<html><head><style type="text/css"></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>Hi Martin, Very well thought out observations and comments! These give a sense of what lies beyond the first set of ideas everyone has to why the real deal has not been accomplished over the last 50 years. Cheers, Alan </div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><hr size="1">From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> To: Erick Lavoie <erick.lavoie@gmail.com> Cc: Alan Kay <alan.nemo@yahoo.com>; K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk@gmail.com>; iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; sugar-narratives@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, July 3, 2009 12:50:07 AM Subject: Re: [IAEP] changes in outlook with Sugar (was Re: Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW) On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Erick Lavoie<<a ymailto="mailto:erick.lavoie@gmail.com" href="mailto:erick.lavoie@gmail.com">erick.lavoie@gmail.com</a>> wrote: > The high level roadmap I would suggest to end up with a mentoring system > would be: Excellent post - thanks! While Alan's posts are inspiring, my hands can help with something like your roadmap more effectively than with raising 19B USD :-) > A partial answer to the motivation problem Alan talked about in mastering a > skill like reading would be in my opinion to provide constant feedback on > the progress of a learner in pursuit of a goal.  Such feedback seems to be > the key behind the success of a system like Nike+ and the addicting effect > of video games. I think it could be replicated for a learning environment by > showing the mastership level of different skills needed to achieve a goal > and their evolution in time. I find this part problematic, however. Been working in software related to e-learning for ~9 years, and the computer is really limited (ie: stupid) at measuring whether the user can achieve interesting and useful goals. Games do provice the continuous feedback you mention, but they work on things the computer can understand. And the computer cannot understand much, actually. Attempts to make the computer assess complex things are usually based on very creative use (by the designers / programmers) of simple rules; and these attempts impress adults... but when you see kids using them, they _immediately_ figure out that the "real game" is to "play to the mechanics, as implemented". In other words, they learn to trick the computer. And they learn it fast! The roadmap you outline works towards a very important toolset -- building tutorials on how to use things is a powerful thing. And getting kids to build tutorials themselves on skills they just acquired is a great tool to work on the skill and deepen it. But it is not a tool to develop non-computer skills. Clearly, we have strong hints on how to build effective self-learning tools for a specific subset of skills (ie: computer-use skills, and computer-assessable-skills), but these techniques don't apply well to topics outside those specific areas (as far as I can see, glad to be proved wrong). I naturally worry about this leading to a heavily biased set of tools; tools that help with that narrow slice  we know how to deal with... and leave a huge, glaring gap. I guess there are two ways about this. We can embrace the narrowness of our help, and perhaps even reinforce it by making explicit the narrow focus, so nobody thinks we're out to cover much. Or we can work on approaches that cover a wider area, and I am thinking very specifically about social constructivism here. My preference -- as you can guess now -- is to understand how can we aim for wider tools and approaches that take advantage of social dynamics. These will be perhaps less directly effective in their feedback loop (addictiveness, stickiness, etc), but will be able to deal with the kind of skills that computers can't help with. For all the fascination that computer games (solo and networked) cause,  the behaviour I see in game players is that past the initial exploratory stage players are _always_ playing to the mechanical rules. If they don't know the "metaphor" that those rules stand in for, they don't actually learn it. cheers, martin -- <a ymailto="mailto:martin.langhoff@gmail.com" href="mailto:martin.langhoff@gmail.com">martin.langhoff@gmail.com</a> <a ymailto="mailto:martin@laptop.org" href="mailto:martin@laptop.org">martin@laptop.org</a> -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first - <a target="_blank" href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff</a> </div></div></div> </body></html>