[Squeakland] squeakfest conclusions

[José L. Redrejo Rodríguez]

Hi, all
I've checked the Squeakfest'06 schedule page and donwloaded some of the
materials that are available there.
Unfortunately, the sound of the S. Papert speech recording is pretty
bad, specially for those who don't have english as our native language,
the noise make some parts really hard to be understood.
Anyway, it's wonderful to be able to see it for all of us who haven't
could attend this year.
I would like to know more about how the event has gone, some of the
topics of the schedule that look very promising, as SimBuilder, don't
have any information at all, to know the state of the art for this
project.
But, what for me would be more useful is to know the general impression
of the attendants to the current state of the Squeak use in particular,
and of computers at schools in general. Squeak is more or less involved
in a good bunch of projects as Tweak, Sophie, Croquet, Scratch, OLPC,
etc, but the feeling I have from the distance is that all that cloud of
projects don't seem to be followed by the educators, they just look like
laboratory experiments, not being applied to the classroom except for
some testing purposes. The main Squeak community seems to be quite
stationary and almost no new projects (in terms of .pr files and also,
in term of the application use) have arrived for the last year. Maybe
it's just an impression as the squeakland site is not updated too often,
maybe it's the real world. 
Some of you know that in Spain, in our Extremadura region, some crazy
people are fighting trying to use the computers to build a new way of
thinking and a new way of teaching, but the main stream in the educative
community is really strong, and what I see here, and in the rest of the
world is that most of the budget is going to pay applications or
platforms that just translate the text books to the computers, as if
that were enough to justify the use of computers in the classroom. When
the teachers have their curricula contents in the computer as in the
book, they feel safe. That's a stupid way of thinking for me as the text
book is cheaper and easier to use, but people feel comfortable that
way. 
So, ending with this too long mail, my main questions are:
- what's the feeling people have brought after attending squeakfest?
- Are there new development or projects being made in Squeak, or around
its projects?
- Any other related thing you would like to tell to all who felt sad not
being in Chicago listening and learning..
Best Regards.
José L.