isaac Mao's personal annotations on this page
Isaacmao bookmarked
on 2009-01-26
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Since inventing much of the technology behind personal computing in the late 1960s, Alan Kay has dedicated his work to developing better learning environments for children. Now a senior researcher at HP and the president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Kay is launching Squeak, a multimedia authoring tool that allows children to construct dynamic simulations of real-world phenomena. We spoke with him about the unfulfilled promise of technology in schools—and about what computers have in common with pianos.
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This link has been bookmarked by 12 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 Jan 2009, by Damon Snyder.
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the point of school is to teach all those things that are inventions and that are hard to learn because we're not explicitly wired for them. Like reading and writing.
Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
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Gary BrownAlan Kay, developer of the mouse, still lamenting the failure of imagination of adults/educators.
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Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
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A: If you look with a squinty eye at most of personal computing today, you'll see we're basically just automating paper—using digital versions of documents and mail. But as was the case with the invention of the printing press, the interesting thing about the computer is that it allows you to have new ways of representing things, new ways to argue about things, and new kinds of fluencies.
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On the other hand, if you have a musician who is a teacher, then you don't need musical instruments, because the kids can sing and dance. But if you don't have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that
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The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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Since inventing much of the technology behind personal computing in the late 1960s, Alan Kay has dedicated his work to developing better learning environments for children. Now a senior researcher at HP and the president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Kay is launching Squeak, a multimedia authoring tool that allows children to construct dynamic simulations of real-world phenomena. We spoke with him about the unfulfilled promise of technology in schools—and about what computers have in common with pianos.
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Josh CharlesAlan Kay's thoughts on Educational Technology
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