Hello, Edward, > Just as videophones have not taken off in industrialized nations, video chat > is not a killer app. I have used > teleconferencing as a business tool, and it will have a place in the XO > program. But what we really need is quite > different.
Yes. Since I've read this email (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-April/002091.html, item #5 in HIGHLIGHTS), I was sort of looking for the other voices. > There have been computers in schools for 30 years. But they have never been > integrated into the curriculum, because it > was impossible to make an assumption about how much computer time students > would get, and it was impossible to make an > assumption about what software would be available. Now we can create > textbooks containing interactive models of > phenomena. We can give children real-world datasets to analyze. We will have > powerful data acquisition capabilities > using the camera (including microscopy), and using the sound input port as a > high-speed A/D converter feeding a digital > oscilloscope, and so on. Yes, I'd like to make all of these accessible to teachers and students via a good end-user programming capability. (Ah, Etoys on OLPC can take camera and sound input and control them via tiles.) > This gives us an opportunity and a responsibility to look at the curriculum > anew. The time-honored divisions of subjects > and sequences of ideas that made sense for paper-and-pencil learning do not > necessarily make sense when the computer can > do the heavy lifting. Just as one example, trigonometry used to be a semester > course, and no doubt still is in many > places. That probably made sense when surveyors in training had to learn to > solve dozens of triangles a day with no > greater aid than a book of function and log tables, but it is absurd in the > age of scientific calculators and computers. > The essential mathematical content of trigonometry can be reduced to two or > three pages, including proofs. (It's not my > opinion. Saunders Mac Lane complained about trig in Mathematics: Form and > Function, after reducing it to less than three > pages.) Yes. > Calculus is still treated as a high-level high school subject, but primary > school children can grasp the notion of the > direction of a curve: just put a ruler up to any convex object. They can > equally grasp the concept of the area under an > arbitrary curve. Draw it on paper, cut it out, and weigh it. Leave the > formulas and the proofs for later. When we have > the basic ideas in place, we can use them for many purposes. Then when the > students get to the calculations and proofs, > they know what it's all about, and will grasp it much more readily. It is one of Seymour's powerful ideas. > The Internet gives unequalled opportunities for language learning through > online literature, songs, movies, mailing > lists, chat rooms, voice broadcasts, Voice over IP, and video conferencing. > We really have no idea how to take full > advantage of all this. > > There is much more of this sort of thing. I think we need a separate > list to discuss it properly. Or, these lists are good to remind the ourselves (developers) that what we are shooting for. -- Yoshiki _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
