On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:34 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
2008/6/19 kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com>:
<< SNIP >>
PS: the Europython list is making me homesick for Vilnius,
My grandfather was from Vilnius. You might like to check out Andrius Kulikauskus's Minciu Sodas, which is based there.
Hey thanks for that informative posting Edward, lots I didn't know mixed with some familiar stuff I enjoy revisiting.
A pleasure.
My overlap with Alan Kay was courtesy of Mark Shuttleworth who threw together this high powered meeting in London aimed at thinking through a strategy for South Africa (some government representation, other private sector).
Andrius, I, and a fairly high-powered group of others have been working on a strategy for the world. The basic elements that I am working on right now are renewable electric power, WiMax for Internet connections, microfinance, and OLPC. Later I propose to work on linking schools around the world and teaching the students how to go into business together. Each component supports the others better than linearly to increase the community's total access to economic opportunity even in the poorest and most remote villages. We have others working on community, agriculture, health, and various other components of a complete set of solutions.
We pow wowed for about 2.5 days, Gunner clerking.[1]
Your plan looks interesting. I have Wikied some thoughts about what textbooks should turn into when we have a known software base including SciPy, and also some thoughts about what should happen to the curriculum as we find out more about how to make subjects accessible at ever-earlier ages. There is some work on Kindegarten Calculus, for example, teaching the concepts but not the apparatus. Alan Kay has a demo in which ten-year olds are pointed in two directions, in simulation and in real life, and then encouraged to combine the results in order to figure out that Galilean gravity means constant acceleration. If you then get children to look at water fountains (something the Greeks failed to notice properly) and show them how to model Galilean relativity with constant horizontal motion, they get to discover parabolic motion. Relating that to conic sections visually is easy, but the proofs have to wait until later.
I blogged about it live at the time [2] plus have had some time to reflect since then, lots of field testing ideas.
I haven't been the South Africa in the interim (used to go there more often when my parents lived in Lesotho) but do check on Kusasa from time to time, to see how it's going.[3] Love them Freedom Toasters! [4]
Kirby
[1] http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=708462278 [2] http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2006/04/shuttleworth-summit-day-two.html [3] http://www.kusasa.org/ [4] http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2008/05/legally-free.html
-- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay