Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation

Hi, everybody,

For the past few years, I have been working on a historical study on  
the Dynabook vision as conceived in the early 1970s as well as how  
the idea and its various incarnations have played out in the  
intervening three-and-a-half decades. This has been part of my PhD  
work in education at the University of BC -- as such, I am working  
from an educational perspective, rather than a compsci one.

As of November 2006 I finally finished the thing, and successfully  
defended it. I hereby unleash it on this community, in the hopes that  
it will provoke discussion on the Squeak-oriented mailing lists and  
beyond. Squeak-dev and Squeakland have been major resources to me all  
the while, and I'd like to thank everyone on these lists for  
providing such a rich ongoing commentary.

The entire work is roughly 300 pages. This link is to a PDF just  
under 2 megabytes. At some point, if I have some time, I want to  
break this out into some more granular web pages, but I'm already  
late in releasing it, so here it is in its entirety. You can find it  
(along with a brief abstract and ToC) at:

   http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/dissertation

I'm very interested in any comments you might have.


  - John Maxwell
    Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing
    Simon Fraser University
    [hidden email]

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Am Jan 19, 2007 um 1:33  schrieb John Maxwell:

Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for  
"OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine),  
but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on that.

 From my perspective, the hardware is surely there and pretty much  
could account for the "book" in "dynabook". The question is, from  
today's perspective, what software could fulfill the "dyna" part of it?

Maybe you even have some thoughts on the reality of a dynabook in  
your thesis, going to read it asap :)

- Bert -


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Hi,
Great work !

Probably a little out of topic but on the same track is toontalk
http://toontalk.com

Toontalk is not open source and free, but cheap and the beta version can be used freely if you give feed back.
With tootalk we get an  interaction when an object is droped on an other.

This way programing is recording these interactions while training a robot to do things.

Programmation is no more lexical but procedural.

Many kids which have difficulties at school, have problems with langage but have the thinking of action,can do but can not explain with words.

When I discover Squeak , they easily  pass to Squeak and find similarities like:

Book associated to an object with toontalk are the same as wiewer from blue eye with  Squeak.


In this way, I have writen a project for building geometric figures with Etoys, using the interface gadget for the variable of type player to designate objects used as parameter.

This concern not programming but building by doing versus describing.

See the project on the swiki of the french community.

http://ofset.org:8000/super/210

How to start:

Clic on objects in the green area to get a copy.

For instanc get two copies of ellipses(points) then a coy of a straight line.

Click on each yellow square and show a point.
Clic on go to active scripts.

You have built a straight line passing by two points.

Help ballon explain what thing to show for a gadget. Sorry in french. But using red halo menu debug/edit ballon help anybody can change it for any language).

Be carrefull

Hitting just publish will save the project back on the server. hit alt/dot to abort saving in this case!

The right way:
Stay on publish and choose 'publish on another server' to save the project  in your computer.

Best regards


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-------- Message d'origine--------
De: [hidden email] de la part de Bert Freudenberg
Date: ven. 19/01/2007 11:09
À: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Cc: [hidden email]
Objet : Re: [Squeakland] Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation
 
Am Jan 19, 2007 um 1:33  schrieb John Maxwell:

Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for  
"OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine),  
but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on that.

 From my perspective, the hardware is surely there and pretty much  
could account for the "book" in "dynabook". The question is, from  
today's perspective, what software could fulfill the "dyna" part of it?

Maybe you even have some thoughts on the reality of a dynabook in  
your thesis, going to read it asap :)

- Bert -


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[hidden email]
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On Jan 19, 2007, at 12:00 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Sounds very interesting :) I of course searched the PDF for
> "OLPC" (being one of the guys who puts Etoys onto the OLPC machine),
> but it only has a brief mention. I'd be interested in your take on  
> that.

I wrote the bulk of this thing before the OLPC project had gotten  
very far (which made it much easier to write! :-) and so there is  
just one footnote near the end.

But I did address the OLPC issue in my thesis defense. While I'm  
eagerly watching the project, and have great optimism for it, I also  
think that it's a grand risk -- one of the biggest shots in the dark  
in recent history actually.

My reason for this assessment has everything to do with the analysis  
of "computing cultures" that I talk about in the dissertation. There,  
I look at Squeak in the light of the incredible weight of accumulted  
Unix and Microsoft culture, which is shot through just about  
everything we do on the Internet these days. With such a culture  
(Eric Raymond's Art of Unix Programmming is a good ethnography), we  
have (more or less) a shared worldview, vocabularly, set of virtues,  
and benchmarks for what is good and what isn't.

In light of that, what Squeak is or isn't able to accomplish in the  
'developed world' is in response to or contrast to that dominant  
culture. It's an uphill battle some of the time (as we all know), but  
it also provides people at least a background against which Squeak's  
vision of the world can be seen/compared/evaluated. But... take it to  
Africa or wherever, and give it to kids who've never even been  
exposed to Microsoft culture, let alone Unix, let alone PARC/
Smalltalk/etc., and who knows how they will make sense of any of it.  
Maybe the lack of cultural baggage is a good thing, because there's  
less unlearning of the Unix way needed; EToys can be taken at "face  
value". Or maybe it makes it even more alien and remote and  
incomprehensible.

In sum, I guess my "take on it" is that to focus on the technological  
achievements of OLPC (as the blogs are so fond of doing) vastly  
underestimates the amount of cultural context required to make sense  
of those achievements. We can take that context mostly for granted.  
Without the cultural background, however, it seems like a major shot  
in the dark. May it bring forth great and unseen things!


  - John Maxwell
    Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing
    Simon Fraser University
    [hidden email]

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