squeakfest conclusions

Hi, all
I've checked the Squeakfest'06 schedule page and donwloaded some of the
materials that are available there.
Unfortunately, the sound of the S. Papert speech recording is pretty
bad, specially for those who don't have english as our native language,
the noise make some parts really hard to be understood.
Anyway, it's wonderful to be able to see it for all of us who haven't
could attend this year.
I would like to know more about how the event has gone, some of the
topics of the schedule that look very promising, as SimBuilder, don't
have any information at all, to know the state of the art for this
project.
But, what for me would be more useful is to know the general impression
of the attendants to the current state of the Squeak use in particular,
and of computers at schools in general. Squeak is more or less involved
in a good bunch of projects as Tweak, Sophie, Croquet, Scratch, OLPC,
etc, but the feeling I have from the distance is that all that cloud of
projects don't seem to be followed by the educators, they just look like
laboratory experiments, not being applied to the classroom except for
some testing purposes. The main Squeak community seems to be quite
stationary and almost no new projects (in terms of .pr files and also,
in term of the application use) have arrived for the last year. Maybe
it's just an impression as the squeakland site is not updated too often,
maybe it's the real world.
Some of you know that in Spain, in our Extremadura region, some crazy
people are fighting trying to use the computers to build a new way of
thinking and a new way of teaching, but the main stream in the educative
community is really strong, and what I see here, and in the rest of the
world is that most of the budget is going to pay applications or
platforms that just translate the text books to the computers, as if
that were enough to justify the use of computers in the classroom. When
the teachers have their curricula contents in the computer as in the
book, they feel safe. That's a stupid way of thinking for me as the text
book is cheaper and easier to use, but people feel comfortable that
way.
So, ending with this too long mail, my main questions are:
- what's the feeling people have brought after attending squeakfest?
- Are there new development or projects being made in Squeak, or around
its projects?
- Any other related thing you would like to tell to all who felt sad not
being in Chicago listening and learning..
Best Regards.
José L.

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:22:21 +0200
From: Jos? "L. Redrejo" Rodr?guez <[hidden email]>
Subject: [Squeakland] squeakfest conclusions
To: [hidden email]
Message-ID: <1154103741.6415.22.camel@localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

> Hi, all
>
> I've checked the Squeakfest'06 schedule page and donwloaded
> some of the materials that are available there.
>
> Unfortunately, the sound of the S. Papert speech recording
> is pretty bad, specially for those who don't have english
> as our native language, the noise make some parts really
> hard to be understood.

What's the link again?

Daniel

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

El sáb, 29-07-2006 a las 19:44 -0500, Daniel Ajoy escribió: It's together with some of the materials used at Squeakfest. The link is
accesible from squeakland homepage:
http://interactive.colum.edu/partners/squeakfest/sfPrelimProgram.aspx

Regards, José L.

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

Hello,


Main page:

http://interactive.colum.edu/partners/squeakfest/


and Seymour's talk is here:
http://interactive.colum.edu/partners/squeakfest/sfPrelimProgram.aspx

  -- Kim


At 7:44 PM -0500 7/29/06, Daniel Ajoy wrote:
_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

Hi José,

First here come my answers to your questions:


> So, ending with this too long mail, my main questions are:
> - what's the feeling people have brought after attending squeakfest?
>  
My feeling is some kind of general happiness and deep sense of
opportunity and potential. There are some places where "all it's still
to be done" but almost always that means that you have not yet a good
thought concepts or technology enough mature. This is not the case with
Squeak and all the related developments. It's just that is not main
stream for some reason (but we can made it main stream). This has a lot
of advantages, for example, community is small and warm and you don't
see a lot of informal layers. You start to be part of this community
very quickly.
> - Are there new development or projects being made in Squeak, or around
> its projects?
>  
We have a educative experience using Squeak in Universities to teach a
first course on introduction to informatics. You can see the main wiki
page of Squeak for that course here:

http://www.eduwiki.info/IntroduccionInformatica/Squeak

Or search for squeak in the wiki search box to see some works of the
students using squeak.

You can see also my presentation with the conceptual background of this
experience in:

http://www.el-directorio.org/CharlaTallerSqueak

You will see also developments on Scratch, Tweak and Croquet in the
project pages. May be will need to make some kind of "Squeak Ring" so,
from one site you can reach another sites and may be we can put somekind
of web bot to make cross searches in a lot of Squeak related sites, even
if they support different microcommunities interactions and dinamics.
> - Any other related thing you would like to tell to all who felt sad not
> being in Chicago listening and learning..
>
>  
I think that the most important thing, now that we have a small nice and
warm community is to think how to make it bigger (not always bigger is
better, but we need some kind of critical mass). This is some kind of
memetic exercise ¿How we can make that the memes of Squeak travel better
and faster in the macroculture? Of course I will not try to answer this
here, but some clue could be on how we make a better travel of knowledge
inside the microcommunity and between microcommunities. One of my
attempts is try to make "hot documentation" in the wikis/blogs while the
knowledge is acquired. If you follow the RecentChanges on
el-directorio.org and eduwiki.info and give some places where I can
follow that changes in your efforts may be we could make some bridges.

I share your concern about education, but things like the SqueakFest
full me with hope.

Cheers,

Offray


José L. Redrejo Rodríguez escribió:
> _______________________________________________
> Squeakland mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
>  



___________________________________

AVISO LEGAL: El presente correo electronico no representa la opinion o el consentimiento oficial de la PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD JAVERIANA. Este mensaje es confidencial y puede contener informacion privilegiada la cual no puede ser usada ni divulgada a personas distintas de su destinatario. Esta prohibida la retencion, grabacion, utilizacion, aprovechamiento o divulgacion con cualquier proposito. Si por error recibe este mensaje, por favor destruya su contenido y avise a su remitente.
En este aviso legal se omiten intencionalmente las tildes.

Este mensaje ha sido revisado por un sistema antivirus, por lo que su contenido esta libre de virus.
This e-mail has been scanned by an antivirus system, so its contents is free of viruses.
_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

El dom, 30-07-2006 a las 20:56 -0400, Bob Irving escribió:
Thanks so much for your notes. I have could get some of them from the
video, but I have learnt some others from your blog. Anyway, the video
lasts more than an  hour, so I suppose there are many more ideas left..

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland

José L. Redrejo Rodríguez a écrit :

> But, what for me would be more useful is to know the general impression
> of the attendants to the current state of the Squeak use in particular,
> and of computers at schools in general. Squeak is more or less involved
> in a good bunch of projects as Tweak, Sophie, Croquet, Scratch, OLPC,
> etc, but the feeling I have from the distance is that all that cloud of
> projects don't seem to be followed by the educators, they just look like
> laboratory experiments, not being applied to the classroom except for

I fell like there are a lack of solid experimentation, validation and
output at the research level regarding the educational aspect of Squeak
use in education.


> some testing purposes. The main Squeak community seems to be quite
> stationary and almost no new projects (in terms of .pr files and also,
> in term of the application use) have arrived for the last year. Maybe

Well, there was this DrGeoII interactive geometry thinks I wrote earlier
this year, but you already knows about it.


Hilaire

_______________________________________________
Squeakland mailing list
[hidden email]
http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland