Look and Learn . . .

[Richmond Mathewson]

Viktoras Didziulis wrote:

"this is a so called "visual 
programming" or "dataflow programming""

I know about that, but that is not what I meant;
what I mean is Agent-guided program creation (as
demonstrated at

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RRRThesis/files/

files KALA.zip 1 to 12)

both "visual programming" and/or "dataflow
programming" still demand thinking which should not be
required of the specialist who has spent years
specialising in their field and has not either the
time nor the inclination of going down that road (nor
may be capable of thinking in that way).

I worked with Primary School teachers at Greyfriar's
Primary School in St Andrews who described their
"computer skills" to me as:

1. turn on/off Windows PCs

2. create a document in MS Word

3. Pop CDs into the CD drives for pupil use.

[Unfortunately this is what education departments
describe as "computer literacy":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_literacy    ]

They blew their minds when I showed them the few,
small things KALA-rev could do . . .

I held out the promise that at the end of a long day
"whipping the tinies into line" (and Primary Teachers
work very hard indeed) over a cup of tea they could
rapidly be guided by an Agent to put together programs
that could subsequently be used by children to
reinforce knowledge/information that they had
previously studied.

-----

On a personal basis, having started with MiniFortran
(who remembers that?) I think xTalk, and particularly
the RR version, is wonderful; and rather like my
attitude to automatic cars; give me a gear-stick any
day so I don't feel out of control.

However, there are millions of educators, librarians
and so forth who are just gasping for "an automatic
car" to do the driving for them.

-------

"But so far they do not seem very popular..."

Of course they don't; they have been developed by
programmers with a mind-set that still:

expects people to think either "visually" or in terms
of "dataflow"; both which presuppose all sorts of
things which historians, doctors, and so forth may not
be prepared to deal with.

cannot escape from the idea that one has to sweat
one's way through a steep learning curve to do
something that, in actual fact, with good GUI
automation, should require only the following
knowledge:

1. Turn on the PC,

2. Start the automated GUI  [this is if the automated
GUI is not already configured as either all or part of
the GUI of the OS],

3. Mouse-Click on choice buttons,

4. Type text into text-boxes,

and

NOTHING ELSE.

While that does not (at least as far as I am
concerned) in any way constitute computer literacy;
computer literacy should not be required of the vast
majority of people- they should however be able to
deliver information relating to their specialist field
via computers and computer-related media without any
computer literacy whatsoever.

-----

At the Primary School where I did my alpha-testing
there was a dedicated classroom containing some 15
Pentium 3s running Windows 98 just pulsing with
unrealised potential.

Children were taught (2004) how to use a PAINT
program, TYPE a letter, use a variety of CD-ROMs
containing encyclopedias (which would have been just
as good in book format), and a few fairly mindless
games of no pedagogical value whatsoever (beyond,
possibly, giving the poor, overworked and underpaid
teacher, a few minutes to breath).

All that is effectively rubbish when Runtime
Revolution (for instance) can produce programs that
children can interact with to reinforce, reiterate and
deliver content (and :) allow the teacher a break).

-----
Imagine a language teacher with 15 vocabulary items in
a target language. The teacher needs the pupils to be
able to use the vocab items in context, and does not
have the time to check the 26 pupils s/he teaches.
Teacher sits down in front of the PC and is guided
through to a program that lets children check those
vocab items against the mother-tongue, and use them in
a variety of contexts (statements, questions,
word-to-picture matching . . .).

Now I (and, presumably 99% of the subscribers to this
Use-lIst) can knock something half-way useful of this
sort out in 45 minutes. But that is at a price of
quite a bit of time learning the programming language,
learning the object metaphor, and so forth.

Most teacher, lecturers, profs, business conference
presenters do not have the time to learn all the
above.

------

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson

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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
____________________________________________________________


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