On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:

2008/12/23 michel paul <mpaul213@gmail.com>:

...

http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/obama-education

"Computing education benefits all students, not just those interested in pursuing computer science or information technology careers," said Bobby Schnabel, chair of ACM's Education Policy Committee (EPC).

Thanks. I'll invite them to join Earth Treasury's digital textbook project for the OLPC XO + Sugar. We have Smalltalk, Python, and FORTH standard on the XO, and we can add anything else of interest. Well, not Ada or C++, but those aren't of interest to third graders. APL is coming. Scheme is pretty easy. What else would you like?

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

Butting in, I'd like Erlang please. I just read this and it seemed to make a lot of sense to me, got me curious about Erlang again: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-December/084265.html I like the idea of taking students through a language a day for five days, making it completely a play experience, no sense that the ax will fall if you feel floundery some of the time. However, for brevity, we'd want all of these languages to be interactive, like APL. Possible sequence: Python (because easy); Scheme; Erlang, Ruby, REBOL. Hey, this is fun, this is empowering, this is middle school, thanks to philanthropic campaigns by ACM, OLPC etc. NCTM seemed luke warm most the time, but that's cuz our best cheerleaders haven't had access to their conferences (yet). We need to stage an Obamarama for those left behind folks. NCTM = National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for those not up on everything. Big focus has been "technology in the classroom" but that mainly just means TI calculators, maybe some page-turner "electronic textbooks", not much mention of programming languages that I've seen (except the TI one). NCTM partnered with TI and CBS on this police show called "NUMB3RS" which I have some problems with: http://focus.ti.com/pr/docs/preldetail.tsp?sectionId=594&prelId=et050009 Snapshots of me being critical of NUMB3RS in my blog: http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/search?q=NUMB3RS Kirby

...

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

- Michel

-- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 11:18 AM, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada) <gerry.lowry@abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com> wrote:

Edward Cherlin, in part: "APL is coming".

NumPy is heavily influenced by APL, as are the math parts of Ada, Common LISP, FORTRAN 90 and beyond, and all functional programming languages.

Therefore, J, APL'S successor in ASCII, makes sense in this regard.

J has a small footprint and is brilliantly programmed by Roger Hui et al.

I have a copy of their published source code from several versions back. It is amazing how Roger used the C preprocessor so that he could write much of J in APL style, essentially giving an object definition for nested arrays containing data of any mixture of types.

Further, Ken Iverson was a teacher until his last breath*.

With constant insistence that the right way to learn is by exploration. Try to invent tests that tell you what a function is and does before you read the definition.

The J IDE makes a great environment for teacher and student experimentation.

+1 from me, of course. The big question is whether Eric and Roger would be willing to GPL some version of J. The computational core would do nicely for many purposes, although I would far rather have the complete system, including object-oriented programming, graphics, and GUI development. Both Alan Graham and Arthur Whitney are working on enhanced APLs under a Free license, and have offered them for the XO.

Regards, Gerry (Lowry)

Best wishes to all for a healthy, happy, and safe holiday season.

References:

http://sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1

* http://objectmix.com/apl/152815-ken-iverson-dead-83-a.html

__________________________________________________________________________ Gerry Lowry, Principal Ability Business Computer Services ~~ Because it's your Business, our Experience Counts! 68 John W. Taylor Avenue Alliston · Ontario · Canada · L9R 0E1 gerry.lowry@abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com

-- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai

The idea of a Richard Stallings type geek using the XO as his "main laptop" just fills me with evil glee, I'm sorry, such an absurd image.

Sorry, Stallman, duh. Johnny Stallings is a talented actor who plays all parts of King Lear and Hamlet (though not both plays at once). More on my blogs e.g. http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2004/10/king-lear-play-review.html Stallman (Richard) was through Sri Lanka awhile back, talking with user groups, which is what got me tracking the Unicode picture vis-a-vis Tamil and Sinhalese, two of the main ones. I have a longstanding interest in fonts, taking a Tibetan glyph set into Bhutan on Mac disks in the 1980s, only to learn from their resident artists that Dzongkha isn't really Tibetan, lots of differences to notice. I understood completely, never lost my interest in the global challenge however, of getting computer technology more inclusive in this way. I'm sort of collecting Python source code examples (Py3K) using these multiple glyph sets, to get across the internationalization of the coding experience. I think too many get scared away from computer science thinking it'll all be all Latin-1 all the time, whereas those were the bad old days (still pays to learn it though, not trying to "put it behind me" or anything). For those of you not on edu-sig, I'm referring to the leap from 2.x to 3.x, wherein top level names became any Unicode string, facilitating coding outside Latin-1, though Pythons keywords and special names remain in the picture, plus Standard Library has its stipulations and so on. This collection would look good on an XO, but we're not trying to tie LCDs and XOs together too tightly, as many a flatscreen is a read-only device, like a billboard, where it makes just as much sense to show off these new capabilities. Kirby

