Webcast of Walter Bender’s Talk at Berkman, 6/3, 12:30 ET
On Tuesday, June 3, Walter Bender, formerly of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and now of Sugar Labs, gives the lunch talk at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His presentation should be webcast and archived.
Folks might be chatting about it on Babbledog and in #berkman on freenode.net.
Walter’s opening with a talk about the split in education between children who have access to things like the Internet & computers and those who don’t.
As you might expect, the OLPC guys have made a good showing.
Walter believes people are inherently social. Someone sitting near me pointed out that by that definition, certain classes of people, like autistic folks, would not be human.
Walter jokes about turning all the children into Linux kernel hackers.
Kids will appropriate knowledge differently. Walter wants to encourage that.
“When was the last time you wrote a program for your phone?” He queried the audience. After a few hands went up, he asked those folks if they wrote the program on their phone. (Someone and I joked that we both have phones that only allow calls, then he proceeded to tease me about how his phone does less than mine because it’s older. His doesn’t even text. I’m horribly jealous. As we were having this exchange, I was watching the fellow sitting next to me sort through headlines on his iPhone.)
Step 1: Imagine & realize
Step 2: Critique & reflect
Step 3: Iterate. Go back to Step 1. If you’re done after Step 2, you haven’t challenged yourself properly.
“It’s all about making sure the tool has the right affordences,” he explains.
“Let’s talk about free as in speech because learning wants to be free.”
How do we decide on a governance model for Sugar Labs? How can we choose governance and engage the community.
Sugar wasn’t trying to start everything over from scratch. They wanted to borrow the best pieces, use what already exists. Chat, for example, or Facebook. They want to use collaborative technology, but not necessarily invent their own stuff when/if they can use what already exists.
In truly social apps, people are always around. Sharing with other people is always one step away.
Sugar’s Journal saves and preserves everything. How many of us have lost documents because we weren’t as dilligent about saving them before a crash as we should have been? *raises hand and glares at computer with its frequent kernel panics*
Simplified framework + transparency = easy to get into, low ceiling
TamTam, the music software, is a progression: TamTamJam to play, TamTamEdit to write music,
You can open the Python editor, written by Chris Ball, to play with the code.
Small screens are still problematic, which is why computers will rule over other gadgets in some areas. One reason why folks might not write cell phone programs on their cell phones is because of screen size.
OLPC is Sugar upstream. What comes after Sugar Labs is downstream. There’s a growing community around the project doing interesting things.
“With open source, you don’t have to have all of the good ideas.”
On IRC, some of us were talking about how to encourage people to produce stuff, especially folks in areas of the world where people are oppressed. How do we encourage disempowered have-nots trying hard to get the bare essentials for survival to think creatively and bring their ideas into production?
“I don’t know anyone who learned how to program without copying code.”
Someone asked about the small (meaning smaller machines) laptop market. Bender says it’s a good thing because it makes the machines accessible.
Chris Ball: Learning can be an exploration of the environment, finding something and poking around a little bit. Bender adds a social component to that. Not only do we want to explore our environment, but we want to share what we’ve learned with other people.
“Are projects like Sugar Labs & OLPC racing against proprietary software companies?” wondered someone affiliated with Tor, an IP address randomizer so folks can surf the Web with anonymity and, in some cases, get to sites blocked by their organizations or countries.
If we replace chalkboard with computers, the situation will become bad.
“Part of one’s education should be getting dirt under your fingernails.” I, personally, really like that idea.
Bender admitted being involved in a work-study project to shift books around in a library. It works well for the library getting inexpensive labor, but it doesn’t teach the students as much as they would learn, say, doing something practical in their field, like working in a science lab. (I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who paid for education by shifting books in libraries. I won’t tell you how much I learned or didn’t learn, but sometimes having a task where I can put my brain on autopilot is good.)
I didn’t think to bring my XO until I arrived at Berkman. Since I knew I was going to be doing a lot of typing, I didn’t bring it because I really don’t need to strain myself any more this week than I already have.
