T Racing the D Ynabook : As Tudy of T Echnocultural T Ransformations

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

T Racing the D Ynabook : As Tudy of T Echnocultural T Ransformations T RACING THE DYNABOOK: A STUDY OF TECHNOCULTURAL T RANSFORMATIONS by John W. Maxwell MPub, Simon Fraser University, 1997 B.A. (honours), University of British Columbia, 1988 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Curriculum and Instruction) UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA November, 2006 © John W. Maxwell, 2006 i Abstract The origins of the personal computer are found in an educational vision. Desktop computing and multimedia were not first conceived as tools for office workers or media professionals— they were prototyped as “personal dynamic media” for children. Alan Kay, then at Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center, saw in the emerging digital world the possibility of a communications revolution and argued that this revolution should be in the hands of children. Focusing on the development of the “Dynabook,” Kay’s research group established a wide-ranging conception of personal and educational computing, based on the ideal of a new systems literacy, of which computing is an integral part. Kay’s research led to two dominant computing paradigms: the graphical user interface for personal computers, and object-oriented programming. By contrast, Kay’s educational vision has been largely forgotten, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of discourse on e-learning and the Web. However, an historical analysis of Kay’s educational project and its many contributions reveals a conception of educational computing that is in many ways more compelling than anything we have today, as it is based on a solid foundation of educational theory, one that substantially anticipates and addresses some of the biggest civil/political issues of our time, those of the openness and ownership of cultural expression. The Dynabook is a candidate for what 21st-century literacy might look like in a liberal, individualist, decentralized, and demo- cratic key. This dissertation is a historical treatment of the Dynabook vision and its implementations in changing contexts over 35 years. It is an attempt to trace the development of a technocultural artifact: the Dynabook, itself partly an idealized vision and partly a series of actual technologies. It is thus a work of cultural history. But it is more than simply a looking back; the effective- history of the Dynabook, its various incarnations, and its continuing re-emergence and re-artic- ulation mean that the relevance of this story is an ongoing question which needs to be recognized and addressed by educators, technologists, and learners today. This dissertation represents an introduction to this case. ii Table of Contents Abstract . .ii Table of Contents . iii List of Figures . vi Acknowledgements . vii Dedication . viii Introduction . .1 The Story So Far—A Conventional Mythology . 3 A Critique of the Popular Mythology . 8 Impoverished perspectives . 9 The Division of Labour in Modern Technology . 11 How Education is Complicit . 15 Alan Kay and the Dynabook Vision . 21 From ARPA to Xerox PARC . 23 Toward the Dynabook . 28 Elements of the Dynabook Vision . 32 The fate of the Dynabook . 35 What Follows... 36 Chapter 2: Positions and Approaches . .39 Introducing Myselves . 39 Roots . 40 My Encounter(s) with Objects . 43 Why This Study? Why This Approach? . 50 Reflecting on my history . 50 “Computer criticism” . 52 Multiple perspectives, blurred genres . 52 Methodology and the Problematic of Distance . 54 Introducing genre theory . 58 History as politics . 59 The Dynabook as/in history . 60 How Do We Know a Good Idea When We See One? . 64 Personal computing/educational technology as a site of struggle . 65 Chapter 3: Framing Technology . .68 Technology as Media . 68 McCullough’s Framing of Media . 71 Latour’s Mediation: Articulations and Translations . 74 Technology as Translation . 77 Standardization and the Tower of Babel . 82 The Mechanics of Text . 83 On ‘Abstraction’ . 85 Digital translations . 87 Software . 89 The Semiotics of Standardization . 93 Simulation as Interpretation . 95 iii The Ethics of Translation . 99 Back to the Tower of Babel . 100 Our responsibility to technology . 101 Chapter 4: Alan Kay’s Educational Vision . .104 Computers, Children, and Powerful Ideas . 105 “Late Binding” and Systems Design . 112 Smalltalk—“A New Medium for Communications” . 117 Objects and messages . 118 The Design of Smalltalk . 120 Late binding in Smalltalk . 122 The Smalltalk environment . 125 “Doing With Images Makes Symbols” . 126 Ways of Knowing: Narrative, Argumentation, Systems Thinking . ..
Recommended publications
  • QATAR ASW ONLINE SCRIPT V.8.0 Pages
    “DEXIGN THE FUTURE: Innovation for Exponential Times” ARNOLD WASSERMAN COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY IN QATAR 2 MAY 2016 مساء الخير .Good afternoon It is an honor to be invited to address you on this important day. Today you artists and designers graduate into the future. Do you think about the future? Of course you do. But how do you think about the future? Is the future tangible - or is it intangible ? Is it a subject for rational deliberation? Or is it an imagined fantasy that forever recedes before us? Is the future simply whatever happens to us next? Or is it something we deliberately create? Can we Dexign the Future? What I would like us to think about for the next few moments is how creative professionals like yourselves might think about the future. What I have to say applies as much to art as it does to design. Both are technologies of creative innovation. I will take the liberty here of calling it all design. My speech is also available online. There you can follow a number of links to what I will talk about here. The future you are graduating into is an exponential future. What that means is that everything is happening faster and at an accelerating rate. For example, human knowledge is doubling every 12 months. And that curve is accelerating. An IBM researcher foresees that within a few years knowledge will be doubling every 12 hours as we build out the internet of things globally. This acceleration of human knowledge implies that the primary skill of a knowledge worker like yourself is research, analysis and synthesis of the not-yet-known.