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote: << SNIP >>

Ken would have disagreed strongly with you. He got IBM to loan a school a 360 to teach elementary arithmetic with.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not against this kind of thing. When we get a prodigy, they sometimes call me in. This kid at Winterhaven (Portland's Hogwarts for geeks) had partitioned his laptop into five OSes, including with DOS, was playing with all of em, got Putty on WinNT in a classroom subnet to slave to his telnet server on the ThinkPad. Kid was eight years old (3rd grade). Not saying I'm unfamiliar with the breed or anything. It's just you don't want to make your whole pitch be about pandering to prodigies. The grand piano market would go bust if only Mozarts could get them. The thing about laptops is they're generically useful even if you *don't* care at all about these computer languages right now (you might be too bright for them, prefer learning human ones...).

...

What laptop would you give a Peruvian or Cambodian teen, if not an XO? Of course it should run Python, and of course it shouldn't ignore the serious advances the XO represents.

Take a look at the Encore Mobilis. Brazil is buying them. I worked for Encore at one time. I'm asking them about putting Sugar on it.

Yeah cool, that's the kind of suggestion I'm looking for. How to pay for these is a problem the private sector is waiting to see solved, before jumping in, I understand the psychology. There's a UN ban on recruiting teens into military services (OK, an unenforced agreement), but nothing similar against Girl Scouts right? Kirby

On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 11:18 AM, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada) <gerry.lowry@abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com> wrote:

Actually, I was not talking about prodigies of any age.

The idea was not about "hitting a pre-teen with ... J", rather it's about using J as a workbench with which educators can rapidly mentor your average student to experiment and grow with J and with the J IDE. In the following example, I recall a book called "Confessions of a Sneaky Organic Cook (Or, How to Make Your Family Healthy When They're Not Looking!)".

To say "your average student" subtracts info from my "pre-teen" as at least I was giving an age bracket. Given my premise that the XO, because of design and appearance, is really designed for pre secondary school aged kids (more for elementary), I am seeing the proposal to have J on the XO as a commitment to writing curriculum for the J language for pre-teens ("curriculum writing" doesn't necessarily imply paper books, though it still might in some circles). The pipeline I've derived (from a process of many meetings) is more "controlling an avatar" (puppets) starting early (continuing onward -- fine to use not-computerized puppets of course, rear projection as in Indonesia is cool), then immersion in various environments designed to facilitate learning of this and that (ala Sims, Spore, Second Life, Active Worlds, and that Smalltalky one -- forgetting the name at the moment). The final phase is starting to dig behind the scenes to study the implementations of these things, getting into math and source code in a deeper way (I call this "tunnels under Disney World" -- realizing most might not call it that). Myself, I'm a big believer in hybrid environments meaning we don't standardize on any one language or environment, aren't in any way trying to get everyone on the same page. No "national curriculum" (blech), no lock-stepping with ETS, a strategy that has destroyed a generation already, so no need to keep repeating that same mistake over and over. I believe in competing models, different states (nations, corporations) trying different approaches. For marketing purposes, we intimate that if your high school doesn't teach you any SQL, you should be concerned, very concerned, but that's not the same thing as calling for a nationalized curriculum with some top-down "advisory board" (guffaw). Here's a link to some of my "tourism literature" FYI: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1876104&tstart=0 (mentions Iverson, XO etc.) Note I have no objection whatsoever to anyone's efforts to put J on the XO. I just hope I also have access to it when I'm working with my target demographic, the students I'm more trained to work with (too old for the XO, more AK-47 age (could be on Wii)).

Perhaps, with appropriate prepartion, an educator might mentor a number of students with a technique that might be called "Confessions of a Sneaky Educator (or How to get average students to learn above average computer and mathematics skills)".

I'm all for that. Subversion of this kind is what education is all about no? So many messages have a discouraging spin, keep students feeling it's beyond their ken. Great of they might grow up less intimidated by such as J, used unscrupulously in some circles to conceal Ponzi schemes etc. (same as Python, same as any language where obfuscation is a possibility -- English especially good at this).

If we only focus on prodigies, we short change society. There are many potential students who are highly capable even though they are not prodigies.

Yes. On the other hand, prodigies fall through the cracks way too often, something I'm very aware of given my place of employment (a school that attracts prodigies).

Further, providing and mentoring a variety of tools via OLPC XO-1 may even help the educators to discover the next Srinivasa Ramanujan before she/he is washed out to sea by a tsunami or blown to bits by a roadside IED.

