[squeakland] squeakland week

Rita Freudenberg rita at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de
Fri Nov 19 09:49:00 EST 2010


Dear Squeaklanders,

this is my first attempt to give you short overview about what happened this week in Squeakland. I'm not sure how often I'll succeed in writing this, hopefully more often than in the last months. But if I don't write, that doesn't mean hat nothing happens! And you are welcome to ask everything you want to know anytime on this list!

#1. There was an "International Conference on ICT for Development & Education" this week in Kathmandu, Nepal. It was organized by Madhur Shresta and SM Foundation. Madhur has participated in several Squeakfests in the past years. I gave an online presentation on Wednesday and there was at least one other Etoys presentation by Toshio Miyasaka. [1]

#2. We had our weekly education team meeting on Thursday, where we discussed Gary's plans for teaching Etoys in Nepal. 3 schools will be involved, one in Kathmandu, two in more remote areas. Connectivity is a problem there, available solutions rather expensive. There are efforts to develop Etoys lessons about health care, Randy, Cherry and Beth are involved. If anyone is interested, there is a lot to be done, and it is an important topic for Haiti right now. Beth reported, that a young high school student is helping to create an Etoys unit on malaria.
We shortly talked about the manual. There is a document that visualizes the current state of each chapter, green means "done", red means "needs to be done" and yellow and orange are the states in between. Then we discussed if and how we want to support the introduction of programming using Etoys. We are interested in this topic, for different reasons, but we agree that this is not the focus of Etoys and Squeakland. It is not about programming, but critical thinking. 

At the end Carlos told us how much he enjoys reading "Mindstorms" by Seymour Papert. He says, this is the only book teachers would need to learn how to teach using Etoys! [2]

#3. Carlos send an announcement for a conference on Digital Citizenship in Montevideo, Uruguay at the end of November, where Walter Bender will be one of the speakers. [3]

#4. There is a new interview with Alan Kay about computers in schools. He is being cited with "Computers have become tools of distraction, Kay said, instead of education." We need to find ways to show teachers how Etoys can add to education. [4] 

#5. Bert did send around a very interesting TED Lecture video this week about "Teaching kids real math with computers". Here is the link again in case you missed it.[5]

Greetings,
Rita

[1] http://technetnepal.net/blogs/ict/archive/tags/Conference/default.aspx
[2] http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/2010/11/18/education+team+meeting%2C+November+18th
[3] http://www.ciudadaniadigital.com.uy/conferencistas.html
[4] http://www.cultofmac.com/computers-in-schools-are-a-failure-apple-fellow-alan-kay/68757?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cultofmac%2FbFow+%28Cult+of+Mac%29
[5] http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers.html
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