OLPC is not dead! Long live OLPC!
12 March, 2014
Check out OLPC XO-4.
I would hate to add to the speculation that OLPC is dead because it’s not. Wayan Wota has been calling OLPC dead for 5 years. This is not news. He has not been involved with the project in a long time. His article is about the XO-1, apparently he doesn’t even know the XO-4 was officially introduced at this year’s CES, alongside the tablet.
If you really want to know what’s going on with current OLPC community projects see Adam Holt’s http://www.unleashkids.org/
Full OLPC Statement (from: http://gizmodo.com/one-laptop-per-child-isnt-quite-dead-yet-1541430670):
OLPC’s mission to empower the world’s children through education is far from over. OLPC is thriving and making more inroads at bringing education to those who can’t easily access it. OLPC recently formed a strategic alliance with the Zamora Teran family through many of their enterprises and their philanthropic foundation, the “Fundación Zamora Teran to deliver XO laptops not only to Central and South America, but also to Africa.
Aside from distributing more laptops in several schools in Costa Rica, Uruguay is receiving its first 50k units of the XO-4 Touch (running Android) in a few weeks’ time. In addition, the XO Tablet is currently available directly through governments and NGOs, as well as in Europe and Canada and through all major retail outlets in the United States including Walmart, Amazon, Toys ‘R Us among the others.
OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education. As an example, we’ve partnered with the Smithsonian Museum to bring feature-rich, interactive and more targeted content to our young learners.
We have more exciting things planned in the horizon including the implementation of very large scale projects in several regions of the world, so be sure to stay tuned.
OLPC is a concept, it is a movement, it is a community and it is about helping children. Sure the grand vision may be delayed, but the benefits of education and technology, of improving the human condition is not dead. We all knew that it’s not profitable to teach third world children. Still, no one thought that companies would compete against OLPC. Countries opted for different technologies for hardware but never matched the promise or the vision of the software. Had the world united around this platform children would have benefited and the world today would be a better place as we develop together and stamp out ignorance. There is nothing like education to improve the world and that mission is not dead. OLPC is evolving, finding new ways to reach more children, making more with less, and finding ways to make a real difference in the world.
Support OLPC! Long Live the vision.
Cog Development Welcomes Clément Béra
5 October, 2013
Word has it that Clément Béra is working With Eliot Miranda on Cog. Göran pointed out Clements excellent blog: here, to me a few weeks ago after meeting him at ESUG.
From Eliot: Clément Béra is, amongst other things, working on Cog performance, looking at adaptive optimization/speculative inlining (Sista in Cog, for Speculative Inlining Smalltalk Architecture).
I just wanted to welcome Clément Béra and to say thank you to everyone working on the VM for both communities, you know who you are (and we do to) and especially Eliot for working on Cog and keeping the advancements coming! Hip Hip … and all that.
Alan Kay – Abel, Fields and Turing Laureates Meet the Next Generation
28 September, 2013
Alan Kay Meeting the Next Generation. See the talk here: http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-friday-september-27-alan-kay/
Sad news. Most of the Smalltalk community knows all about Doug through stories shared by Alan. Some of you have been lucky enough to have met him. Much of what we know about computers was invented by some really terrific minds. Today we lost one of the best. It is amazing how far technology has progressed in such a short time. We are lucky to live in a time that still has so many of the great inventors still alive. It’s an amazing time to be standing the the shoulders of giants. Alan Kay reminds us that all of the present is not made up of all of the past. Only part of what was done back then survived and is in use today. Some of our history is better than our present. We should all take a moment and remember that past.
I couldn’t help but notice that Doug has three controls. The Mouse the keyboard and what? A function menu? A view selector? Just what is that left hand doing? I know I’ve tried to explain ctrl-c to people and even today many people have no idea that keyboard shortcuts exist. Just a thought.
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/doug-engelbart-american-inventor-computing-legend-passes-away/
Great Women in Technology – Dr. Cynthia Solomon
24 April, 2013
Dr. Cynthia Solomon
Cool pictures at: http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r/tasman_turtle_page.htm from bill_r
Great article on the History of Logo.
“If Seymour Papert is the Father of Educational Computing, then Cynthia Soiomon is the Mother of Educational Computing! Not only did Cynthia help create the first programming language for children, but she developed many of the pedagogical approaches and activities we still use to teach children to use computers. Forty five years later, Logo is still in use by millions of children around the world in the form of Scratch, MicroWorlds, Snap! and other dialects. The Twenty Things to Do with a Computer paper written by Solomon and Papert in 1970 or ’71 remains provocative today and lays the foundation for the maker movement sweeping the globe.”
See the full article: Time to Honor a Technology Pioneer!
