Dan Ingalls gave an interesting Tech Talk on the Lively kernel (best viewed in Safari 3 apparently) at Google a few weeks ago – what better way to (re)introduce our new board member?
Category: Platforms
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Randal Schwartz Talks With Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC
Don’t miss this fun new video from Randal Schwartz and Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC. Randal builds a very nice car demo.
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XO in the US Virgin Islands
Great video of the Waveplace XO Laptop Day.
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Immersive Education Summit Ad-Hoc Meeting
Well I couldn’t resist. Aaron E. Walsh sent out an invitation to the Squeak – Croquet communities for an ad-hoc Immersive Education Meeting. The Boston Digital Summit held in January covered the Education Grid, this meeting was a chance to review this information for those that were not able to make it to the summit.
Second Life was quite an experience. I had to sign up and go through some training, figure out how to get to Sun’s virtual auditorium and sit down. It was quite amusing to see some people show up on stage and not know how to sit down either, so I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe I should have spent more time in the training.
Aaron, reviewed the details of the Education Grid. The Grid is an education content virtual repository focused on interoperability, standards, and quality educational content. The goal is to provide standards that allow content to be developed to operate in different virtual worlds. These standards must be open source to ensure that content can be made freely available.
Content is just a piece of the puzzle in education. Educators also need tools to be able to evaluate the progress of students. There are a number of general tools that should be developed and made available in a consistent way for each offering. Aaron mentioned, “While it is possible to record everything that happens in a virtual world there is no way an educator could watch everything a student did in an activity that might take 2 hours.” Tools that allow educators to evaluate raw data, to assess progress and to track grades, and to create content are essential.
Quality content will be assured by having a Peer Review of offerings before the become part of the grid. The peers will be selected from the community and people with special expertise will be sought to make sure that the education goals are met, the content is accurate, standards are followed, and licensing is compatible to be a part of the grid.
Licensing and interoperability were the major concerns once Aaron opened the floor to questions. Ownership of the content was also discussed. Aaron mentioned that a not-for-profit organization would own the grid, but that the grid would be virtual and would be hosted by multiple organizations. I’m not sure there was a full answer about the ownership of the content. I would have suggested that copyright stay with the author or developing organization, and that the grid would receive unlimited rights to distribute the content, much in the same way were are trying to organize the Squeak community.
Well I ran out of time but Aaron did a very nice job of wrapping it up just a few minutes over. Thank you! The concept is really a terrific idea. I hope that our communities will join together and support developing freely available virtual world educational materials. Aaron mentioned that other meetings will be held in Croquet, I look forward to that. I hope to see you there. Hopefully that meeting will be just as well attended as the SL meeting.
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Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) 2008 – Call For Papers
Call For Papers
*** Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) 2008 ***
July 8, 2008 (Tuesday)
Co-located with ECOOP 2008, Paphos, Cyprus
Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN
http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls/dls08/
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IMPORTANT DATES
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Submission deadline: April 25, 2008 (hard deadline) Author notification: May 23, 2008 Camera-ready copy due: June 6, 2008 DLS 2008: July 8, 2008——————————-
ABOUT DLS
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The Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at ECOOP 2008 in Paphos, Cyprus, is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, Prolog, and APL continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications.DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development.
DLS 2008 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
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TOPICS OF INTEREST
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Areas of interest include but are not limited to:– Innovative language features and implementation techniques
– Development and platform support, tools
– Interesting applications
– Domain-oriented programming
– Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
– Reflection and meta-programming
– Software evolution
– Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
– Dynamic optimization
– Hardware support
– Experience reports and case studies
– Educational approaches and perspectives
– Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming——————————-
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
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We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/dls/dls08/ in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.
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PROCEEDINGS
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Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.——————————-
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
——————————-Chair: Johan Brichau (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
Joe Armstrong (Ericsson AB, Sweden) Pierre Cointe (École des Mines de Nantes, France)William R. Cook (University of Texas at Austin, USA) Pascal Costanza (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Wolfgang De Meuter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Maja D’Hondt (IMEC, Belgium) Robert Hirschfeld (Hasso-Plattner Institüt, Germany) Roberto Ierusalimschy (PUC-Rio, Brazil) Andy Kellens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium) Michele Lanza (University of Lugano, Switzerland) Michael Leuschel (University of Düsseldorf, Germany) Oscar Nierstrasz (University of Berne, Switzerland) Kent Pitman (PTC, USA) Lynne Shaw (CheckFree Investment Services, USA) David Ungar (Sun Microsystems, USA) Peter Van Roy (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) Martin von Löwis (Hasso-Plattner Institüt, Germany) Daniel Weinreb (ITA Software, USA)
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Brought to you by ESUG!
The European Smalltalk Users Group – ESUG has generously agreed to support international smalltalk presentations.
From Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE :
Hi all
as announced at Lugano ESUG is putting in place new action to promote the use of smalltalk http://www.esug.org/promotionactions/publicationpromotion/
PublicationPromotion
ESUG offers 150 Euros for each international conference paper whose concepts involves an implementation in SmalltalkRules
• After notification of acceptance, one of the authors sends to the ESUG board the article, a CV, and a brief explanation of how Smalltalk was used
• In case the ESUG board decides to support the promotion, the author has to send to ESUG after the camera-ready deadline a PDF of the article, where ESUG is referenced in the acknowledgment section, including a link to esug.org
• During the presentation at the conference, the author must mention ESUG support
• After the presentation at the conference the author sends to ESUG a PDF version of the slides, where there is a visible reference to ESUG (e.g. theESUG Logo). ESUG will put the slides on the ESUG website
• The author can then trigger the payment by sending an e-Mail to the ESUG board
• A maximum of 3 supported articles per year per institution is allowedProf. Stéphane DUCASSE [ | ]
http://stephane.ducasse.free.frOpen Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org, http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
Free books for Universities at http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
Online Free Books at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html -
Squeak now running on Nokia N810
Derek O’Connell reports that he has Squeak up and running on the new Nokia N810. Having compiled a Unix VM for the platform, he was then able to run a standard Squeak image without tweaking! Performance is acceptable, and it works well with the new keyboard on the N810, but it doesn’t pick up on some of the system events, so a little work is needed for Squeak to work seamlessly.
Derek received his N810 as one of the 500 lucky developers given access to the device through the maemo.org “Nokia N810 maemo device program”, based on his proposal to port Squeak to the device.
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Tunnel Vision? OLPC
EDITORIAL By Ron Teitelbaum.
You get what you pay for. The world is much better for all the corporate contributions to end poverty and the huge commitment over the years to help educate the worlds children. There is no question that the world owes a huge debt to these companies. Now that corporations have made such great strides throughout the world they should be paid handsomely for their computers and software. After all, corporate resources can never be matched by a Non-Profit.
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Intel Resigns From Board Of One Laptop Per Child
Intel Resigns From Board Of One Laptop Per Child
By STEVE STECKLOW of The Wall Street Journal(reproduced with permission)
January 3, 2008 8:17 p.m.
Intel Corp. says it has dropped out of a non-profit project to sell millions of low-cost laptops in the developing world, citing disagreements with the organization’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte.
The divorce culminates a stormy relationship between the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker and the One Laptop Per Child project, which recently began selling a low-cost laptop in African, Latin American and other countries. The two sides had been feuding over Intel’s aggressive marketing of a low-cost laptop of its own design in many of the same countries that the non-profit had been targeting. The OLPC machine uses a microprocessor from Intel’s chief competitor, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
After more than a year of public sniping between Intel and OLPC, Intel joined OLPC’s board in July and had been planning on announcing a new low-cost, OLPC-designed laptop based on an Intel microprocessor at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But the company has quit the board and scrapped the new machine, according to Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy.
“We’ve reached a philosophical impasse with OLPC,” he said. He added that Mr. Negroponte had demanded that Intel stop selling its own designed laptop, known as the Classmate, and to stop supplying its chips in other laptops marketed to schoolchildren in developing countries. “We can’t accommodate that request,” Mr. Mulloy said. He said Intel favors offering “many solutions” to developing countries, not just the OLPC laptop. He also said dropping the Classmate would hurt Intel’s relationships with overseas manufacturers and suppliers.
Tens of thousands of Classmates have been sold.Mr. Negroponte, a professor on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, couldn’t be reached for comment. The simmering dispute between Intel and Mr. Negroponte was detailed in a page-one story in this newspaper in November.
The concept of a low-cost laptop for the world’s poorest schoolchildren has sparked great interest from world leaders and technology companies ever since Mr. Negroponte first proposed it three years ago as a way to bridge the technology divide between rich and poor countries. He vowed to get such a device, costing just $100, into the hands of up to 150 million children by this year. But although OLPC has managed to develop an innovative machine, it has failed so far to achieve its target price — the current model sells overseas for $188 — and to attract large orders from governments because of increasing competition. As sales problems mounted, the project recently reversed course on its plan not to sell the device to American consumers. In November, it began selling pairs of laptops to U.S. and Canadian consumers for $399 under a program in which buyers could keep one and give the other to a student in a poor country like Haiti. The program ended on Monday. OLPC has called the program — known as “Give One. Get One.” — successful, but hasn’t disclosed total sales figures.
Mr. Negroponte serves on a committee to protect the editorial integrity of Dow Jones & Co., the owner of The Wall Street Journal that was acquired last month by News Corp.
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Here it is. OLPC!!
Now I know this computer is supposed to be for children, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing all the wonderful pictures of the children receiving their computers, but as an adult I really did not expect it to be this much fun.
I’m writing you from my olpc computer. I just received it from the Give 1 Get 1 program. I took this snapshot from the computer. Zoe was quite interested too and couldn’t resist getting in the picture.
I had no trouble getting on-line and figuring out the interface. I was quickly zooming around making music, guessing random numbers, finding matching tiles, and reading programs. There are a lot of fun, interesting and educational activities to do. I got to turtle art and had a blast creating my own turtle spirograph. I made the little turtle walk using the programming tiles in a repeating path, then turned it by 80 degrees and set up a repeat. I was able to draw some very cool shapes.
What fun !! It is not too late, but time is running out fast. Give an Olpc XO computer to a needy child and get one that you can play with too! Now I guess maybe I’ll show it too wife and daughter. If I have too.
The Weekly Squeak 