Mark,

Interesting preposition. Personally, I believe these arguments are correct
in the grand scheme of things though not necessarily in their concrete
interpretations. What we see today is a development towards better
communication abilities which hide the fact that there's a "computer"
underneith. I think very few of the people using mobile phones for example,
realize that they're talking about a device that has almost as much
computing power as a Palm (or any other hand-held computer). The next
generation of these communication devices (to which I count Palm as well)
will have even better displays, more communication bandwidth, faster
processors, more memory etc. etc. etc. If you just look at UTMS or any other
"always on" technology you will understand that what we're talking about an
entire new generation of communication devices.

However, these devices cannot realistically stand on their own. Without the
builtin high-bandwidth communication facilities they're nothing but a "poor
man's desktop computer" (which is exactly the problem with hand-helds in
general; the price is dominated by the constant struggle of trying to be
"almost" a personal computer and the need to be less expensive). Thus, these
devices need to be always on, they need something to be connected to. Which
in turn means that a level of "10 kids per computer" might be absolutely
acceptable if that computer happens to be the server their communication
devices connect to.

With respect to your argument about that these devices are (and will be) too
cheap ... I don't know. Given enough bandwidth (and we're talking *lots* of
bandwidth in the next generation here) it might very well be feasable to
stream all of that stuff directly into your mobile device. In fact, given
the economics of UMTS (where you'll pay mostly for the bandwidth you use and
not for the time you're connected) the network providers will not only love
you for this idea - they're also desparately looking for applications that
create enough bandwidth to make economic sense (I've recently spoken to a
friend of mine who's in that business and he basically said that UMTS will
only make economic sense if we start playing Doom through streaming the 3D
world as MPEG movie ;-)

[Re: Technical Questions]
All of Squeak - and I mean *all* of it - does run on hand-held devices like
the iPaq. It's not necessarily very fast but it runs. With respect to Palm,
according to some recent press-release they're going to use StrongArm in the
next generation - this should solve almost all of the problems we had
porting Squeak to it (these problems primarily relate to the way Palm used
to handle memory). Also, I would never say that Squeak "can't" be ported to
any of these devices - it's all just ASMOP (or perhaps in this case a
somewhat larger ;-)

[Re: Educational Questions]
Actually that's a technical one too ;-) (at least the part about the shift
of cost/performance ratio). And no, I don't think that this shift will ever
reach a balance where we're truly satisfy with the results. True, things
improve but the ratio of improvement doesn't seem to increase at a
significant higher rate than in the world of desktop computers (Laptops
being seemingly the only exception here - they managed to come up to par
with desktop computers but at a price...) While the performance of an iPaq
is probably in the range of the PC I used five years back it's simply not
satisfying my today needs. And I think that's going to be true for the next
years unless we look at these devices in a different way (see above).

Cheers,
  - Andreas


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-squeakland at squeakland.org
> [mailto:owner-squeakland at squeakland.org]On Behalf Of Mark Guzdial
> Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 1:59 PM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org; squeakland at squeakland.org
> Subject: Access vs. Media
>
>
> A few of the academic educational technology research groups in the
> U.S. have been shifting their focus to Palms from desktop or even
> WinCE devices.  Their argument is interesting: It's about access of
> two kinds.
> - ACCESS BY STUDENTS: Many people believe that we're never going to
> see much impact of computers at the level of 10 kids per computer (at
> best!) that we have today.  Palms are cheap enough that one can
> outfit a whole class with them using current budgets.
> - ACCESS TO STUDENTS: What's more, students react to them differently
> than desktop computers.  My former Ph.D. advisor, Elliot Soloway,
> says that kids in urban school districts don't even talk about the
> Palms like computers -- instead, it's more like a Walkman or an MP3
> player.  It's a media device that happens to have more interactivity
> to it.
>
> I'm making an argument that a cheap, handheld device is a grand idea,
> but the Palm is too cheap -- we simply don't want to give up all the
> forms of media that we have even if we step up to an iPaq or WinCE
> class device.
>
> I have some questions for y'all about this:
> TECHNICALLY:
> - I've been claiming that all forms of Squeak media (e.g., 3-D,
> Alice, MPEG, Flash, text-to-speech) run on WinCE and iPaq devices,
> but I realized that I haven't actually seen those all run on a
> handheld device.  Can anyone verify that these Squeak media run on
> the handheld devices?
> - Is it still the case that Squeak can't be ported to Palms?
>
> EDUCATIONALLY:
> - This group cares about these kinds of issues.  What do you think?
> I'm arguing that more diverse media is worth an decrement in
> accessibility that's found in the Palm.  Do you buy that?  Or is it
> just a matter of time before the Palm's cost-performance ratio shifts
> and we can get the media we want without surrendering the Palm's
> cost, ubiquity, and accessibility?
>
> Thanks for advice and comments,
> Mark
> --------------------------
> Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta,
> GA 30332-0280
> Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
> Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
> (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html