Posted by
michael
on from the montessori-school dept.
suzipaw writes "In this interview on OpenP2P.com, Kay has some interesting observations about both the past and future of computing--including kids using technology. Says Kay, "Montessori would have been a great innovator with computers.""
108 comments
My kid loves her computer
by
Voltronalpha
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· Score: 5, Insightful
My child loves her computer; she is 3 1/2 and uses it for 2-3 hours everyday. It has replaced the time in her day where she would usually sit and watch a Disney movie or some other such, now she is challenging her mind instead of taking backseat. Kids and computers do mix.
On the plus side at preschool there are two computers that the kids use/watch other kids use, exposure seems to be key.
-- There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Interesting
i grew up with computers, around the age of 6 i was a regular on a bunch of local BBSes and also running my own, with DOS and stuff. i feel these days i have much less curiousity and ability to learn, i wish i could go back to the mindset i had in those days so i can figure things out just as fast as i did back then.
ever since i enrolled in university i've been much less active, so to speak. in high school i used to love hacking around the school district servers, the local security and protection, the proxy server, all that stuff. now i have no interest in the university equivalents (rooting the server, upping my quota, etc). it's not because i know the penalties are really harsh if i get caught, but i seriously have no interest.
these days i'm starting to feel as if maturity and education have ruined me. kids with computers are incredible because they are able to learn much faster and realize thing much sooner. maybe it's just me but i wish i could be like i was back then.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
For some reason school always kills my interest in things.
During holidays, I'll sit for days on end reading about similar topics as the courses I'm taking.. but tell me I HAVE to do it and I just shut down.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
Please, be careful. I grew up with computers, and I'm a complete fucking mess.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
Flabby+Boohoo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
2-3 hours is a huge amount of time... I honestly cannot see how that would be good for her.
I have two boys (5 and 7), and I encourage them to go outside and play, play with Lego building blocks (not legso:-)).
They each have thier own computer (old laptops) and they do play some games such as Reader Rabbit, etc. But I purposefully limit the amount of time spend in front of it. I just don't see how it can be good for them to sit there for hours.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
Commutative+Monoid
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There are several hours in a day, and for a child that isn't even three yet, I can't say that there exists a tremendous quantity of things for them to be doing to fill their time. Simply being outside for an extra two hours or so isn't going to make a tremendous difference in their capacity to kick or run, and in reality I see most small children spending much of their free time watching television.
The grandparent poster indicated that their child replaced Disney films with computer use, something that stresses literacy, over something that mostly involves vegetation. You may disagree with their assessment about the benefits of computer use over Disney films, but you've no particular reason or grounding to judge another person's parenting by in this, and it's rather rude to posit there's something harmful about the previously mentioned usage, simply because you do not see a reason for it with regard to your children.
Don't assume that because his child spends an aggregate two hours or so using a computer, that that is the extent of her day.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Alas, I think I required more aids in literacy as a child. Or perhaps proof-reading patience that Internet forums so frequently devour.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
eenglish_ca
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· Score: 1
Exposure is a great thing. I can remember the veyr first computer I used. It was a blue and white 286 laptop which could run the alf spelling game. It was great. The next computer I had was in 1992 when my dad bought us a 486. At first I was quite annoyed and boycotted using it because when we were getting it we had a choice of either getting the computer or going on a trip to disney land. I of course wanted to go to disney land but my brother got his way and we got the computer. I never really became interested until I cut open my foot with a large extendable exacto knife, which required 50 stitches and 3 internal layers of stitching to fix. As a result of this, at school I could no longer go and play outside and spent my lunch hours working on an old amiga with D-Paint and talking animator creating stories and so forth. From there I became interested in hour such things were accomplished and learnt how to program in Q-Basic. I didn't really accomplish much in it but playing with the internal speaker was fun. I can't really remember what happened after than except that I further became interested in computer graphics but then 1.5 years ago I decided to make a 3d renderer so that sucked up a lot of time as I was learning c++ and coding such a major project. I am still working on it, as it was a huge undertaking. Right now it is 7k lines of code.
Nevertheless exposure to computers at an early age created interest in me, so that now I have a going to university next year to study computer science.
Just my life story.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
shadowbearer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Beats them spending the same time in front of the Vacuum Tube watching the garbage on it, doesn't it?
(ok, unless you can restrict their TV time to more educational things such as Discovery Channel and whatever else is available nowadays - beats me, I haven't watched TV in years)
SB
-- It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
Voltronalpha
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· Score: 1
2-3 hours is a good chunk of time the 5 hours she spends at preschool is an even bigger chunk. I was actually worried that she would not take to the machine and just want to watch movies for this portion of her day. I'm ecstatic she would rather interact and use her brain than sit and watch. She's in no danger of not learning her social skills, for as much as she likes her computer she LOVES to interact with other kids.
I also limit the time my daughter uses her computer as mentioned before (2-3 hours tops), she would if I let her use it for most of the day. She now only occasionally watches the movies she did as a toddler (and has seen over and over by the way) and is always jumping up and down to get to use her computer.
My opinion is I'd rather her play "Blues Clues" on her computer than to watch an episode on Television but I don't make her do either I only encourage her to do what she enjoys unless I think there is a factor of damage to consider.
The more rules you impose on your children the less creative and curious they will become. So I'd warn that not thinking through how any given 'rule' will impact on a child is negligent.
If you say to your kids you can only play reader rabbit for 1/2 an hour a day what are you saying to them? At this age they are learning about everything around them (though by seven they have a pretty good grasp on their world), almost every activity is learning to them even if they don't realize it and they don't see the line between playing and learning, but they do recognize doing what they want to and what you want them to do, and if what you want them to do is learn and that is not what they want to do they will end up resenting learning type behaviors and seek play instead. Showing encouragement is better than showing ultimate authority.
-- There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
lommer
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· Score: 1
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
o man you are such a troll...
Re:My kid loves her computer
by
ddd2k
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· Score: 1
join the party
Trollin, trollin, trollin with the trolley...
But listening to one of the true innovaters of our time is not something I would want to miss if I was in the area.
Re:Doesn't do much for me
by
Commutative+Monoid
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I had to make an equally offensive and presumptious statement, it would be that you're using a formulaic means of "whoring" kharma. Your comment is all criticism about the intent of the article and the self-opinion of their subject, with no real substance. Pfffft.
The article is indeed a promotion. It's telling you:
1. Who Alan Kay is, and what he's helped contribute.
2. That he's giving a talk at an O'Reilly function.
3. A general idea of what the talk will be about.
4. A few of the reasons Kay feels we shouldn't become complacent and accept the failings of our current computing world, and why he believes we have ended up with this.
5. It talks a bit about the topic of educating children, where the author reminisces about a previous presentation of Kay's that he witnessed.
6. It mentions Squeak's progression and involvement in education.
Overall the article does an alright job of outlining what you can expect from Kay's actual keynote address, why you might listen to him, and some of the things that he's done and is doing. If you want more, see him speak. If you have complaints about the actual article, they would be with the author and not with Kay, and if anyone is out of place with their arrogance, it would be you and not Alan Kay. He's contributed far more than you, and he's not sitting around deriding you on message boards, telling you how much your comments are a waste of disk space and a contentless mechanism for promoting web hosting services.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Re:Doesn't do much for me
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I had the opportunity to see Alan in action at two separate R&D groups. (Apple and Disney)
I agree with your assessment.
Squeak Wiki
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
For all the hype about Squeak, it's just another closed smalltalk world.
The real innovation to come from the Kay camp is the pervasive collaborative editors that now manafest themselves as Wikiwebs.
Kids and Computers
by
1nsane0ne
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I've taught computer classes to kids before (ages 5 - 14 ) and it is amazing what some of them can do. It's neat to see which ones are confident enough to tinker with things and don't fear making mistakes, the same qualities many/.'ers had in their formative years I'm sure. By sitting in a lab with a few kids and doing something like blocking their favorite website, 9 times out of 10 the kids that go and find away around whatever you did are the ones that relate best to other people and kids. A little bit different then the older stereotypical geek I suppose. Back to the article, I think that besides the internet there has been no real boom in the computer reveloution during my lifetime at least, but then again I'm young and the lowest end machine I got to tinker with was a 286. I'm sure those of you who still have their commie 64's around have some other examples, but quite frankly, I missed all those. The way I see it the computer revolution has been a slow and steady battle with little booms along the way.
Re:Kids and Computers
by
iq+in+binary
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Being someone who had to completely re-build his social skills due to computer use, I am torn between agreeing and disagreeing.
I used to get the crap kicked out of me every day (literally) by kids who saw me as a threat due to my intelligence. I stopped this by withdrawing completely from any personal social interaction.
Time eventually came where I "re-introduced" myself to the world. The fact I had been a social recluse for the past 3 years gave me a whole new spin on life once I actively sought one. I wholely believe this is for the better. Having been a social recluse for so long made real social interaction a learning experience for me.
Due to that, I'm now one of the most popular people in my area. This isn't even intentional. More than likely, it is due to the extreme change in environment and need to acclimate myself.
Tough situations are much better learning and cementing tools than people realize. Had I not shut myself off for awhile in my pubescant years, I'd probably just another wasted youth in America's ghetto.
Children aren't meant to handle social situations as well as adults can. Sometimes taking them out of the social situation for a small while is the best thing to do, considering how much they'll actually learn once put back in the situation.
-- Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last;)
It's also a little more than just computers. I drove past my old school busstop on a quick trip through the neighbourhood one morning, just before work. One of those spur of the moment things.
At the busstop were 5 schoolkids waiting for the bus - and at the time I went past EVERY one was on their cell phone, none talking to the other. (not face to face anyway, hell they could have all been on a party line to each other for all I know:)
While that's not a complete lack of human interaction, neither is a lot of computing. Networked gameplay, AIM/AOL/email/MSNmessenger/IRC, webcam chats, forums, newsgroups, slashdot... it's all a form of human-human interaction, and quite a bit bigger IMHO than just plain using a computer to interact with non-human objects.
No, I have no point - just a few comments inspired by your post.
Re:Kids and Computers
by
rf0
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I will admit that I use to be similar in being intelligent and that works against you. However a few years ago I decided to turn my life round as well and now I've got a life, a gf and actually go out. Perhaps I work a bit to much but I'm a lot happier. I just can't help but think though I should of spent more of my childhood out playing..
Re:Kids and Computers
by
rf0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
When kids are old enough yes then I can see IM being reasonable as a form of communication. As for the mobile least the kids were talking. What I'm more concerened about is when kids are very young. They aren't going to use IM/IRC and I wouldn't let my kids over fears of security.
Its the 5 years old I worry about and would make to sure any kids I have will goto kindergarden so they at least learn what is socailly acceptable
Re:Kids and Computers
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
The current joy of tech is oh so apt for this discussion.
Re:Kids and Computers
by
frankthechicken
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· Score: 2, Insightful
9 times out of 10 the kids that go and find away around whatever you did are the ones that relate best to other people and kids
I find it best to differentiate between kids and real people as well.
I seem to remember that the most socializing I did as a kid with regards to computing was the illicit trade of copied C64 games tapes. Apart from the actual gaming, everything else seemed to be a largely solitary pursuit, probably as the home revolution was still in its infancy. I'm not sure, but I feel that revolution was when printers became cheap, and suddenly there was an actual practical use, rather than just the perception of it being a rather expensive toy.
Re:Kids and Computers
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I used to get the crap kicked out of me every day (literally) by kids who saw me as a threat due to my intelligence.
Where were your parents? Out pursuing their own fulfillment? I know this is the black experience, but you're white.
The best thing for kids is to get them in a directed environment, band, piano, programming, something, anything intellectual. "Just playing" is absolutely worthless.
Those skills will help them throughout their life. And ten years from now, ask your parents just where the fuck they were while they watched you get beat up.
Dare I suggest that lack of social skills due to computer use will be less of a problem in the future, as computer use will be less dependent on sitting down in a room in front of a desktop to become something you can do just about anywhere, in the company of your friends.
The hacker minority will probably stick to the old fashioned way, at least during heavy-duty programming sessions, but most kids will surely embrace mobile computing when it comes (wearable computers not far off?).
Re:Kids and Computers
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I've seen a few kids who are 4/5 and have no idea about how to interact socially. There more than quite and shy they are withdrawn.
Uh, yeah. Kids -- and adults -- like that have existed for a long time. The question is, are they more prevalent now than before, is there a correlation between them and computer use, and is it a causal connection (i.e., are they withdrawn because of computers, or is computer use merely a symptom of being withdrawn?).
I was actually the same way. Throughout high school, I was quite antisocial. Once in college, however, I decided to actively be more social and now when I go out, people I don't even remember come up to me and say "what's up, Dave?" I actually just broke up with my girlfriend because all she wanted to do was sit at home and watch TV. I just can't live my life like that anymore.
I think the important thing to consider about children and computers is what they would be doing otherwise. It's probably a good thing to start talking to others before college, but if a kid is playing with a computer instead of watching TV, that's a huge step in the right direction. Social development in one's earlier years is probably good, but as you and I can verify, it's not essential to having a social life as an adult.
By sitting in a lab with a few kids and doing something like blocking their favorite website, 9 times out of 10 the kids that go and find away around whatever you did are the ones that relate best to other people and kids.
Well duh, of course, because they are the heroes that bring you the pr0n. Ah, it always drives the tech forward..
Kids and Computers
by
rf0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
To survive in todays world I agree that kids need to be able to use computers but one thing that concerns me is that an increasing number of people are seeing the computer as an alternative to having human interaction. I've seen a few kids who are 4/5 and have no idea about how to interact socially. There more than quite and shy they are withdrawn.
There should be a balance and I would think that it would be better to spend time with parents that technology. Just call me old fashioned it you want
Refelctions...
by
evilviper
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, all you get in the article are refections such as We were doing great things, and Computers aren't going where they should be. As with most similar interviews, there is nothing about what we SHOULD be doing now, just that we aren't doing it...
People, if you aren't happy with computers, come up with where they should be going, and why. A GUI was a natural evolution for the computer... What exactly do we need next? Come-on all you "visionaries"...
Re:Refelctions...
by
baryon351
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's interesting you raise the issue of the GUI as a natural evolution. I remember in the mid-80s when I had my first Amiga, the complete disdain that practically anyone I knew who owned a computer felt towards a GUI or computer with graphics was amazing. It certainly took time and visionaries to push the idea of a GUI, not as an optional gimmick, but bundle it with every machine - or as with the mac, make do with ONLY a GUI. for 15 years or more.
Until computers can actually understand our thoughts and do what we want them to do rather than what we told them I don't think people will become happy. Of course that would mean that we would all be Borg but hey...
Re:Refelctions...
by
FunkyRat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm not sure whether you are trying to troll or if you're just a little igonorant about the history of the computer.
Back in the early 1970s, GUIs were not a natural evolution for computers. They only appear so in retrospect because Steve Jobs happened to get a tour of Xerox PARC and decided that GUIs should be the next step in the evolution of computers. I daresay that Jobs (and Woz's) experiences growing up playing (and later writing) video games influenced the decision to base the Lisa and then the Mac's OS around a GUI but had Jobs not had his little tour about PARC it's arguable that the PC revolution would never have happened and the CLI would still be dominant today.
Alan Kay and his fellow researchers at Xerox PARC and preceeded by Doug Englebart at SRI are the real thing - true visionaries. It's easy to knock their accomplishments 35+ years out (Englebart et. al. developed NLS in 1967!) because we've had that long for their ideas to percolate into mass culture. Yeah, I know, the Mac has only been with us since 1984 but really, Englebart and later Kay were subtly but powerfully through their work and demonstrations preparing the way for the dominance of the GUI. Also, as I made allusion to before, don't forget the powerful role that video games had in preparing the kids of the 70s and 80s in ways that would make GUIs seem second nature.
So yeah, I've got to agree, this interview was pretty weak. However, if you want to see where Kay really envisioned that we'd be right now, take a look at the copious information out there regarding Dynabook, Smalltalk and his work at Xerox PARC. Then take a swing by squeak.org, download a copy and play around with it for a while. It's hard not to be impressed. As far as where we go next, that's up to all of us, including you. Personally, I'd like to start working in some strong AI and humaniform robots, but that's my hangup. Perhaps you have a different destination in mind.
Note: I'm not sure of Steve Jobs actual role at Xerox PARC. I've read differing accounts ranging from the tourist picture I paint above to his actually being a researcher there. Can anybody clarify?
I would say that this 'interview' is mostly written to tell the reader why they might be interested in seeing Alan Kay speak at the O'Reilly conference on the 24th.
For the people (and I don't mean you, but rather the grandparent and other similar posters) that constantly crap themselves with the "Well what should we do then, Smart Guy?!" attitude, are just inherently resentful towards the positions and accomplishments of researchers from before their time. Even if Alan had absolutely, positively, no idea what we should do to address his concerns, it wouldn't invalidate his criticisms. They're too busy belittling the significance of his (and others, as this behavior is generally pathological) accomplishments to match the giant zero that is their own.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
... because Steve Jobs happened to get a tour of Xerox PARC and decided that GUIs should be the next step in the evolution of computers.
Correct as far as it goes. Two small additions from a former Xeroid (Xerox AI Systems - just down the road from PARC- 1986-88):
At the time of the jobs PARC visit, Xerox was a significant investor in Apple, owning something like 15% of its shares. That's how he got the tour.
Jobs was given the tour over the strenuous objections of many of the PARC researchers. They knew what they had at PARC, were frustrated that Xerox wasn't doing anything significant with it, and were afraid that someone else would take it and run with it.
There are any number of books on how Xerox dropped the ball on PARC research. My personal favorite is Fumbling the Future. Xerox management style has long been somewhat manic-depressive, oscillating between two ideas:
We put marks on paper. The internal phrase for this was "toner pays our salaries."
We are the information/document company - information management is the future.
They switch back and forth between these two poles at intervals of two to three years. Lately they appear to be closer to the "marks on paper" pole.
Except that people like Alan Kay are doing new things, continuing to be visionaries. See Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org) - the platform of development for Alan Kay and a lot of others. They are doing a lot of cool, new stuff- most of which is written off by most Slashkiddies because it isn't C/GTK+/Unix.
--
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
It certainly took time and visionaries to push the idea of a GUI
I think you misunderstood the point. While computers were only text, things like televisions were graphical. Sure, there was discussion about if there is any advantage to a GUI, but the technology was there for anyone to make use of.
Back in the early 1970s, GUIs were not a natural evolution for computers. They only appear so in retrospect because Steve Jobs happened to get a tour of Xerox PARC and decided that GUIs should be the next step in the evolution of computers
No. The only thing that tour of Xerox did was to (perhaps) change the time-line. Since we had TVs, it's only natural that computers would develop into devices that had graphical output. Perhaps it happened earlier than it otherwise would have, but I have no doubt that it would have happened no matter what. The same could be said of sound as well.
The question is, what is needed to allow a computer to do something else that it can't yet do? We don't have 3-D TV yet, so there's no drive to get 3-D computers. Force feedback seems to be making inrods, but nobody has any killer app for it (other than games) that makes it a practical necessity.
If you can answer the question, then you will be considered a visionary, and will likely make a good deal of money off of the idea as well.
I didn't say they weren't... Mainly just that the article didn't contain much info, and the things they are doing aren't addressing their own complaints. eg.: Kay: Computers should be doing so much more by now. Me: What should they be doing that they aren't? Kay:.....
Re:Refelctions...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What I'd give for the "computer revolution" to have never happened and for CLIs to be the dominant operating system interface today. The world would be a much better place and the industry would be much stronger with the emphasis on applications, not operating systems.
Going from what I've seen of recent computer history the booms seem to just sneak up. For example the net really became big in about 97/98 here is europe and it caught everyone off guard. Even Microsoft said "the internet isn't relevant" and then turned around and released IE. I'm sure there is going to be another boom its just trying to work out what it is
Kids need to teach us about computers!
by
mabhatter654
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Kids are remarkably adaptable, but they lack the handling of highly complicated verbage structures. i.e. most kids can build complex things with blocks and lego bricks, but can't handle the abstract reading, writing required for most comupter languages. As adult programmers we should work to fix that--it will also benifit other older people as well. Kids are resilliant and love to play. That could be used to create all sorts of interfaces and study the effect on the kids-and the kids effect on the interfaces.
after all these years why are we still programming with text files? there are so many other possibilities. Not everything needs to be on a screen! We could use Blocks, music, colors, lights, shapes--with today's tech the possibilities are endless!
Re:Kids need to teach us about computers!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Dammit, Gus, your app won't compile!"
"Print out the log and lemme have a look."
"Ahh! Nevermind, it looks like your musical blocks are having trouble turning neon red.
Re:Kids need to teach us about computers!
by
xchino
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· Score: 1
Check out National Instrument's LabView.. certainly not for kids, but kind of a cool environment. It's basically like a flow chart or circuit diagram that you plug code into... it's mostly for data aquisition.. but a neat concept:)
-- Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
what's going on?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
it's been several hours since this was posted and there is only about 30 replies. Did you guys get lives and leave us behind?
It's non-political and involves a computer scientist from before the times of the masses of 16-year olds that populate Slashdot. Don't worry, some other, more redundant "YOUR RIGHTS ONLINE!" or "SONY RELEASED A NEW SEIZUREMATIC 2000!" post will make it through the queue and we'll return to our regularly scheduled unresearched garbage posts.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
And mine are on the street if they learn PHP at any point... Although, actually, children learn to talk before they learn to draw, so why should mastering computer language come 12 years after mastering point and click? Or, conversely, why are GUIs so shallow?
The GUIs we have now generally have the grammatical sophistication of a 2 year-old: "Want THAT, Don't want THAT, move THAT, and THAT, and THAT..." Seeing Kay's name go past again makes me nostalgic for an age when interface designers dreamed bold dreams, when object-oriented meant more than another way of managing libraries, when we really thought that GUIs could become languages rather than cave paintings revisited. I remember playing with GUI code on a Symbolics 15 years ago that still makes any modern GUI seem incredibly limited, and this despite having 100 times the processing power we had then.
I think we settled for a parody of the original dream.
Speaking as someone who has developed RSI from working on computers, I would suggest those of you who have kids that use computers at an early age that you both limit their time spent on the machines and have them sit, use the keyboard and mouse/track ball properly.
If not, they will develop habits that will be difficult to break once they get into their early-to-mid 20s--then they'll be in trouble. Have them develop good habits to start with.
I totally agree with this. I am fourteen right now, and I use a "modifed hunt and peck". I can type about 110 a minute, but I am pretty sure I will not be able to go any faster with out going to Home Row Style. DONT LET YOUR KIDS HUNT AND PECK!
-- "What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
Actually, "hunt and peck" is OK! When one use hunt and peck, they're probably typing without their palms resting on armrests which is good. Your nerves are very close to your palms and if you type while your palms are resting against something, they will cause problems in the long run. Touchtyping also allows one to overreach towards the intended keys and that's bad. Worse is typing while slouching, wrists and arms not in a neutral position, head not resting properly, and inadequate lighting conditions.
I am pushing for my local supermarket to have an "Old People Only" checkout isle, with old people banned from all other checkouts, so that I don't have to wait behind some crusty old fart paying by cheque because they're scared that using their debit card (which their bloody bank sent them anyway) might kill them.
Re:Old Gits and Computers
by
dubbreak
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· Score: 1
actually that's a good pointer to where we are going:
-there will be the people that use computers
-there will be the people that write the software
-there will be a bunch of people stuck on a remote island because they can't do either
-- "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Re:Kids and Computers and boys and Ritalin
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The trouble is, darned few kids are taught to program, they just sit in front of the screen filling out multiple choice answers. It's used mainly as a scoring aid for teacher.
Inquisitive and restless boys, the troublemakers, are sent to the school nurse, who then has a talk with the parents about ADHD. Parents then get from SSI a $450 check for their disabled child being treated with vitamin R.
and when these powers of expression bring forth a new way to discuss, think, and argue about important ideas.
Yo brain don't work well on Ritalin. Besides, few math and science majors ever teach those subjects. In reality, the football or soccer or hockey coach picks up the computer class, and he/she just teaches out of the answer book. Coach skidded through teaching college with a minor in Social Sciences or Human Services. Never had a logic class, and the last time was in a science or math class was 7th grade.
Alan Kay needs to acquaint himself with the new realities of public education.
Kids Sholdnt use the Internet.
by
ExEleven
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Until the rediculous amounts of Internet Sex related content are somehow lowerd, i would not let my kids touch the internet until there about 13 and are already shown all that in school.
Besides I have better things for my bandwidth then Children downloading crap all day.
Re:Kids Sholdnt use the Internet.
by
justin_speers
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· Score: 1
Until the rediculous amounts of Internet Sex related content are somehow lowerd, i would not let my kids touch the internet until there about 13 and are already shown all that in school.
I think it's funny you chose 13 as the age you're willing to let them explore the Internet, in all of it's sexual content glory...:)
That's the age I really got interested in the Internet!
Re:Kids Sholdnt use the Internet.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
no need to worry so much about internet porn dude, first of all you can get one of the many internet filtering solutions available so they *can't* see porn and all that dodgy stuff, also it really dosen't matter anyhow, all they need to know is porn is HOW-TO have sex, and not MAKE LOVE. The two are completely different realities so as long as they know that, they'll be fine.
Re:Kids Sholdnt use the Internet.
by
Commutative+Monoid
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or they could try being a parent. I don't know, maybe periodically keep tabs on what they're children are doing. I know it's a fairly outlandish theory in this modern day of ours, what with television being the typical mother and father these days.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
-- You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Re:Kids Sholdnt use the Internet.
by
ktorn
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· Score: 1
It's probably the right age, because its more or less the average puberty age.
Mind you, since apparently (and in my opinion strangely) such average is coming down people might want to take 1 or 2 years off, so 11 or 12 sounds more appropriate.
Re:Kids Sholdnt use the Internet.
by
promixr
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· Score: 1
Yes there should be some way of stopping nekkidness and cuss-werds on computers and on the internet so iz dumb hiks frum Texis won't ever see that...
What will computers *be*, to kids.
by
dmorin
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Once upon a time computers were thought to be really fancy calculators.
Then people started thinking about them as fancy typewriters.
Then, databases. I remember working at a retail computer store in the late 80's and actually using the "mom can store her recipes" argument.
Somewhere in there they were seen as having the potential to be generic problem solvers. But I think that view was only ever held by developers, not users.
I think kids see the computer as a communication device. IM is the world to lots of them.
I, like many Slashdotters, saw my first computer at the age of about 10 where if you wanted a new video game you learned assembly language and wrote your own. I spend the next 20 years listening to people say things like "Oh, my 2yr old is into the computer just like you were!" Yeah, sure. The 2yr old likes to wiggle the mouse, I was hacking 6809 assembly. That's the same thing. But kids now have simply learned to see the computer for its communication ability, and don't necessarily care to see it as a machine that can be turned into new things. Sure, they like to personalize the hell out of it. Skinning your programs, generating new icons, that's all the rage. But the percentage of 10yr olds that are out there thinking about new IM programs to write is probably about the same as its always been. I've always been a firm believer that hackers are born, not made, a kid who is destined to hack will show an intuition for it from the minute she sits down at the keyboard, and a kid who isn't will be bored and distracted in programming classes.
Re:What will computers *be*, to kids.
by
ktorn
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· Score: 1
You have some good points there.
There are still some little hackers in the making out there, perhaps even more than before, but the great majority of the kids see computers as a toy/tool. I think that's ok, since most of them will be using computers as a tool in their professional careers but not necessarily as programmers. They need to be computer literate as users not as hackers.
What troubles me is that some of these future users when faced with the big decision of choosing their undergraduate course, will choose Software Engineering based on their fondness of computers, not realizing that there's a lot more into these courses than 'mouse wiggling'. I personally have met one such University first year drop-out. The guy just wasn't a hacker, he didn't have it in him. Now he spends his days at home, surfing the net and playing PlayStation (ironic, the very same hobbies that led to his misjudged decision).
Then I think "How should I go about educating my (future) kids about computers?". Well, I'm not going to force them down this or that path. I don't care if they turn up hackers or users. Let them find out for themselves, and be there when they have questions.
its just a part of evolution
by
Rooked_One
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· Score: 2, Insightful
As the human species progress over the course of time, without destroying itself, it will inherently gain many qualities. One of which is, since we've developed many ways to aid in our progress, to make machines that will aid in our progress. To think otherwise is insane - do you know anyone that would have taken Pi to the extent pc's have? I thought not.
As computers become more common place humans will evolve further. We will no longer have to invest in hard core brain power, and perhaps will concentrate on a different role. If you disagree with darwinism please disregard this post entirely, I don't want to say anything but my opinion. As computers start to do some things for us we will learn how to do other things we couldn't imagine of doing right now. The question is - will we get there without losing sight of what is really important?
If I lost you, I apologize in advance - mod this down all you want:)
Re:its just a part of evolution
by
Pray_4_Mojo
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· Score: 1
As the human species progress over the course of time, without destroying itself, it will inherently gain many qualities. One of which is, since we've developed many ways to aid in our progress, to make machines that will aid in our progress. To think otherwise is insane - do you know anyone that would have taken Pi to the extent pc's have? I thought not. As computers become more common place humans will evolve further.
Computers have yet to exist long enough for them to effect evolution. And before you get all high and mighty about your precious status as human, top of the food chain, remember that dinosaurs ruled with earth with thick skin, big teeth, and cold blood for 40 million years. Our evolutionary experiment of "reason" (brainpower and tool building as opposed to strength) has only lasted 7,000 years. Not very long in compairison, when you think about it. With oil spills, nuclear fallout, and all the other potential "civilization killers" or "environmental destroyers". It looks like man's greatest enemy in evolving further is man.
We will no longer have to invest in hard core brain power, and perhaps will concentrate on a different role.
Actually, we're not going to "evolve" anything differently. The more complex an organism, the harder it is to change. Thinking/Self-Managing Technology is not going to supplant thought anymore then the calculator was going to destory mathematics. Technology, often thought of today as man's savior (both in medecine and in war) will not give you answers. Such Optimism in the technology field is dangerous. Do you think AI is going to be used in educating your children, or in designing smartbombs? If you believe the former instead of the latter, stop by CMU's SEI (Software Engineering Institute -- making the guidance systems of a lifetime:) )
If you disagree with darwinism please disregard this post entirely, I don't want to say anything but my opinion. As computers start to do some things for us we will learn how to do other things we couldn't imagine of doing right now. The question is - will we get there without losing sight of what is really important?