Computer Environments for Children: A Reflection on Theories of Learning and Education
Designing Multimedia Environments for Children
Wouldn’t it be fun to have the Girls For Raspberry Pi read Twenty Things to Do with a Computer 🙂
Imagine Invent Inspire – Etoys
25 March, 2013
Don’t miss the new Etoys book: http://wiki.squeakland.org/index.php/LearningWithEtoysI3.
Etoys is:
- an educational tool for teaching children powerful ideas in compelling ways
- a media-rich authoring environment and visual programming system
- a free software program that works on almost all personal computers
All school children should have the opportunity to engage with computers in the most meaningful way. Learning to think and using the computer to discover and work with powerful ideas is the knowledge of true value. The community of Etoys users is working toward the dream of having all students become computer literate. This book only covers a small portion of those items. As you and your students learn some of the basic techniques, you will find more and more uses for them. The process of learning Etoys is just that, a process; the learning is on-going even though projects are begun and finished. Students will enjoy becoming experts and sharing their knowledge with others in the classroom.
Imagine this: A group of learners want to visualize what they Imagine so they go to Etoys to Invent their dreams and Inspire each other by building on their various Etoys projects. Today’s learners need this kind of experience to be prepared for the future.
For more information about Etoys visit www.squeakland.org
Bringing Multimedia (back) to Squeak
6 January, 2011
Sean DeNigris has been doing some great archaeology recently, and with help from some of the original Sophie team, he has managed to get some of Sophie’s rich multimedia capabilities working in mainstream Squeak images.
Sophie is a multimedia editing environment that was originally written in Squeak, although more recently it has been rewritten in Java.
The screenshot above shows a video being played by the QuickTime plugin, and being presented as a morph in Squeak. Sean shows in his blog post how to get this up and running in a few minutes in Squeak on OS X. There’s also a great discussion on the squeak-dev mailing list.
There’s still lots of gems to be uncovered in the Sophie code base, but this is a great starting point!
Squeak Video Tutorials, 74 and counting!
29 April, 2010
Chris Cunnington reminded the Squeak-dev mailing list that for a while now he’s been creating video tutorials explaining aspects of Squeak. In fact he’s been working at this for so long that he now has over 70 videos available!
The videos give snappy introductions to topics as varied as: using SqueakSource to download Squeak applications; the mysteries of the red, blue, and yellow mouse buttons; how to use morphs; and using Croquet to interact in 3D environments (as seen above).
If you want to learn about Squeak, or to find out more about Squeak applications you’ve never used before, these are a great resource, so head over to Chris’ Smalltalk Medicine Show channel on YouTube. If you know of other great videos for newcomers to Squeak and Smalltalk, please let us know in the comments.
Dynamic Web Development with Seaside
28 February, 2010
A print-on-demand, softcover copy of the book “Dynamic Web Development with Seaside” is now available from Lulu.
Seaside is an source framework for developing highly dynamic and interactive web applications, and makes building web applications as simple as building desktop applications. The book gives you all the instruction and support necessary to get up and running in all the popular distributions of Smalltalk, with separate chapters on Pharo and Squeak, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone/S, GNU Smalltalk and VASmalltalk.
The printed book is based on the free online version and the purchasable PDF version of the book, and will be updated regularly. The book costs around €28/£24/$40 and will be delivered within 3-5 working days, so order your copy now!
The authors wish to thank the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG), inceptive.be, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone Smalltalk, and Instantiations for generously sponsoring this book.
Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk
17 June, 2009
More exciting conference news for Smalltalk aficionados: James Foster has announced on his blog that this year’s OOPSLA conference will include several tutorials with a Smalltalk theme including his “Back to the Future: Programming in Smalltalk” in which he will look at the “new” ideas from Smalltalk that are still influencing newer programming languages. He will examine some of these ideas and present a number of tutorial exercises that explore some of Smalltalk’s fundamentally different approach to language design and object orientation, including the following aspects:
- All values are objects, even integers, booleans, and characters (no boxing/unboxing);
- Classes and methods are objects (supporting reflection);
- The language has only five reserved words;
- All control flow (looping and conditional branching) is done through message sends;
- Programming is done by sending messages to existing objects; and
- The base class library can be modified.
James works on Gemstone’s high performance product family based on Smalltalk, but intends the exercises to be relevant across different versions.
This year’s OOPSLA will be held in Orlando, Florida from 25 to 29 October, and will also be co-located with the Dynamic Languages Symposium, which will doubtless have lots to interest Smalltalkers.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for a European break this year, don’t forget that the 2009 International Smalltalk Conference, organised by ESUG, will be held in Brest, France, from 31 August to 4 September, and also has a great set of sessions lined up.
The Weekly Squeak 