Hi, It's good to see this conversations happening on this list. Conversations below. On 24/08/18 16:25, Hilaire wrote:
Hi Hannes,
Le 24/08/2018 à 06:59, H. Hirzel a écrit :
Hello Hilaire
Thank you for the short summary what authentic learning is and the conclusions what this means for a Dynabook implementation.
You conclude that
Dynabook's tools should support using authentic documents.
I think that in practice this means that DOCX and ODT documents should be supported in some way. Authentic documents are situation or media from the "real world" used in teaching situation. It can be an analog or digital document: a poster, a TV advertisement, a TV show, or it can be a real world problem. Often these ones need to be scaffolded by the teacher to make it accessible to the students.
Speaking about docs/dot support, could Dynabook support it? It depends on what it will be. 1. Is Dyanbook just one software among many in a given os host, to support creative use of computerized simulation? 2. Or is it the whole operating system for the host, disconnected from today use cases and software (ie libreoffice). For what benefit? 3. Or a mix of both?
Hilaire
In my case, authentic documents are those that I do mostly with communities. We have a long tradition of documentation in the Colombian FLOSS communities with an old wiki that reached, in its good times, 4000 pages (now only spread in offline backups). Most of this documentation is done using light markup languages and recently a strong tendency is in the use of variants of Markdown (mainly because of their preeminence in sites like GitHub and StackOverflow). Also we are concern with online and offline edition, because connectivity is not a given in countries of the so called Global South and because web technologies are (gratuitously?) overcomplicated. Those authentic documentation workflows and needs are the ones that Grafoscopio is trying to support. Several demos of such documentation use cases have been done, like the Data Journalism Handbook[1], blogging on reproducible research and data activism, storytelling and visualization[2][3][4] and, of course, the Grafoscopio Manual is written it itself[5] (because, you know, we love metasystems that help to evolve themselves). [1] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/mapeda/ [2] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/panama-papers-1 [3] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/sdv-infomed [4] http://mutabit.com/offray/blog/en/entry/ds-twitter-mockup [5] http://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/grafoscopio/uv/Docs/En/Books/Manual/manual.p... This means that the Dynabook, at least currently can be (de)construct like something in between a software among many others, running in a host, but also something connecting to today's real needs, like the ones you solve in office software (word processing and documentation, calculation and visualizations, and presentation), despite not solving them in the same way (what would be the point then?). In Grafoscopio's case, the outlining metaphor (a la OrgMode[6] or Leo Editor[7]) is important is such alternative approach do documentation. [6] http://orgmode.org/ [7] http://leoeditor.com/ Which leads us to the issue of benefit? Who benefits from this other ways of authentic documentation? One of my issues with current Dynabook incarnations and research papers, in the form of Smalltalk (and its variants and projects, including Squeak, Etoys, the original Scratch and Phracth), is that they are too oriented towards children and teenagers (with incidentally teachers in the mix) or computer scientist. I felt that the more I grow up, the more frozen the "software" felt for me, because the huge gap between the intended audiences of the software (children, teens, their teachers and computer scientist) and the rest of the population. If I departed from those communities and needs, it was difficult to find any place for me in the Dynabook/Smalltalk related communities and their used tools. There was little to nothing for the day to day task (i.e. documenting) or it was too insular and departed for more widely spread practices (i.e. Markdown or Pandoc) or without the huge traction and diverse functionality of custom made formats and tools (i.e. OrgMode). It was like if, Smalltalk keeps its curse of being so concern with the future that was disconnected from most of the present and so, giving the majority of us no bridge between our present and the Dynabook vision. I think that data activism, storytelling and visualization joined with reproducible research and publishing can help us to bridge the gap mentioned before for a lot of diverse populations (journalists, activists, researchers, academics, students) that are leaving or outside the classroom or are already adults and such themes are concerns from the present and the upcoming future. That's why Grafoscopio locates in such places and educational context beyond the classroom (hackerspaces, workshops, innovation labs, newsrooms). I think that The Home Desktop System [8] is tackling other knowledge workers with a parallel similar approach, including outlining [8] [8] https://github.com/hpi-swa/Rack Grafoscopio is trying to make its contribution for authentic documentation in learning pedagogy for long life learning. Children, teens and the classroom are an important concern and also the needs of computer scientists, but, of course, they're not enough and we need to provide more bridges for empowering more diverse populations with authentic learning pedagoty. I think would be important to know what we can come with, as a community, so more people can traverse such bridges and build more. Cheers, Offray