2009/1/10 Walter Bender walter.bender@gmail.com:
In regard to your specific examples, you can easily import the output of Record into Abiword and you can run the two Activities in parallel and share media objects between multiple users. What is the use case for a more tight coupling.
That's the point, we don't know exactly what is the point of more tight coupling. And it is from this point we can have creative way of using the computer. Now, in this previous example, if I mention an interactive geometry activity instead of the Record activity, the coupling will be more obvious to you as an educated adult: coupling text activities and interactive geometry canvas may look more obvious. Nevertheless can we pretend coupling tightly Abiword and Record is (will be) irrelevant? This is not how I perceive been creative with computer.
I will take another example. A few years ago when I implemented user programming in DrGeo1.1, I had no idea of the use of such features. I only know this feature will be an open door for creative users. Indeed several months later, a math teacher from Italy started to use this feature in unique way useful to him to expose historical math problems (a few examples in http://www.ofset.org/uploadfiles/64/download/libro.pdf), another one from Taiwan where modeling mechanic problem with it. All these uses were unthinkable in their exact instantiation, but I was clearly expecting this instrumentation process .
activity by activity basis, for example, Arjun Sarwal, the author of Measure, integrated data capture directly into Turtle Art. But that was a developer, not an end user. As I said, we have a ways to go.
Yes, it is where the Smalltalk/Morph/Etoys has excelled for years. It pushed this capability in the user land... That's indeed a huge contribution. Not only Smalltalk/Morph/Etoys makes it possible for user, but moreover it makes it possible at two levels: - at the Etoys level, to interlink artifacts - at a lower Smalltalk level (however still a very higher level compare to other solution) to design additional artifacts for example.
And yes all this in a very user-friendly environment. Well may be this one is really the downside of Smalltalk/Morph/Etoys. However project like Smalltalk Pharo with much fewer resources than Etoys/Sugar/OLPC shows it can be easily updated and improved.
However all this creative capability in the user land got a price, the documentation. You really need good documentation to take a chance to get it used. You need to provide the key to play with the lock, or it will be show stopper. And better provide such documentation directly in the laptop.
Hilaire