Why killing Media was killing an investment in the future

[Richmond]

List-users who are NOT interested in my "Social Commentary", but are 
interested in what my Summer Kids did with RR/LC should scroll down to 
this mark: ####

Right, Alejandro, you asked for it . . .   :)

> Richmond wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>> Certainly in Britain (and here in Bulgaria) the end result of
>> years of pseudo-socialist thinking has resulted in a feeling
>> that the state must provide: all parents have to do is
>> produce children and after that provide food and bed,
>> and everything else will be provided
>> "from the cradle to the grave" by the nanny state:
>> what happens is one gets a race of slack-jawed
>> passive observers instead of the actively engaged, thinking
>> individuals one needs in a healthy society.
>>
>> Mummy and Daddy should NOT provide little Twinkle-toes
>> with a computer hooked up to the internet so s/he can
>> go blotto on online games and associated crap.
>> Mummy and Daddy should provide a computer stuffed with
>> stuff to stretch little Twinkle-toes' mind; and that means
>> programming environments.
>> But as 90% of parents are f*ckwits, and the state likes
>> that because those sort of 'people' (are they fully human?)
>> can be manipulated by the state; that doesn't happen.
>>
> Richmond, you are describing a society of living dead.

To be honest with you, a cruise round the housing estates of St Andrews 
(Scotland) and the tower blocks of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) all I can see are 
living dead. Any children who show signs of being capable of rising 
above that will be quickly suppressed by the "education" system, 
parental stupidity, or the endless pap of TV and computer games.

I remember part of my Master's degree from the "University" of Abertay 
(the only bit worth anything)
involved my trialling my Agent-led Software generation system 
(completely authored in RR/LC) at
the Primary School in St Andrews (Greyfriars RC). The teachers loved it 
as they were sick-to-death of teaching 7/8/9/10 year olds how to write 
"Dear Mummy and Daddy" letters in WORD, and endless PAINT programs. 
However the headmistress (a very sharp Irish lady) told me that I had 
about as much hope getting funding to continue development from the 
local council (Fife) as a bar of gold falling on my head out of a tree. 
She said that the unpleasant truth was that education was always pitched 
at the lowest common denominator in the state sector.

Ringing up a friend who taught in a private school I was told that the 
pressure to take standardised exams was such that teachers would have no 
time to use anything (let alone a fully automated software development 
system) that moved outside the rigid confines imposed by the exams.

[My father took early retirement for the simple reason that he was sick 
to death of teaching kids to pass exams instead of teaching them the 
subject.]

Britain, particularly, hates success and thrives on a culture of 
mediocrity. What I liked a lot about the United States when I stayed 
there was that success was admired and there were not so many things to 
stand in your way as there are in Britain.

In Bulgaria, you are dead on the ground, unless you are a big business 
interest in bed with a
government that encourages business monopolies.

-----------------------------

This reminds me of 2 statements that are both true:

"Why are most people in Scotland so witless? Because those who have any 
'get-up-and-go' have
got up and gone."  However, to be fair that probably refers to Scotland 
prior about 1990.

"Have you noticed that the only Arabs that have contributed to society 
in the last 100 years are ones
who have NOT lived in Arabic countries."

Needless to say, Bulgarians who have contributed ALL live overseas.

> In the world where we are living too many people do not
> understand that the state of wealth in which they live is
> a consecuence of specific actions and attitudes from
> previous and actual generations... not a natural event,

That may be because History is taught as a series of mind-numbing dates 
(do you know when the
Byzantine emperor had constipation?) of Kings and Queens and Wars. What 
might be better is a curriculum that demonstrated how ALL we have now is 
built on the work of previous generations.

Bulgarian children are told the first computer was built by John 
Atanasov (a Bulgarian born in America to Bulgarian parents); which is 
palpably NOT true. Arguably the second computer was built by Charles 
Babbage (and programmed by Ada Lovelace), the first by some 
Graeco-phoenician some 2,500 years ago. And where are Turing and so forth?

While Atanasov may have co-authored the first software reprogrammable 
computer, that is not the same thing at all as what is claimed for him 
here in Bulgarian schools. In context his achievement can be seen for 
what it is, rather than some impossibility.

pace Isaac Newton.

> like rain, wind or sun or an entitlement or birth right.
> A city just have to run out of water, energy or jobs,
> to awake their habitants of their pleasant state.

At which point 90% of people will sit around saying "they should do 
something about this" until
they die. Of course there is a school of thought that says this might be 
a good thing.

I will be out there digging up the garden to plant potatoes, finding a 
couple of cows for milk,
getting in a supply of wood for winter heat and so on.

>
> Returning to the title of this thread:
> How did goes your classes to teach LiveCode to a
> group of your English students???
>
> Did they concluded with sucess?

####

I am not entirely sure what you mean by "success".

Of the 4 kids (aged 10 - 23) who attended:

All of these young people worked with Runtime Revolution 2.2.1 (a FREE 
version offered by NOVELL via a chap called 'Stompfi' for Linux), and 
have computers running Linux either as the sole OS or on a partition at 
home.

1. (12 year old boy) Couldn't get his head round the simplest of ideas: 
e.g. that a field could be a
visible container for data, and that one could "call into being" an 
invisible container for data, a "variable". This boy, however, is 90% 
passive in his English classes, waiting there for me to shovel stuff 
into him, and then regurgitating it like a cormorant, rather than 
processing it.

2. (10 year old boy) Got cheesed-off extremely rapidly when I wanted 
them to move string sentences
between fields, combining them with an end-user entered string; he was 
so obsessed with "I have to build a game" that my "let's learn to crawl, 
then run, and eventually run" wasn't good enough for him.
Not a stupid boy at all, but one who is used to getting what he wants 
instantly with a minimum of effort.

3. (13 year old boy, with a place at the Mathematical High-School in 
September) worked his way through the Metacard training stack at the 
pace I set, but went off on all sorts of interesting and creative 
tangents in his spare time.

This boy started English with me 7 years ago: he sat in the classroom 
going nowhere for about 4-5 months. His mother and I had a weekly 
shouting contest when she told me I hadn't a clue how to teach English, 
and I asked if that were so why she kept on paying me and why she didn't 
just take her boy away. Suddenly, after 4-5 months of next to nothing, 
he suddenly started outstripping all the other children! He has a highly 
individualistic way of learning (bless him) which, if the 'system' in 
Bulgaria will let him, will mean that he could end up as an extremely 
creative programmer. Unfortunately the poor lad is going to get a nasty 
shock when he comes up against C++ at the Maths school; luckily he is 
well aware of this.

4. (23 year old man/boy) Now authoring stuff for my language school; 
have a meeting set up for the last week of August to see if I like what 
I see and am ready to pay him for the work. He has also worked his way 
through the code of about 90% of my EFL standalones. I have given him a 
list of criteria as well as copies of the textbooks I use with 
guidelines on the topic areas that I feel I have not provided adequate 
coverage on. As this fellow has a degree in tourism from a shitty 
college here in Bulgaria that is worth next to nothing, but has enrolled 
to do an MA in Applied Linguistics at the one semi-decent University 
here in Plovdiv, he is extremely happy that he has found a skill that is 
sellable, and is now putting his nose to the grindstone like nobody's 
business; I have suggested that IF his programs for the summer are worth 
having I will find a way to buy him some sort of LC licence so he can 
produce standalones for Windows as well as Linux.

This is Ilko Birov: 
http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-livecode/2012-June/173435.html

As this "course" consisted of 4 x 180 minutes (each class starting with 
30 minutes with the computers
OFF and my explaining concepts such as local and global variables on a 
whiteboard and with cups and beans, followed by 150 minutes of hands-on 
with my sitting amidst the 4 computers) we progressed as far as 
modelling a simple pocket calculator (+, -, *,/,=,M,M+,M-), a 
fortune-telling program based on a person's birthdate, image movement 
and drop-targets.

The difference between #3 and #4 is really a simple question of 
maturity: the younger one can work things out very quickly indeed, but 
then takes quite some time applying them; while the older is
quite the other way around.

As I am sure most readers will be well aware RR/LC 2.2.1 does NOT have 
the capabilities of RevMedia FREE, and in my classroom we played around 
with that a bit on the G3 iMac I have there so the kids could see what 
'the next step up' was capable of.

>
> Any chance to read a detailed account of their
> learning process???
>
> Al
>
>

I will use this occasion to beg for something of the order of RunRev 
2.0.1 for Mac, Win and Linux to be released for FREE; possibly with a 
fair few of the capabilities removed.

Richmond Mathewson.