Thanks for the reply, Kim. I do plan to attend the Chicago SqueakFest and hope to learn much more then. I'm quickly getting attached to Squeak as a science/math learning tool - having bought the "Powerful Ideas ..." book, Squeak DVD, and playing with it with my 7-year-old. I'd be curious how many folks who are members of nsta.org are familiar with/using Squeak (I just recently became a NSTA member). Perhaps having a workshop at the annual NSTA mtg next year would be something to shoot for. For now, I intend to take a grass-roots approach by teaching a Sat. morning class at our county library.
I head up a new, small lab here in Indianapolis that's one of a so-called "Pervasive Technology Labs" affiliated with Indiana University. My lab is called the Scientific Data Analysis Lab and one area I'd like to become more involved in is K-12 science & math education using computers/IT. Indianapolis also has some terrific museums where it would be interesting to set up a "Squeak station" for children to use. One thought I've recently had is to consider porting Squeak to a large tabletop display which a sister lab has devised that would allow for multiple (~3) children to stand around and collaborate. (This would require changes to the user interface/mouse).
I'm certainly open to the possibility of going after joint funding and would be happy to discuss this offline (as I'm sure many other academics are :).
--Randy
-----Original Message----- From: Kim Rose [mailto:kim.rose@squeakland.org] Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 10:25 AM To: Randy Heiland Cc: squeakland.org mailing list Subject: Re: [Squeakland] collaborative uses
Hi, Randy -
When I think of "collaborative possibilities with Squeak" I think first of people getting together and working together in groups toward a common set of goals. Ironically, I don't think immediately of how the Squeak enviornment might help us collaborate, but rather how we can work together socially (either via email, phone, face to face meetings) to create more curriculum, project examples for new users, new "first time" and introductory experiences, etc.
In "Squeakland" we have a developing community of players and practitioners who are very interested in coming together and creating some of this work. SqueakFest (in Chicago/August) will give us an opportunity to meet face to face, exhange ideas, develop deeper relationships and enable opportunities to work together to produce some meaningful Squeak-based content and proejcts.
The workshop at Teachers Colleage (April 1 and 2) also just announced, is another opportunity for collaboration. The folks at T.C. are most interested in establishing a shared database/repository of Etoy projects accessible to teachers and students to which we might all contribute examples.
Other possibilities are to enter into grant opportunities together to receive funding to enable further development of not only the Squeak system, but again, content and projects suitable for different learners of different ages, in different subject matter areas. I think this is what we deeply need at this time.
Hope to meet you in either New York, or Chicago or both! cheers, Kim
Hello,
I was just curious if there are any existing collaborative
possibilities
with Squeak? This is a very open-ended question, I realize, but I'm interested in any/all aspects of it. Well, I'm not into multiuser gaming. I am curious about the possibility of squeakers being able
to,
say, obtain/display data from online instruments. Or being able to build up a regional/national database of (local) measurements -
similar
to the "plot of temperatures" figure in Alan Kay's "Computers,
Networks
and Education" paper?
More on the tech side, are protocols such as XML-RPC supported in Squeak?
thanks, Randy
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