Maybe the inner cynic in me wants me to yell "haven't we already?" -- but in general, I see all men as blind -- even those whose faith lies in the prominence of scientific reasoning, such as myself. We're cane tapping our way to the future. All our past discoveries are merely a recorded number of taps from one location to another. My hope for the next century is the men learn to see, instead of continue to cane tap. That's when things will get exciting.
If I lost you, I apologize in advance - mod this down all you want:)
after all these years why are we still programming with text files? there are so many other possibilities. Not everything needs to be on a screen! We could use Blocks, music, colors, lights, shapes--with today's tech the possibilities are endless!
Squeak incorporates a system called eToys wherein the user draws objects on the screen and then programs them using drag-and-drop "tiles" that represent the various properties and actions associated with the object.
I haven't played much with it myself, and it's rather primitive still but there are kids successfully making rather complex programs with it.
He says there isnt much effort in trying to improv
by
ioao
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· Score: 2
He says there isnt much effort in trying to improve computing. To me, there are many efforts in several fronts. In fact, due to the mass of information and geographic distance, many of these efforts are hard to track, even if you tried.
logic classes?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You're kidding. That's like asking a dopey skulteechr to have read Rosseau, or Camus, or the Federalist Papers.
Ideas are the last thing a teacher would know anything about. However, they know lots about Title IX and Title I, and Readiness to Learn Programs for two year olds.
Re:He says there isnt much effort in trying to imp
by
hoggoth
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· Score: 1
>... much effort in trying to improve computing... >... there are many efforts in several fronts... >... many of these efforts are hard to track...
If there are so many efforts, how about a few links instead of a content-free post?
-- - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat/dev/random (may take some time)
Re:He says there isnt much effort in trying to imp
by
ioao
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· Score: 1
Ace: http://research.sun.com/projects/ace/petstore.html
MDA: http://www.omg.org/mda/.NET: http://www.microsoft.com/net/
And I am not a researcher of this stuff, but these projects did impress me.
I see the merging of the mobile phones and the TVs with the computers as important improvements as well.
Wireless rocks but needs security improvements.
Cheers.
Thank you! I've long wondered how Jobs managed to get inside PARC. I'd never known that Xerox held a large portion of Apple shares. Fumbling The Future is one of those books that is on my "list" along with about 500 others.
It really is amazing that Xerox never could realize the potential in what it had. The Star, 3 years ahead of the Mac, was amazing. IIRC, and I apologize if my memory is faulty, you guys at Xerox AI Systems did a lot of work in making practical expert systems. Astounding. Xerox has all this brainpower producing such beautiful stuff and completely and totally blows it.
Fumbling the Future is a fast read, but a good one. It alternates between history of PARC research and development (stuff like people working weekends wire-wrapping workstation boards, so they could join the party faster) and the history of the business decisions around PARC.
The most telling story in the book is about the Star's coming-out party, at a big Xerox new-products show. They set up a room full of Stars, file servers and printers, and showed them off to a bunch of senior VPs and their wives. This was the early 80s, so the Xeroid management was pretty much white male, older guys, and their wives were housewives who might have been secretaries before they got married.
The guys didn't have a clue about how revolutionary this stuff was - to them, keyboards were tools of the lower class. They walked around and nodded. Their wives, however, got it at once, and were quite excited about it all.
Well, you have to bear in mind that the people at Apple extolling user interface were already familiar with PARC. Chiefly this would be Jef Raskin, who had been working with UI issues since the 60's. However, Jobs, who didn't get it, was a bigwig at Apple and was threatening the future of the Macintosh project and their exporting of UI features into the Lisa project. So the PARC tour Jobs took was more to get him to support what other people were doing, or at least stop interfering. People doing real work didn't pick up a great deal from it.
For a good Apple history, I suggest "Infinite Loop" by Michael Malone.
-- --
This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Computers!=problem solving
by
panurge
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· Score: 1
"Programming" is, or should be, about problem solving. Computing is about extending the range of problems that human beings can solve. In essence it works like all other thinking prosthetics, by substituting a different, easier to manage API.
When I went to school in the precomputer age, mutiplying and dividing decimal numbers (a hard process) was handled with logarithm tables, which substituted an API of a two dimensional + interpolation table search plus addition and subtraction. It wasn't a very good API, and for multiplication at least kids good at mental arithmetic could calculate faster than the logarithm lookup, to four places at least. Now we have calculators, which have a different API (pressing buttons, but also knowing about the need for batteries, keeping the thing free of water etc.)
It may seem stretching it to use the term "API", but in every single problem solving case there is a point at which people interact to make the machine do work, whether it is at the earliest stage (design) in an embedded application such as an elevator, or at the latest stage as in an interpreted language.
And my point? I think we should be carefully distinguishing problem solving and information absorbtion in children. The present personal computer is only one metaphor and it has a short history. Introducing children to it early on is perhaps no bad thing, but not at the expense of other manual, visual and auditory skills. Introducing children to logical and mathematical problem solving via dedicated programming languages is good, but to stick to the present GUI is about as sane as the British education system, which regarded proficiency in Latin as the main indicator of intelligence virtually to the middle of last century (Alan Turing had trouble at his English school partly because mathematics had such low status compared to Latin.) It would be interesting (but impractical) to get experienced teachers to describe what facilities would most benefit their attempts to teach their subjects, regardless of technology, and then get a lot of the more venturesome technologists to try and find a way of meeting those needs without considering present metaphors. After all, that's how applications are supposed to be scoped, not "We've been given computers, how can we be seen to be using them?"
The difference is a bit like the difference between the amateur photographer and the pro. The amateur thinks "If I had a Cakon H2000 with a 0-60 in 3 seconds telephoto I could do such-and-such." The pro thinks "I have to produce such-and-such a job, what resources do I need?". It's amateur thinking that fills schools with computers when perhaps what they really need is sackloads of technical Lego, or perhaps an old 60s PDP11 so they can really experience the conversion from ideas to 1s and 0s.
Oh well, just the out of touch ramblings of of a crusty old git.
-- Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
I just saw a Lego commercial on TV. What the hell has happened to them? They used to be fun toys when they were just multi-colored blocks. Now, they're 'action figures' that don't even come apart! $100 gets you a pre-molded 'toy' that might have a few pieces that you can move around. Yay...
Who had Capsula growing up? What about Erector Sets? Hell, even Voltron was more educational than Legos are now. Don't waste your money.
-- "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Closed? Which part of Open Source didn't you follow? you can get full sources to the image and VM, and change whatever you want. Heck, even for commercial systems like VisualWorks, customers or educational users can get full source - including VM sources - and make whatever changes they want.
I don't think you read the same article I did.
-- Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library
Re:Kids and Computers and boys and Ritalin
by
sketerpot
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· Score: 1
That reminds me of something that happened to me back in elementary school. We had a computer lab with a bunch of old macs running system 7, and we were told to open a certain "educational program". Mine wouldn't run, because there wasn't enough memory. So, inquisitive child that I was, I went and turned on virtual memory. Only a megabyte, but after that the program worked fine. Only thing was, the teacher found out about it, gave me a little lecture about how I could have messed something up very very badly (I knew what I was doing damn it!) and then she moved me to a different computer where the teachers could keep an eye on me to make sure I was doing only what I was supposed to. That sucked, but that school was better than most.
A story being lived out right now.
by
davisshaver
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· Score: 1
I am currently a fourteen year old, and I, as many others here at /., love technology. The most important thing, I think, is to make sure your school is flexible. Instead of sitting in a study hall an hour a day, the computer teaches let me work on the web sites, on the year book, on the end of the year slide show, and sometimes on the server. If the school your child is going to right now does not have a fairly "open to new ideas" computer staff, look for an alternative.
-- "What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
Re:A story being lived out right now.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
dude, you're lucky.
i'm fifteen, stuck in a school where the most advanced computer class is basic html and i'm banned from the computers for evading their pathetic blocking system.
and then they're puzzled as to why i don't spend much time on my homework.
Re:Kids and Computers and boys and Ritalin
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Not True. I am currently in middle school, and have adhd, and use computers profusely(it is not the right word, but it is the first word to come to mind). When I wake up and log on I cannot think straight, I am more creative, but I cannot remember anything. After I take your "Vitamin R", which is actually now usually a time release drug called Concerta, I can program and still have my creativity.
Re: Revisionist Mac/PARC history
by
Animats
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Note: I'm not sure of Steve Jobs actual role at Xerox PARC. I've read differing accounts ranging from the tourist picture I paint above to his actually being a researcher there. Can anybody clarify?
Mostly, that's a myth. First, Parc was never that secretive. I got the tour and demo in 1975 while taking a class in computer architecture, years before Jobs did. Met Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, and saw an early version of Smalltalk running a discrite-event simulation.
Second, the Lisa was the innovative machine; the Mac was a severely cost-reduced Lisa. (Remember the original Mac specs: 128K, one floppy, no hard drive, cost about $3K) The big problem back then, realized by most researchers, was that you need about a megapixel, a megabyte, and a megahertz to do a GUI system. PARC did that by having custom minicomputers built at a cost of about $40K each. (Xerox Altos were actually built by Data General, and were Data General Novas with different microcode.) Other people tried to build "workstations" that had enough hardware to do the job, but most of them ran UNIX, which was a poor platform for a GUI.
Third, what PARC had back then looked nothing like the Mac, or even like a modern GUI. It looked more like a game system; you could run one program at a time, and that program ran full-screen. You could get multiple windows going in the same Smalltalk environment, but they all belonged to the same program.
Incidentally, back then Kay described Ethernet as "Alohanet with a captive ether". It was based on a University of Hawaii VHF network well-known in the networking community at the time.
in an article about the computer revolution,
by
sstory
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· Score: 2, Funny
we find this sentence: " I spoke to him by phone while scribbling madly to keep up with him."
Yeah, I'd certainly agree that you aren't using electronic tools to their maximum if you are writing madly to record what someone's saying.
Re:in an article about the computer revolution,
by
promixr
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· Score: 1
Yeah really, I'm so sick of so called 'technology journalists' who are wayyyy behind the times when it comes to technology...
Doesn't do much for me
by
Mattygfunk1
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· Score: 1
Firstly well argued. Some of your comments are spot on - while I did criticize I didn't offer a "solution" myself.
I would say however, that the article didn't offer us anything new. Slashdot is a (sorta) news service. Personally I want to read something that is either new to me or an "out of left field" controversial opinion that has the potential to shake things up a bit.
As you concede the article is a promotion, if one on an interesting topic from an interesting speaker. It is just not what I clasify as news.
I was thinking this the other day, remembering having arguments with the other two geek friends I had as a kid as to the point of a GUI...
I read some article somewhere extolling the virtues of a GUI in highly theoretical terms, and got all excited, managed to get my hands on an early copy of Windows and tried to convince my friends that this was the way of the future...
they rolled their eyes at me, and after about a week of messing around with it, I trashed Windows from my machine. Did I ever think that was a waste of time...
Even though Alan Kay is often mentioned as a dim shadow of the past, in reality he's busily working on what may be the cutting edge of many computing aspects. The Squeak project is his current baby. I heartily recommend it to anyone who pines for the good old days when programming was fun, and only seriously undertaken by those who thought it so.
My daughter is almost 4. She is a great artist. She loves to draw, color, paint, etc.
My wife and I decided that we would use the computer as a tool for her growth and development, but not as a time-waster/babysitter. And, I didn't want her to have to "learn the computer," a complex interface in and of itself.
I have it set up so that she can bring the computer out of suspend with the power button, run her drawing program with one hotkey on the keyboard, and she's into her drawing program. She loves her Disney's Magic Artist Studio.
The best thing we have done though is buy her a drawing pad. She doesn't know how to use a mouse or the keyboard, but she can make some very impressive pictures with this setup!
I don't want to hear her say "I want to play on the computer." I want to hear "Can I draw colors?" The difference is between the computer as a complex device requiring a difficult interface with a learning curve, the other a specific tool that accomplishes a definite purpose, that is easy to use and enjoy.
I don't think kids should be learning touch-typing at the age of 5. I also don't believe that kids should be just mindlessly clicking on pre-defined hot spots on the screen as part of a game or a time-wasting "activity" program.
When we are a bit older we can impress our juniors by calling their PDAs
"dynabooks".
Grandpa! Why do you always call my PDA a "dynabook"?
"Well sonny, long before you were born, there was a really smart guy named, Alan Kay, and he was the first person to think up a powerful, portable computer a kid could draw on, and ask questions."
If you want to see where Kay's latest thinking is taking him, you can see the evolution of Squeak into a more experimental phase of collaborative computing, Croquet. See also the manual.
Around about 1975, when I was an undergraduate student at a small, private, and somewhat uptight college, Alan Kay gave an afternoon talk in one of the main auditoriums. In the middle of the presentation, seemingly unrelated to what he was talking about, he said, "Watching television is like mental masturbation." He then seemed to lose his train of thought, so the sentence just hung there for several seconds. He then continued on talking about the Dynabook or whatever like nothing had happened.
28 years later, that's the only part of the talk I remember.
-- Make a difference: move to a swing state.
How soon they forget (Was Re:Refelctions...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You guys forgot to place Jef Raskin in the mix. His Masters Thesis was a description of a WYSIWYG printing/graphics system (The Quick Draw Graphics System) published in 1967. Work on the Mac (which predated the Lisa actually) started over a year before Jobs went to PARC at Raskin's urging (proxied via his former student, Bill Atkinson). Raskin set up the PARC tour in order to give Jobs a taste of what a working bitmapped computer graphics system might be like because Jobs didn't "get it" and kept trying (with varying degress of sucess) to kill the Mac project.
How much of the Mac/Lisa interface was homegrown, derived from Raskin's work, or obtained from PARC has been much discussed. Search the archives for the usenet discussion between Raskin and Bruce Horn for more info on this.
A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suites and they made rude noises during my presentation."
The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference. Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd, an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations. Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother with social conventions?"
"They are alive within the Tao."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
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My child loves her computer; she is 3 1/2 and uses it for 2-3 hours everyday. It has replaced the time in her day where she would usually sit and watch a Disney movie or some other such, now she is challenging her mind instead of taking backseat. Kids and computers do mix.
On the plus side at preschool there are two computers that the kids use/watch other kids use, exposure seems to be key.
There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
A lot of criticisms about how what everyone else is doing is wrong without offering an alternative, and gloating that "he did it first".
Nothing against Alan personally, but he reminds me of team motivators that are great at speaking theory but lack giving true direction.
__ cheap web site hosting FAQ
The real innovation to come from the Kay camp is the pervasive collaborative editors that now manafest themselves as Wikiwebs.
I've taught computer classes to kids before (ages 5 - 14 ) and it is amazing what some of them can do. It's neat to see which ones are confident enough to tinker with things and don't fear making mistakes, the same qualities many /.'ers had in their formative years I'm sure. By sitting in a lab with a few kids and doing something like blocking their favorite website, 9 times out of 10 the kids that go and find away around whatever you did are the ones that relate best to other people and kids. A little bit different then the older stereotypical geek I suppose. Back to the article, I think that besides the internet there has been no real boom in the computer reveloution during my lifetime at least, but then again I'm young and the lowest end machine I got to tinker with was a 286. I'm sure those of you who still have their commie 64's around have some other examples, but quite frankly, I missed all those. The way I see it the computer revolution has been a slow and steady battle with little booms along the way.
