[Cuis-dev] Dynabook and education

[Hilaire Fernandes]

Le 12/06/2020 à 16:06, Juan Vuletich a écrit :

> I can not help wondering what is still missing for that very article, 
> together with the examples, to be an active essay itself, running in 
> the Smalltalk system. Erudite, Glamorous Toolkit, StyleTextEditor, 
> Morphic Projects are all pieces in that space. What else is needed? 
> How can we move forward?

IMO, getting right the backbone where dynamic media will fit in place is 
the tuff part. Since 5000 years, our culture is text based, the *hand* 
and the *eyes* are its tools. Looking at what is happening in school 
(primary up to senior high school) is interesting because it is where 
our culture is transmitted to our young.

The way we teach at school is articulated around texts: teachers provide 
a lot of text documents (book, exercises book), students produce a lot 
of text too (mainly exercises resolution, drawing - on the desk too -, 
notes). As a teacher, I only know and speak about this context. But 
clearly we are not where we could be, I fell daily this frustration. Why 
be limited to physical text contents, why not digital dynamic media as 
text, sound, video, lesson, exercises circulating between the teachers 
and students, annotated, re-annotated, cut in piece for exploration. 
Sometime I fell like we are stuck in the XIXe century although I use 
daily computer in front of the students. So yes now we can use computer, 
but it's like dragging around a cinderblock, so many obstacles for so 
little outcomes.

> The Dynabook and Active Essays ideas are extremely important for me. 
> Cuis is becoming mature enough to be a good base for them. (Although I 
> think that vector graphics is a must).

Cuis is mature and even more importantly it is *agile like a ballerina*. 
I use your recommendation: start the morning with a fresh image, load my 
code, never save the image, only the packages. It is very easy to do 
with a minimal, easy to remember syntax, very fast and Cuis never crash 
(ok, just once)

Agree about vector graphics, otherwise how will you do state of the art 
stylus handwriting/sketching on the dynabook?

>
> I think that, as you suggest, writing active essays will require, in 
> addition to some natural language, and perhaps topic specific jargon, 
> good Smalltalk skills. But I believe that a casual reader of an active 
> essay should be able to get most of the ideas without needing to 
> understand the code, in the same way we can get a good part of what a 
> technical book is talking about, without looking at the formulas.

I wrote another small article discussing about these questions, based on 
A. Kay writing.

https://blog.drgeo.eu/2018/07/the-dynabook-concept.html


>
> People are trying to do OpenScience / ReproducibleResearch with Python 
> Jupyter Notebooks. We can do much better than that!

I don't know much about this. Experimental science teacher in school 
could benefit of a content with media of heterogeneous forms: text with 
some handsketched writing, photography/video, table of data collected 
from the device input sensors, etc.

The mental image I like is to imagine a *student A4 textbook*, with 
contents on the forms of handwritten text, an interactive diagram he can 
play with, a vocal note of a Spanish language exercises, and some data 
he collected from the temperature sensors plugged to the textbook. For a 
meaningfull use of IT in education, it would be a good start.

Of course student will receive his dynabook at the primary school and 
keep it at least until senior high.

Are we dreaming? ;-)

Hilaire

-- 
GNU Dr. Geo
http://drgeo.eu

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