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.
- John Maxwell Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Simon Fraser University jmax@sfu.ca