Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu> said:

>There is also a top-down approach, by going to educational technology
>researchers, ed software companies, and administrators.  Of these
>communities, I know ed tech research the best, and it's pretty heavily
>invested in Java these days.  For example, the US National Science
>Foundation (NSF) recently funded three national Centers for educational
>technology (see http://www.cilt.org and http://www.letus.nwu.edu/ for two
>of them), and they've become vocal advocates of Java in educational
>technology.  There was just a big piece in IEEE Computer with the CILT
>group advocating Java Beans as a way of creating reusable educational
>components.   When I show Squeak to these people, and I explain that we
>have complete source code compatability across many platforms, their
>jaws
>literally drop.  But these Centers are pretty large, and after investing
>many lines of programmer code, many hours of talks, and many papers on a
>Java-based approach, it's not easy to shift to Squeak.  As one of the
>Principal Investigators on the LETUS project said to me, "We've already
bet
>the farm on Java."

A lot of these people "bet the farm" on OpenDoc first, so you can't blame
them for being shy about switching again.

One question arises: would it be possible to implement an OpenDoc-like
facility using Squeak?

I.E., could one drag an icon representing a morphic off of a desktop and
have it visually embedded within another morphic object?

Being able to provide OpenDoc-like AND JavaBean-like facilities (not to
mention being able to run Java itself within Squeak) would go a long way
towards gaining acceptance.

A former business partner and I were examining the possibility of
OpenDoc-based extensible games. You have some kind of world defined with a
choice of 2D or 3D viewers to this world. If an updated version of one of
these viewers is released, one only needs to replace THAT object, rather
than updating the entire game. A slot in the game window could be reserved
for note-taking, and if a more robust word-processor object was available,
that could be used instead of the minimal default text-object ["part" in OD
parlance]. Design of spaceships in a space-opera game could be accomplished
with simple OR complex 3D graphing tool-parts, depending on what was
available.

Both visual (OpenDoc-like) and functional [Bean-like] parts could be
swapped in as needed.


I would THINK that this kind of thing could be doable and would make Squeak
the killer platform for educational development.



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