Check out my life
To survive in todays world I agree that kids need to be able to use computers but one thing that concerns me is that an increasing number of people are seeing the computer as an alternative to having human interaction. I've seen a few kids who are 4/5 and have no idea about how to interact socially. There more than quite and shy they are withdrawn.
There should be a balance and I would think that it would be better to spend time with parents that technology. Just call me old fashioned it you want
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Yes, all you get in the article are refections such as We were doing great things, and Computers aren't going where they should be. As with most similar interviews, there is nothing about what we SHOULD be doing now, just that we aren't doing it...
People, if you aren't happy with computers, come up with where they should be going, and why. A GUI was a natural evolution for the computer... What exactly do we need next? Come-on all you "visionaries"...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Going from what I've seen of recent computer history the booms seem to just sneak up. For example the net really became big in about 97/98 here is europe and it caught everyone off guard. Even Microsoft said "the internet isn't relevant" and then turned around and released IE. I'm sure there is going to be another boom its just trying to work out what it is
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
after all these years why are we still programming with text files? there are so many other possibilities. Not everything needs to be on a screen! We could use Blocks, music, colors, lights, shapes--with today's tech the possibilities are endless!
it's been several hours since this was posted and there is only about 30 replies. Did you guys get lives and leave us behind?
Strangest troll I have seen in awhile... WTF would microsoft have to do with OSDN anyway
Otherwise I'm going to trade them in.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Speaking as someone who has developed RSI from working on computers, I would suggest those of you who have kids that use computers at an early age that you both limit their time spent on the machines and have them sit, use the keyboard and mouse/track ball properly.
If not, they will develop habits that will be difficult to break once they get into their early-to-mid 20s--then they'll be in trouble. Have them develop good habits to start with.
This is the social problem of the current decade.
I am pushing for my local supermarket to have an "Old People Only" checkout isle, with old people banned from all other checkouts, so that I don't have to wait behind some crusty old fart paying by cheque because they're scared that using their debit card (which their bloody bank sent them anyway) might kill them.
I spent nearly all my time on the computer when I was a kid, and it's made me socially confident and popular with the ladies!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The trouble is, darned few kids are taught to program, they just sit in front of the screen filling out multiple choice answers. It's used mainly as a scoring aid for teacher.
Inquisitive and restless boys, the troublemakers, are sent to the school nurse, who then has a talk with the parents about ADHD. Parents then get from SSI a $450 check for their disabled child being treated with vitamin R.
and when these powers of expression bring forth a new way to discuss, think, and argue about important ideas.
Yo brain don't work well on Ritalin. Besides, few math and science majors ever teach those subjects. In reality, the football or soccer or hockey coach picks up the computer class, and he/she just teaches out of the answer book. Coach skidded through teaching college with a minor in Social Sciences or Human Services. Never had a logic class, and the last time was in a science or math class was 7th grade.
Alan Kay needs to acquaint himself with the new realities of public education.
Until the rediculous amounts of Internet Sex related content are somehow lowerd, i would not let my kids touch the internet until there about 13 and are already shown all that in school.
Besides I have better things for my bandwidth then Children downloading crap all day.
Then people started thinking about them as fancy typewriters.
Then, databases. I remember working at a retail computer store in the late 80's and actually using the "mom can store her recipes" argument.
Somewhere in there they were seen as having the potential to be generic problem solvers. But I think that view was only ever held by developers, not users.
I think kids see the computer as a communication device. IM is the world to lots of them.
I, like many Slashdotters, saw my first computer at the age of about 10 where if you wanted a new video game you learned assembly language and wrote your own. I spend the next 20 years listening to people say things like "Oh, my 2yr old is into the computer just like you were!" Yeah, sure. The 2yr old likes to wiggle the mouse, I was hacking 6809 assembly. That's the same thing. But kids now have simply learned to see the computer for its communication ability, and don't necessarily care to see it as a machine that can be turned into new things. Sure, they like to personalize the hell out of it. Skinning your programs, generating new icons, that's all the rage. But the percentage of 10yr olds that are out there thinking about new IM programs to write is probably about the same as its always been. I've always been a firm believer that hackers are born, not made, a kid who is destined to hack will show an intuition for it from the minute she sits down at the keyboard, and a kid who isn't will be bored and distracted in programming classes.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
As computers become more common place humans will evolve further. We will no longer have to invest in hard core brain power, and perhaps will concentrate on a different role. If you disagree with darwinism please disregard this post entirely, I don't want to say anything but my opinion. As computers start to do some things for us we will learn how to do other things we couldn't imagine of doing right now. The question is - will we get there without losing sight of what is really important?
If I lost you, I apologize in advance - mod this down all you want :)
Squeak incorporates a system called eToys wherein the user draws objects on the screen and then programs them using drag-and-drop "tiles" that represent the various properties and actions associated with the object.
I haven't played much with it myself, and it's rather primitive still but there are kids successfully making rather complex programs with it.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
He says there isnt much effort in trying to improve computing.
To me, there are many efforts in several fronts.
In fact, due to the mass of information and geographic distance, many of these efforts are hard to track, even if you tried.
You're kidding. That's like asking a dopey skulteechr to have read Rosseau, or Camus, or the Federalist Papers.
Ideas are the last thing a teacher would know anything about. However, they know lots about Title IX and Title I, and Readiness to Learn Programs for two year olds.
> ... much effort in trying to improve computing ... ... there are many efforts in several fronts ... ... many of these efforts are hard to track ...
>
>
If there are so many efforts, how about a few links instead of a content-free post?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Ace: http://research.sun.com/projects/ace/petstore.html
MDA: http://www.omg.org/mda/ .NET: http://www.microsoft.com/net/
And I am not a researcher of this stuff, but these projects did impress me.
I see the merging of the mobile phones and the TVs with the computers as important improvements as well.
Wireless rocks but needs security improvements.
Cheers.
Somebody please mod the parent up!
Thank you! I've long wondered how Jobs managed to get inside PARC. I'd never known that Xerox held a large portion of Apple shares. Fumbling The Future is one of those books that is on my "list" along with about 500 others.
It really is amazing that Xerox never could realize the potential in what it had. The Star, 3 years ahead of the Mac, was amazing. IIRC, and I apologize if my memory is faulty, you guys at Xerox AI Systems did a lot of work in making practical expert systems. Astounding. Xerox has all this brainpower producing such beautiful stuff and completely and totally blows it.
If anybody is interested, I highly recommend Bruce Damer's Personal Histories of the Desktop User Interface.
When I went to school in the precomputer age, mutiplying and dividing decimal numbers (a hard process) was handled with logarithm tables, which substituted an API of a two dimensional + interpolation table search plus addition and subtraction. It wasn't a very good API, and for multiplication at least kids good at mental arithmetic could calculate faster than the logarithm lookup, to four places at least. Now we have calculators, which have a different API (pressing buttons, but also knowing about the need for batteries, keeping the thing free of water etc.)
It may seem stretching it to use the term "API", but in every single problem solving case there is a point at which people interact to make the machine do work, whether it is at the earliest stage (design) in an embedded application such as an elevator, or at the latest stage as in an interpreted language.
And my point? I think we should be carefully distinguishing problem solving and information absorbtion in children. The present personal computer is only one metaphor and it has a short history. Introducing children to it early on is perhaps no bad thing, but not at the expense of other manual, visual and auditory skills. Introducing children to logical and mathematical problem solving via dedicated programming languages is good, but to stick to the present GUI is about as sane as the British education system, which regarded proficiency in Latin as the main indicator of intelligence virtually to the middle of last century (Alan Turing had trouble at his English school partly because mathematics had such low status compared to Latin.)
It would be interesting (but impractical) to get experienced teachers to describe what facilities would most benefit their attempts to teach their subjects, regardless of technology, and then get a lot of the more venturesome technologists to try and find a way of meeting those needs without considering present metaphors. After all, that's how applications are supposed to be scoped, not "We've been given computers, how can we be seen to be using them?"
