some news

Hans N Beck hnbeck at t-online.de
Sat Apr 22 18:33:33 UTC 2006


Hi Daniel,

Am 22.04.2006 um 19:02 schrieb Daniel Vainsencher:

> Moving sideways in this discussion - as long as mentoring is more  
> important than content, the number of kids that can be "infected"  
> at any given time is bounded by the number of people able to do the  
> mentoring. I expect mentors are even rarer than computers where the  
> 100$ laptop is headed.
>
> Haven't there been any serious attempts to make systems in which  
> the content itself takes the user on a reasonably long and useful  
> ride even with no mentoring?
>
> I had about 3 years of fun with Basic and about 500 pages of  
> exercise booklets, and nothing more. I think two important elements  
> to that success were that the Commodore64 had zero extraneous  
> interface, and that the booklets started from explaining the keyboard.
>
> Why can't the booklet be part of the environment, and improved  
> until mentors can be banned from the room with no/little ill results?
>

 From the pedagogical point of view the interaction with a human  
mentor is essential. On the other side, there is so much to learn,  
that it could not be done all be a mentor.

The solution to this problem lies in the fact, that learning is a  
long going process. Basic knowlegde - basic experience - basic ideas  
teached by a human AND good didactics gives the foundation later the  
learn the rest of the universe from text, computers, machines.
In other words: both is needed: stuff for human mentors, and stuff  
for creating machine learning. I think the field Alan Kay is working  
is the field where humans are needed: the beginning of learning at all.


Regards

Hans

> Daniel
>
> Alan Kay wrote:
>> I agree that content is really important, and even more so is  
>> mentoring. The language is less so providing it doesn't develop  
>> limited ideas (like BASIC did).
>
>




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