Regards, Gerry

Great song about that guy, plus stuff in my blogs: http://www.archive.org/details/Ramanujan http://worldgame.blogspot.com/search?q=Ramanujan Kirby

P.S.: Best wishes to all and especially to the underprivileged in 2009 and beyond.

Yes, anyone not being taught any SQL in high school would count as a member of an oppressed group I think. Automated record keeping is core to civilization itself. This is not about "computer science" so much as about government, administration, the practive of medicine, human resources (matching the right folks to the right positions).

Yes Gerry, sounds like we're in agreement on many points. It'd be lovely to be at a point where we're questioning SQL as the best way to go, but alas you don't find many students ready for that discussion in Portland, as they still don't know what SQL is, the Oregonian (town newspaper) rarely mentions it (even though I bet they use it). 'Dilbert' is a great comic, but xkcd is taking the cake in some ways (I'm not persuaded Dilbert really knows much SQL, Wally either -- pointy haired boss uses Office I bet). SQL is required for government and administration. Easy to topple a gov't that has no databases, as there's not really a gov't then, whereas anything with big iron behind it (like IBM behind the Nazis) has real muscle, and that big iron runs SQL (Hollerith keeping tabs, on steroids). SQL is required for industrial scale medicine, as you want that infant associated with a treatment program. This image of doctors without borders seeing people just once is ridiculous, you need repeat visits and you need medical record keeping. These days, that usually means SQL, though it could mean Google appengine, so GQL then ( http://gql.sourceforge.net/ ). That you can become an adult in this culture and not know what SQL is reminds me of when people couldn't read the Bible, had to go to a priest who would likely leave out the juicy bits (e.g. certain demented passages in Leviticus) and spoil the fun. Thanks to Gutenberg, we're able to read our own source code (whatever ethnicity) and in geek world (e.g. GOSCON, GIS), that includes (but is not limited to) SQL. Computer algebra is our way of bridging the digital divide, getting that world class education to South Chicago and places. In today's idiocracy, we flood the cube farms with cube monkeys who beat their heads against that padded cell called Microsoft Access, a fat client piece of Office, but never grasp what's going on behind the scenes, in which case they'd be able to fire up like a shell and go at it directly, hitting those tables with the likes of Django (manage.py shell) or what have you. Access is notoriously not "shell mode friendly", same with VBA in general, whereas J, Scheme, Python... all the decent agiles (Ruby, bash...), have one. So let's just agree to keep Access *off* the XO (for the sake of our children's sanity) and I think we'll be fine. As for the smartest person in the world being a bartender, that makes a lot of sense, as HR/people skills are among the most intensely difficult. One of the smartest people I've ever met was a barista, ran a friendly, happy wifi cafe here in Portland. Yet this person could also coordinate international disaster relief, take guff from egomaniacs (with grace), and champion the plight of orphans around the world (she's been one), forgetting which NGO at the moment. Anyway, a battlehard genius, all of 5 feet tall, kickboxer, Asian model equipment. I've only met two or three other people that intelligent, and I've met a *lot* of really smart people. I think the Indonesians have it right with the shadow puppets. A lot of enculturation will involve projecting and turn taking, people getting up in front of the group and doing show & tell, Q&A. Python's "lightning talk" practice is a great encapsulation of this meme, which isn't that new, except for the technology, having YouTube for showing '16 Words' or whatever. This is the direction we're moving as Quakers (small ethnic cult). Picture us out in Montana, bed sheet strung between two trees, quiet battery powered projector showing J IDE out under the stars someplace, one of our teens giving a short lecture, camp fire crackling. Picture this happening in 2009, already storyboarded (NPYM meets in Montana this year). The XO models the laptop you carry around like a brief case. Once you get to the work place, it may be more like mission control, with lots of people sharing the same screens, big, up in front, more like TVs but really Django and JQuery out the back, talking to Oracle or PostGIS or whatever, helping coordinate food buying (thinking of FoodHub by Ecotrust, or something similar). These are interesting, sought-after jobs, available right out of high school if you're ready for NGO work, internships, or as a part of a college's work/study program if aiming for one of academia's certifications. Having had training on the XO will have been a big boost. You'll thank G1G1 and all those kind people in Hollywood like Angelina and Britney (billboards around Portland again too -- plus we have our own Hollywood (around 42nd and Sandy, used to rent space there)). http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=15.msg27989;topicseen Kirby [ see previous messages on edu-sig, public archive, Python community, for context ]: Message just prior: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2009-January/008986.html On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 7:09 AM, gerry_lowry (alliston ontario canada) <gerry.lowry@abilitybusinesscomputerservices.com> wrote:

k: =. kirby urner (partial quotes) g: =. gerry lowry (reponses to k)