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AlanKay
Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

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last edited by BillSeitz on Jun 19, 2008 7:14 pm

Inventor of , a father of , conceiver of the [Dyna Book]. Did that work at , which he left in 1983. Became an Apple Fellow in 1984. During that time he started . He later moved to for a few years, which he left in Sept2001.

WikiWikiWeb:AlanKay

http://www.dromo.com/fusionanomaly/alankay.html

He posts to the Squeak mailing list regularly.

http://www.squeak.org/ is the home of

http://www.squeakland.org/ focuses on educational applications, and the "" Squeak environment.

See chapter of . When millions of portable, affordable, imagination amplifiers fall into the hands of eight-year-old children, look for Alan Kay somewhere in the plot.

Alan is president of [Viewpoints Research Institute] (http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/about.html): The long term goal is to help make major positive changes in how children are educated all over the world (). The goals for the next several years are to create, test, and put on the Internet, a sample curriculum with supporting media for teaching "real math" and "real science" to K-12, with an initial emphasis on K-8. This curriculum will use Squeak as its media, and will be highly interactive and constructive.

[Lisa Rein] did the ultimate writeup (with video clips) of Alan's session at [ETCon]'03.

Saw Alan Mar14'02 give the lecture at the [New School]. remote image

Some notes:

Alan gets the "Not a Normal Person" chapter in [Dealers Of Lightning].

Alan thinks [Gutenberg Galaxy] is [McLuhan]'s best book, and was key to Alan being able to understand [Understanding Media], which he couldn't understand the first time he read it. (And equally hard book to understand being [Science And Sanity] - see .)

's [Teaching As A Subversive Activity] was another big inspiration. As was (), and [Jerome Bruner]'s [Toward A Theory Of Instruction].

The reproducibility of books (post-Gutenberg) changed the type of argumentation that was possible. Previously, allegorical argument was necessary, because (a) books were rare, thus arguments would be spread orally, and (b) since those few books were reproduced by hand you couldn't count on their precision. But high-volume exact-copy production allowed for more detailed analytical argument.

"We knew people would keep using computers to mimic paper for decades. But we didn't think they'd keep doing it for three decades!"

[Maria Montessori]'s belief, that Nature has designed children to learn through playing, led her to design toys which she believed would be entertaining while subtly teaching children to think. Alan's goal was to do the same thing, but using the computer as a toy that would teach children to think in a 21st-century way.

He showed a video showing lots of Harvard students on the day of their graduation failing to explain accurately why the seasons change. Most think it's because the Earth is much farther from the Sun during the winter. (I think science educators are to blame for this, by always showing orbits from an angle, which makes near-circles look like very oblique ellipses. We need some -s.)

He gave a cool demo using (and his slides were built on top of the same framework).

He says the 4 big things going on in the future (and all relevant to ) are

See : | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |


 



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