>I don't recollect reading about any effort to pick a standard - de facto or > otherwise. Any other interpretation is revisionist history. I
Building a system that was open and discoverable was a goal from the very beginning--we wanted to go "beyond black boxes." But you are correct is saying that that goal could be served in many ways. We had a number of discussions with the team from Viewpoint Research about the merits and practicality of various approaches and decided on Python as the primary development language for reasons that may or may not have been valid in retrospect. But we also, from Day One, supported a plethora of development environments, such as Etoys. We didn't have the resources to everything from scratch and even if we did, it isn't clear that providing just one right way is the best way to build a learning machine. > Creating content that is culturally and personally meaningful to children > across the world is a huge challenge. The thorny issue of content has also been a subject of debate from the very beginning. The gist of the debate was in regard to the proper balance between OLPC providing content vs countries and 3rd parties taking responsibility vs community content vs providing tools for children and teachers to provide/localize content. We haven't yet done enough along any dimension. Just the framing of the debate itself is probably flawed. > So, what do field experiments with kids reveal about "View Source"? There are no such experiments to date that I am aware of, but there is some anecdotal evidence, such as the children in Galadima creating their own Igbo spelling dictionary. They didn't need to modify the source code, but they--I believe--looked at how he English spelling dictionary was structured and mimicked it. It was a real moment of empowerment. -walter _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel