivia at lists.laptop.org>; OLPC Puno <olpcpuno at gmail.com>
> Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 4:11:49 AM
> Subject: [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
>
> We try to learn from those who have succeed for a long time:
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1XWm2q8nQ-l5KUJ_PWkQruLDx-nZ7nsKDfg4idDlsU50
>
> Carlos Rabassa
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
> _______________________________________________
> squeakland mailing list
> squeakland at squeakland.org
> http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>

-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://www.earthtreasury.org/