[IAEP] [squeakland] Alan's Talk on "Programming and Scaling" at HPI now available online

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Wed, July 27, 2011 2:55 pm, Carlos Rabassa wrote:
> Rita, Steve,
>
> thanks for calling this talk and link to our attention,  we found it
> extremely interesting.

Wonderful stuff.

> All the concepts Alan explains left us thinking.  His clear explanations
> add to the shock of thinking of these ideas for the first time.
>
> It is like when we learn about a good new invention,  we think "this is a
> great idea but,  how come I never thought of this before?"

“’Of course!’ I [Watson] cried. ‘How obvious!’”

“”Everything is obvious when once it has been _explained_ to you,’
returned Holmes, a trace of asperity in his voice.” [Emphasis added.]

> We thought it was very nice to thank all those individuals that helped him
> in developing his ideas.  I guess it is true there are many potential
> geniuses who are missing the cooperation of those developers and never see
> their great ideas materialize. We found it a nice and generous gesture on
> the part of Alan.  Needless to say it was nice to see people we know and
> appreciate like Bert and Yoshiki,  receive this well deserved recognition.

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the
shoulders of giants.--Isaac Newton

Of course, this does not work for everyone. One must at least be able to
climb the giant.

If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of
giants.--Possibly from Usenet, source unknown.

> Another point that stuck to our mind was the idea of erasing the present
> to plan for the future.  This, Alan claims, forces us to look all over the
> past to find ideas to develop the future.  Last November,  at Plan
> Ceibal´s year end conference,  one of the speakers shocked us bringing
> examples of teaching in the past,  like the artisans and their pupils a
> few hundreds of years ago,  as examples of good education that we can
> implement today thanks to computers.

We do not have to look only to the past.

The Maasai of Kenya have a traditional education system that turns their
boys into experts on soils, weather, native plants and animals, their
traditional hunting and fighting weapons, strategies, and tactics, and
much more, and also into Olympic-level athletes. Girls learn in equal
detail building, animal "husbandry" and other subjects important to their
traditional cultural roles. There are also problems within this system,
but one cannot simply impose a European education on people who need to
understand their environment much more directly and in great detail, and
do not need training as shop clerks and industrial workers.

The Andaman Islanders were the only ones in the coastal areas around the
Indian Ocean who reportedly lost nobody in the Indonesian tsunami, because
they were the only ones who passed down the story that when the ocean went
away, everybody was to run for high ground before it came roaring back.
All of the colonial education systems and their post-colonial successors
around the Indian Ocean have gone to a great deal of trouble to root out
such "old wives' tales".

> Most ideas we hear today about how
> to use computers in schools are the same teaching systems we already have
> in place,  just scaled up to handle large numbers of students.

It has been much worse than that. Suppose we had "print literacy" labs,
where we kept all of the books, pencils, and paper, and allowed children
in once a week, but never allowed them to apply what they learned there to
either classwork or homework, and suppose in addition that most of them
had none of these things at home.

In Uruguay, Peru, and other countries that are planning to give a computer
to every child, education will be transformed far beyond any of the plans
of the governments, school administrations, teachers' unions, or anyone
else. Nobody saw in Gutenberg's first press the proliferation of editions
of the classics, Bible translations into hundreds of languages (now more
than 2,000, in whole or in part), novels, scholarly journals, newspapers,
magazines, and all the rest. Hardly anybody foresaw the Web until it
happened. Likewise with e-commerce, social networks, Wikipedia, and all of
the rest.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans.--Modern proverb

Life is what happens while you were making other plans.--Another modern
proverb

> Carlos Rabassa
> Volunteer
> Plan Ceibal Support Network
> Montevideo, Uruguay
>
>
>
> On Jul 25, 2011, at 11:04 PM, Steve Thomas wrote:
>
>> Alan Kay's Talks "Programming and Scaling" is now available online at:
>> http://www.tele-task.de/de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/
>> _______________________________________________
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>
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-- 
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://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks