Hi Joshep,
Thanks for your interest and sorry for the technicalities. Is some kind of old bad habit from "academy and research" and their ivory towers built with expert languages. I will try to explain myself and provide more technical details in links. It doesn't help not being a native English speaker neither, but I will try my best.
So, lets start with the idea of critical literacy practices. This idea comes, mostly, from adults literacy. In such context, the teaching practices developed with children don't work pretty well (or at all). So the teachers of such practices don't start by teaching the basic of letters and handwriting and syllables compositions and words, as used with children education, or problems about adding numbers or planets names and rotation trajectories. Paulo Freire[1], for example, started with what he call "problemas generadores" (I don't know the English translation, but is about problems that create more problems, usually related with social and emotional issues), like reading the local newspapers or writing/reading letters from/for the loved ones, working such problems with poor people in rural Brasil. In such practices he recognized that there is not such think as a "neutral" education practice, and that education is about empowerment (or not) of the oppressed. So, think in something like that, but instead of using "classical" literacy for the printed world, we use practices related with data and code for young and mature adults. In such endeavor we don't start with the classical (and kind of dumb) "Hello world!" introduction to computing [2], but with social problems and questions: Do we and our politicians monologue or dialogue in social networks? How our public money is spend? How much information release the governments about medicine information[3]? Do you really need to have a lot of "Big Data" to be a critical participant in the "information society"?
Once we have such questions, we start to get the proper vocabulary (coding+data) to express our partial ideas using prototypes. For that, we learn about Smalltalk basis, but instead of learning to create "apps", we learn to create visualizations and to tell stories supported by data. Some visualizations are the classical colored world map, like the one in the Panama Papers example [4], but made with reproducibility in mind. The idea is not only to publish a bitmap (png, jpeg) or vector image (SVG, PDF), but to provide the complete rationale, data and code behind such stories and visualizations. Other visualizations are custom made, to express some kind of issue, like the one about medicines released information[3] or our ways of communication in Twitter[5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire [2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/dumb-hello-world [3] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/sdv-infomed [4] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1 [5] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/ds-twitter-mockup
Despite of not being directly inspired by the theories of Alan Kay or Paulo Freire, I think that my research put some of their ideas into dialogue. What would happen if we put the ideas of Dynabook, started with kids ( and developed in the North) in dialogue with the ideas of Critical Pedagogy, started with adults (and developed in the South) in the current age of data? How new ways of civic participation are created when people learn how to use data, code, visualization and storytelling to talk about civic concerns?
I hope to be clearer, but let me know if I'm still in the Ivory Tower.
Thanks again,
Offray
On 05/02/18 20:24, Joseph Alotta wrote:
Offray,
I am sorry but I don’t understand what your project is about. The words you use are very precise words that have a technical meaning that I do not possess.
Can you give us a simple example? I am looking for the junior high school version of your explanation.
Sincerely,
Joseph. _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners