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
Am Jan 19, 2007 um 1:33 schrieb John Maxwell:
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.
Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for "OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine), but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on that.
From my perspective, the hardware is surely there and pretty much could account for the "book" in "dynabook". The question is, from today's perspective, what software could fulfill the "dyna" part of it?
Maybe you even have some thoughts on the reality of a dynabook in your thesis, going to read it asap :)
- Bert -
Hi, Great work !
Probably a little out of topic but on the same track is toontalk http://toontalk.com
Toontalk is not open source and free, but cheap and the beta version can be used freely if you give feed back. With tootalk we get an interaction when an object is droped on an other.
This way programing is recording these interactions while training a robot to do things.
Programmation is no more lexical but procedural.
Many kids which have difficulties at school, have problems with langage but have the thinking of action,can do but can not explain with words.
When I discover Squeak , they easily pass to Squeak and find similarities like:
Book associated to an object with toontalk are the same as wiewer from blue eye with Squeak.
In this way, I have writen a project for building geometric figures with Etoys, using the interface gadget for the variable of type player to designate objects used as parameter.
This concern not programming but building by doing versus describing.
See the project on the swiki of the french community.
http://ofset.org:8000/super/210
How to start:
Clic on objects in the green area to get a copy.
For instanc get two copies of ellipses(points) then a coy of a straight line.
Click on each yellow square and show a point. Clic on go to active scripts.
You have built a straight line passing by two points.
Help ballon explain what thing to show for a gadget. Sorry in french. But using red halo menu debug/edit ballon help anybody can change it for any language).
Be carrefull
Hitting just publish will save the project back on the server. hit alt/dot to abort saving in this case!
The right way: Stay on publish and choose 'publish on another server' to save the project in your computer.
Best regards
_______________________________________________ Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
-------- Message d'origine-------- De: squeakland-bounces@squeakland.org de la part de Bert Freudenberg Date: ven. 19/01/2007 11:09 À: The general-purpose Squeak developers list Cc: squeakland@squeakland.org Objet : Re: [Squeakland] Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation
Am Jan 19, 2007 um 1:33 schrieb John Maxwell:
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.
Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for "OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine), but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on that.
From my perspective, the hardware is surely there and pretty much could account for the "book" in "dynabook". The question is, from today's perspective, what software could fulfill the "dyna" part of it?
Maybe you even have some thoughts on the reality of a dynabook in your thesis, going to read it asap :)
- Bert -
_______________________________________________ Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Bert Freudenberg -
Dreyfuss Pierre-André (EDU) -
John Maxwell