Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested

Gary McGovern garywork at lineone.net
Mon Oct 1 21:53:12 UTC 2001


----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2001 4:37 AM
Subject: Re: Computerchannel.de: Squeak 3.0 tested


>
> It's not just England.  10-8 years ago I ran a computational linguistics
> paper in Melbourne, Australia, and I was getting students who didn't know
> what a verb was.  I was also getting European-ancestry
Australian-born-and=
> educated students at the undergraduate level who wrote "Chinglish", that
is,
> the kind of English written by Asian students who are not used to
inflections
> and have trouble even _hearing_ the difference between "sing" and "sings".
> (Like I have real trouble distinguishing tones.)  It's not accidental;
it's
> just that "evidence-based teaching" is an idea whose time has yet to come.
> There used to be a saying in New Zealand that we were always five years
> behind the USA in educational "fashions":  wait five years until the
latest
> fashion has PROVEN itself a dumb idea and THEN adopt it.

Well I'm surprised. I thought Aussies might have had it a bit better being
free from Mother England.

I don't like the sound of these fashions. Surely the best way must be the
old-fashioned classical educations with the bad bits dropped and good new
methods added. Overall it should be pretty constant. I think. I'd be
interested to know ho Leonardo Da Vinci was educated for example.


> It isn't by accident, but it's not a conspiracy.

Alright, I was hasty to point the finger of blame and put it down to a class
thing. And I'm not prepared to research all the official papers to find who
made the decisions. I'll accept that it is not a conspiracy, but was done
accidentally on purpose (does that sound better ;-))

>It's basically the
> "prescriptivist" (now a dirty word) -vs- "descriptivist" question; current
> ideology has it that descriptivism is the humane true-to-linguistics
> approach but prescriptivism is authoritarian (and we all know how evil
> THAT is (:-)).

Yes, its very very bad :-). Authoritarians are so evil that I could write
scores of essays telling what's wrong about their infinitely unquenched
thirst for power and domination.

> The problem is that the educators have forgotten (or never cared to learn)
> that the natural state of natural languages is for people to be unable to
> talk to the people in the next village but one down the river.
>
> This is relevant to Smalltalk:  the natural state of programming languages
> is for Foo Basic to be different from Bar Basic (like the Prolog company
> that had a Mac Prolog and a DOS Prolog, one of which took angles in
degrees
> and the other of which took angles in radians).  I find the recent work on
> porting things between different Smalltalks encouraging.
>
> Well, I was thinking more along the lines of Roboteacher :o) where anyone
> can download the program over the web and get a good solid education in
> literacy and grammar just as the well educated people get.
>
> Is this something that exists?

It exists in my head, I don't know of another yet.

>Where can I read more about it?

You have to create him in your own image ;-). Unless you wait a few years
for me to do it. Just make him unarmed, subserviant to the student and the
students best mate if you can't wait.

Regards
Gary







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