> And then there's the question: why exactly is HyperCard worthy of > reimplementation, and what are the essential features? > > -- > Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org
I think the general idea is to give kids a fairly easy way to organize material and share it, either peer to peer or from a more central repository. The web is how we do that now, but the amalgam of skills (HTML, Flash, Shockwave, applets, cgi...) is not young kid accessible. For one thing, you need a lot of typing. If I could drag a picture of myself to a top card, then put some icons on a next card, then wire those icons to yet other cards, containing more pictures and video clips, maybe some working code snippets (my little Logo flower), then hey, the typing might even be worth the effort -- especially if I can now easily ship this to my friends. There's a close analogy with teachers looking for ways to get lesson plans in some world-readable format, with working quiz scoring, chat rooms, whatever -- something immediately usable given average mouse and typing skills. Moodle and LAMS come to mind as two examples (the latter was showcased at the Summit, by an expert gent all the way from Sydney, Australia). In other words, in reinventing HyperCard, we're looking for some way to deliver content that's both interactive and not dependent on lots of adult intermediaries with more advanced skills. What a lot of the adult world uses for this purpose today is PowerPoint, but PowerPoint is not as flexibly event driven as HyperCard was, and doesn't include the interactivity. PDF in its full glory is perhaps closer to the ideal in some ways, but most people don't know much about PDF's scriptable characteristics -- which are also too limiting. In the original vision of the web, publishing to it was supposed to be about as easy as reading it. The Wiki tries to help with that, as do reStructured text and the rest. But the fact remains, kids face a lot of hurdles when it comes to getting their content onto the Internet. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
