some news

Daniel Vainsencher danielv at tx.technion.ac.il
Sat Apr 22 19:01:44 UTC 2006


Ah yes, I forgot that small issue of most people never really learning 
to read and like it. Sufficient "wiredness" to get started might become 
(more or less) universal on its own as the computers flood in. But books 
have been here forever, and learning by reading is far from a universal 
skill.

I guess this affects the initial content drastically: need to have some 
content that can draw people in even if they can't read, and on the 
other hand get them used to reading in order to learn.

So what content do you expect to have on the 100$ laptop when it is 
shipped, and how far do you think it will be able to take the other 85% 
(or even the next 20%, which would already be great)?

Anyway, for anyone else that finds this fascinating, Neal Stephenson's 
"The Diamond Age (or - a Young Ladies Illustrated Primer)" is (IMHO) a 
very good sci fi story revolving around a Dynabook that happens to 
capture this stuff pretty well...

I never caught on to that particular motivation for Nebraska, though I 
have thought that peer-to-peer mentoring should be an aspect of the 
solution. I gather this happens somewhat spontaneously in MMORPGs, so 
maybe the Croquet facilities will do the trick.

Daniel

Alan Kay wrote:
> Hi Daniel --
>
> At 10:02 AM 4/22/2006, Daniel Vainsencher wrote:
>> Moving sideways in this discussion - as long as mentoring is more 
>> important than content ...
>
> I'd say that if you have good content, the gating factor for success 
> is definitely that quality of the mentoring for most children.
>
>> , 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.
>
> Yep, even in US, Europe, Japan, and generally worse in 3rd world.
>
>
>> 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?
>
> Yes, and it works for some children, especially the 5% who are wired 
> enough to "almost be there" and for those who have learned how to 
> learn via reading (I was one of those).
>
> A very large number of children don't read well enough or have enough 
> interest to follow directions. Most also have very few options when 
> they get stuck. For most children, mentoring of some kind (including 
> from the system if it can) is the bridge over the gaps.
>
> What Jerry Bruner called "scaffolding" is a little different from 
> child to child, but it is key.
>
>
>> 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.
>
> And, most likely, that you were in that 5%! Adele and I realized early 
> on that the real key was to find out what to do for the next 85%, and 
> this is where actual pedagogy and educational environments (and 
> mentoring) really matter.
>
>
>> 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?
>
> Check out the idea of "Active Essays" that Ted Kaehler and I starting 
> doing about 12 years ago. These bridge some of the gap for readers. 
> But are not very useful for non-readers.
>
> The UI is part of the mentoring environment (this is why I got 
> interested in naive relatively easy to use and explorable UIs in the 
> 70s -- they were initially for children).
>
> If you don't have much of an AI behind the scenes, then a really great 
> UNDO makes a huge difference. I think that was one of the main PARC 
> contributions to UIs. (Squeak does not have a great UNDO ...).
>
> But, aside from having huge mechanisms that can anticipate and deal 
> with user errors in a graceful way (c.f. Anderson's work at CMU with 
> tutors of various kinds), not much general mechanism exists. I have 
> thought several times about getting Anderson to do a massively gentle 
> tutor for just the first 30 minutes of the Etoys experience (and I 
> still think this would be a good idea for the $100 laptop).
>
> Among other things, the Nebraska facilities in Squeak Etoys (and the 
> more comprehensive collab facilities in Croquet) are there partly for 
> the purpose of allowing children who have some experience somewhere in 
> the world to help children with less experience in other parts of the 
> world. In McLuhan's global village, this is the analogy to the one 
> room schoolhouse. Both Seymour and we have experimented with this over 
> the years and are convinced that it is a part of the solution of the 
> puzzle.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>
>
>> 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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