The difference is a bit like the difference between the amateur photographer and the pro. The amateur thinks "If I had a Cakon H2000 with a 0-60 in 3 seconds telephoto I could do such-and-such." The pro thinks "I have to produce such-and-such a job, what resources do I need?". It's amateur thinking that fills schools with computers when perhaps what they really need is sackloads of technical Lego, or perhaps an old 60s PDP11 so they can really experience the conversion from ideas to 1s and 0s.
Oh well, just the out of touch ramblings of of a crusty old git.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Who had Capsula growing up? What about Erector Sets? Hell, even Voltron was more educational than Legos are now. Don't waste your money.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Closed? Which part of Open Source didn't you follow? you can get full sources to the image and VM, and change whatever you want. Heck, even for commercial systems like VisualWorks, customers or educational users can get full source - including VM sources - and make whatever changes they want. I don't think you read the same article I did.
Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library
That reminds me of something that happened to me back in elementary school. We had a computer lab with a bunch of old macs running system 7, and we were told to open a certain "educational program". Mine wouldn't run, because there wasn't enough memory. So, inquisitive child that I was, I went and turned on virtual memory. Only a megabyte, but after that the program worked fine. Only thing was, the teacher found out about it, gave me a little lecture about how I could have messed something up very very badly (I knew what I was doing damn it!) and then she moved me to a different computer where the teachers could keep an eye on me to make sure I was doing only what I was supposed to. That sucked, but that school was better than most.
I am currently a fourteen year old, and I, as many others here at /. , love technology. The most important thing, I think, is to make sure your school is flexible. Instead of sitting in a study hall an hour a day, the computer teaches let me work on the web sites, on the year book, on the end of the year slide show, and sometimes on the server. If the school your child is going to right now does not have a fairly "open to new ideas" computer staff, look for an alternative.
"What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
Not True. I am currently in middle school, and have adhd, and use computers profusely(it is not the right word, but it is the first word to come to mind). When I wake up and log on I cannot think straight, I am more creative, but I cannot remember anything. After I take your "Vitamin R", which is actually now usually a time release drug called Concerta, I can program and still have my creativity.
Mostly, that's a myth. First, Parc was never that secretive. I got the tour and demo in 1975 while taking a class in computer architecture, years before Jobs did. Met Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, and saw an early version of Smalltalk running a discrite-event simulation.
Second, the Lisa was the innovative machine; the Mac was a severely cost-reduced Lisa. (Remember the original Mac specs: 128K, one floppy, no hard drive, cost about $3K) The big problem back then, realized by most researchers, was that you need about a megapixel, a megabyte, and a megahertz to do a GUI system. PARC did that by having custom minicomputers built at a cost of about $40K each. (Xerox Altos were actually built by Data General, and were Data General Novas with different microcode.) Other people tried to build "workstations" that had enough hardware to do the job, but most of them ran UNIX, which was a poor platform for a GUI.
Third, what PARC had back then looked nothing like the Mac, or even like a modern GUI. It looked more like a game system; you could run one program at a time, and that program ran full-screen. You could get multiple windows going in the same Smalltalk environment, but they all belonged to the same program.
Incidentally, back then Kay described Ethernet as "Alohanet with a captive ether". It was based on a University of Hawaii VHF network well-known in the networking community at the time.
Yeah, I'd certainly agree that you aren't using electronic tools to their maximum if you are writing madly to record what someone's saying.
I would say however, that the article didn't offer us anything new. Slashdot is a (sorta) news service. Personally I want to read something that is either new to me or an "out of left field" controversial opinion that has the potential to shake things up a bit.
As you concede the article is a promotion, if one on an interesting topic from an interesting speaker. It is just not what I clasify as news.
___________
cheap web site hosting was here.
You ruined Disney's R&D group.
What will you do to HP's R&D group?
Face it: Nobody cares about squeak 'cept for tired old washed-up computer programmers.
I was thinking this the other day, remembering having arguments with the other two geek friends I had as a kid as to the point of a GUI...
I read some article somewhere extolling the virtues of a GUI in highly theoretical terms, and got all excited, managed to get my hands on an early copy of Windows and tried to convince my friends that this was the way of the future...
they rolled their eyes at me, and after about a week of messing around with it, I trashed Windows from my machine. Did I ever think that was a waste of time...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Even though Alan Kay is often mentioned as a dim shadow of the past, in reality he's busily working on what may be the cutting edge of many computing aspects. The Squeak project is his current baby. I heartily recommend it to anyone who pines for the good old days when programming was fun, and only seriously undertaken by those who thought it so.
:)
http://www.squeak.org
Get it. Have fun. Show it to your kids.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
My daughter is almost 4. She is a great artist. She loves to draw, color, paint, etc.
My wife and I decided that we would use the computer as a tool for her growth and development, but not as a time-waster/babysitter. And, I didn't want her to have to "learn the computer," a complex interface in and of itself.
I have it set up so that she can bring the computer out of suspend with the power button, run her drawing program with one hotkey on the keyboard, and she's into her drawing program. She loves her Disney's Magic Artist Studio.
The best thing we have done though is buy her a drawing pad. She doesn't know how to use a mouse or the keyboard, but she can make some very impressive pictures with this setup!
I don't want to hear her say "I want to play on the computer." I want to hear "Can I draw colors?" The difference is between the computer as a complex device requiring a difficult interface with a learning curve, the other a specific tool that accomplishes a definite purpose, that is easy to use and enjoy.
I don't think kids should be learning touch-typing at the age of 5. I also don't believe that kids should be just mindlessly clicking on pre-defined hot spots on the screen as part of a game or a time-wasting "activity" program.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Grandpa! Why do you always call my PDA a "dynabook"?
"Well sonny, long before you were born, there was a really smart guy named, Alan Kay, and he was the first person to think up a powerful, portable computer a kid could draw on, and ask questions."
"Really? Did you know him Grandpa?"
(chuckle) "What do you think?"
If you want to see where Kay's latest thinking is taking him, you can see the evolution of Squeak into a more experimental phase of collaborative computing, Croquet. See also the manual.
So, she just fits in the floppy drive, then?
Around about 1975, when I was an undergraduate student at a small, private, and somewhat uptight college, Alan Kay gave an afternoon talk in one of the main auditoriums. In the middle of the presentation, seemingly unrelated to what he was talking about, he said, "Watching television is like mental masturbation." He then seemed to lose his train of thought, so the sentence just hung there for several seconds. He then continued on talking about the Dynabook or whatever like nothing had happened. 28 years later, that's the only part of the talk I remember.
Make a difference: move to a swing state.
You guys forgot to place Jef Raskin in the mix. His Masters Thesis was a description of a WYSIWYG printing/graphics system (The Quick Draw Graphics System) published in 1967. Work on the Mac (which predated the Lisa actually) started over a year before Jobs went to PARC at Raskin's urging (proxied via his former student, Bill Atkinson). Raskin set up the PARC tour in order to give Jobs a taste of what a working bitmapped computer graphics system might be like because Jobs didn't "get it" and kept trying (with varying degress of sucess) to kill the Mac project.
How much of the Mac/Lisa interface was homegrown, derived from Raskin's work, or obtained from PARC has been much discussed. Search the archives for the usenet discussion between Raskin and Bruce Horn for more info on this.
A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software
conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: "What sort
of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were
unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt and their
clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed out hospitality suites and they
made rude noises during my presentation."
The manager said: "I should have never sent you to the conference.
Those programmers live beyond the physical world. They consider life absurd,
an accidental coincidence. They come and go without knowing limitations.
Without a care, they live only for their programs. Why should they bother
with social conventions?"
"They are alive within the Tao."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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