[Squeakland] Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am Jan 19, 2007 um 1:33  schrieb John Maxwell:

> Hi, everybody,
>
> For the past few years, I have been working on a historical study  
> on the Dynabook vision as conceived in the early 1970s as well as  
> how the idea and its various incarnations have played out in the  
> intervening three-and-a-half decades. This has been part of my PhD  
> work in education at the University of BC -- as such, I am working  
> from an educational perspective, rather than a compsci one.
>
> As of November 2006 I finally finished the thing, and successfully  
> defended it. I hereby unleash it on this community, in the hopes  
> that it will provoke discussion on the Squeak-oriented mailing  
> lists and beyond. Squeak-dev and Squeakland have been major  
> resources to me all the while, and I'd like to thank everyone on  
> these lists for providing such a rich ongoing commentary.
>
> The entire work is roughly 300 pages. This link is to a PDF just  
> under 2 megabytes. At some point, if I have some time, I want to  
> break this out into some more granular web pages, but I'm already  
> late in releasing it, so here it is in its entirety. You can find  
> it (along with a brief abstract and ToC) at:
>
>   http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/dissertation
>
> I'm very interested in any comments you might have.

Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for  
"OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine),  
but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on that.

 From my perspective, the hardware is surely there and pretty much  
could account for the "book" in "dynabook". The question is, from  
today's perspective, what software could fulfill the "dyna" part of it?

Maybe you even have some thoughts on the reality of a dynabook in  
your thesis, going to read it asap :)

- Bert -