On Wed, July 27, 2011 2:55 pm, Carlos Rabassa wrote:

Rita, Steve,

thanks for calling this talk and link to our attention, we found it extremely interesting.

Wonderful stuff.

All the concepts Alan explains left us thinking. His clear explanations add to the shock of thinking of these ideas for the first time.

It is like when we learn about a good new invention, we think "this is a great idea but, how come I never thought of this before?"

“’Of course!’ I [Watson] cried. ‘How obvious!’”

“”Everything is obvious when once it has been _explained_ to you,’ returned Holmes, a trace of asperity in his voice.” [Emphasis added.]

We thought it was very nice to thank all those individuals that helped him in developing his ideas. I guess it is true there are many potential geniuses who are missing the cooperation of those developers and never see their great ideas materialize. We found it a nice and generous gesture on the part of Alan. Needless to say it was nice to see people we know and appreciate like Bert and Yoshiki, receive this well deserved recognition.

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.--Isaac Newton

Of course, this does not work for everyone. One must at least be able to climb the giant.

If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants.--Possibly from Usenet, source unknown.

Another point that stuck to our mind was the idea of erasing the present to plan for the future. This, Alan claims, forces us to look all over the past to find ideas to develop the future. Last November, at Plan Ceibal´s year end conference, one of the speakers shocked us bringing examples of teaching in the past, like the artisans and their pupils a few hundreds of years ago, as examples of good education that we can implement today thanks to computers.

We do not have to look only to the past.

The Maasai of Kenya have a traditional education system that turns their boys into experts on soils, weather, native plants and animals, their traditional hunting and fighting weapons, strategies, and tactics, and much more, and also into Olympic-level athletes. Girls learn in equal detail building, animal "husbandry" and other subjects important to their traditional cultural roles. There are also problems within this system, but one cannot simply impose a European education on people who need to understand their environment much more directly and in great detail, and do not need training as shop clerks and industrial workers.

The Andaman Islanders were the only ones in the coastal areas around the Indian Ocean who reportedly lost nobody in the Indonesian tsunami, because they were the only ones who passed down the story that when the ocean went away, everybody was to run for high ground before it came roaring back. All of the colonial education systems and their post-colonial successors around the Indian Ocean have gone to a great deal of trouble to root out such "old wives' tales".

Most ideas we hear today about how to use computers in schools are the same teaching systems we already have in place, just scaled up to handle large numbers of students.

It has been much worse than that. Suppose we had "print literacy" labs, where we kept all of the books, pencils, and paper, and allowed children in once a week, but never allowed them to apply what they learned there to either classwork or homework, and suppose in addition that most of them had none of these things at home.

In Uruguay, Peru, and other countries that are planning to give a computer to every child, education will be transformed far beyond any of the plans of the governments, school administrations, teachers' unions, or anyone else. Nobody saw in Gutenberg's first press the proliferation of editions of the classics, Bible translations into hundreds of languages (now more than 2,000, in whole or in part), novels, scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, and all the rest. Hardly anybody foresaw the Web until it happened. Likewise with e-commerce, social networks, Wikipedia, and all of the rest.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans.--Modern proverb

Life is what happens while you were making other plans.--Another modern proverb

Carlos Rabassa Volunteer Plan Ceibal Support Network Montevideo, Uruguay

On Jul 25, 2011, at 11:04 PM, Steve Thomas wrote:

...

Alan Kay's Talks "Programming and Scaling" is now available online at: http://www.tele-task.de/de/archive/lecture/overview/5819/ _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

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