    [Show full text]
  • Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020
    Thriving in a Crowded and Changing World: C++ 2006–2020 BJARNE STROUSTRUP, Morgan Stanley and Columbia University, USA Shepherd: Yannis Smaragdakis, University of Athens, Greece By 2006, C++ had been in widespread industrial use for 20 years. It contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced into C in the early 1970s as well as features that were novel in the early 2000s. From 2006 to 2020, the C++ developer community grew from about 3 million to about 4.5 million. It was a period where new programming models emerged, hardware architectures evolved, new application domains gained massive importance, and quite a few well-financed and professionally marketed languages fought for dominance. How did C++ ś an older language without serious commercial backing ś manage to thrive in the face of all that? This paper focuses on the major changes to the ISO C++ standard for the 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020 revisions. The standard library is about 3/4 of the C++20 standard, but this paper’s primary focus is on language features and the programming techniques they support. The paper contains long lists of features documenting the growth of C++. Significant technical points are discussed and illustrated with short code fragments. In addition, it presents some failed proposals and the discussions that led to their failure. It offers a perspective on the bewildering flow of facts and features across the years. The emphasis is on the ideas, people, and processes that shaped the language. Themes include efforts to preserve the essence of C++ through evolutionary changes, to simplify itsuse,to improve support for generic programming, to better support compile-time programming, to extend support for concurrency and parallel programming, and to maintain stable support for decades’ old code.
    [Show full text]
  • The Early History of Smalltalk
    The Early History of Smalltalk http://www.accesscom.com/~darius/EarlyHistoryS... The Early History of Smalltalk Alan C. Kay Apple Computer kay2@apple.com.Internet# Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. HOPL-II/4/93/MA, USA © 1993 ACM 0-89791-571-2/93/0004/0069...$1.50 Abstract Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the ARPA community, gave rise to a host of notions about "human-computer symbiosis" through interactive time-shared computers, graphics screens and pointing devices. Advanced computer languages were invented to simulate complex systems such as oil refineries and semi-intelligent behavior. The soon-to- follow paradigm shift of modern personal computing, overlapping window interfaces, and object-oriented design came from seeing the work of the sixties as something more than a "better old thing." This is, more than a better way: to do mainframe computing; for end-users to invoke functionality; to make data structures more abstract. Instead the promise of exponential growth in computing/$/volume demanded that the sixties be regarded as "almost a new thing" and to find out what the actual "new things" might be. For example, one would compute with a handheld "Dynabook" in a way that would not be possible on a shared mainframe; millions of potential users meant that the user interface would have to become a learning environment along the lines of Montessori and Bruner; and needs for large scope, reduction in complexity, and end-user literacy would require that data and control structures be done away with in favor of a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior.
    [Show full text]
  • A Metacircular Architecture for Runtime Optimisation Persistence Clément Béra
    Sista: a Metacircular Architecture for Runtime Optimisation Persistence Clément Béra To cite this version: Clément Béra. Sista: a Metacircular Architecture for Runtime Optimisation Persistence. Program- ming Languages [cs.PL]. Université de Lille 1, 2017. English. tel-01634137 HAL Id: tel-01634137 https://hal.inria.fr/tel-01634137 Submitted on 13 Nov 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Universit´edes Sciences et Technologies de Lille { Lille 1 D´epartement de formation doctorale en informatique Ecole´ doctorale SPI Lille UFR IEEA Sista: a Metacircular Architecture for Runtime Optimisation Persistence THESE` pr´esent´eeet soutenue publiquement le 15 Septembre 2017 pour l'obtention du Doctorat de l'Universit´edes Sciences et Technologies de Lille (sp´ecialit´einformatique) par Cl´ement B´era Composition du jury Pr´esident: Theo D'Hondt Rapporteur : Ga¨elThomas, Laurence Tratt Examinateur : Elisa Gonzalez Boix Directeur de th`ese: St´ephaneDucasse Co-Encadreur de th`ese: Marcus Denker Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille | UMR USTL/CNRS 8022 INRIA Lille - Nord Europe Numero´ d’ordre: XXXXX i Acknowledgments I would like to thank my thesis supervisors Stéphane Ducasse and Marcus Denker for allowing me to do a Ph.D at the RMoD group, as well as helping and supporting me during the three years of my Ph.D.
    [Show full text]
  • The Future: the Story of Squeak, a Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself
    Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, and Alan Kay [Also published in OOPSLA ’97: Proc. of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-oriented Programming, 1997, pp. 318-326.] VPRI Technical Report TR-1997-001 Viewpoints Research Institute, 1209 Grand Central Avenue, Glendale, CA 91201 t: (818) 332-3001 f: (818) 244-9761 Back to the Future The Story of Squeak, A Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself by Dan Ingalls Ted Kaehler John Maloney Scott Wallace Alan Kay at Apple Computer while doing this work, now at Walt Disney Imagineering 1401 Flower Street P.O. Box 25020 Glendale, CA 91221 dani@wdi.disney.com Abstract Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include: a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object; a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers; efficient bulk- mutation of objects; extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling; and real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk. Overview Squeak is a modern implementation of Smalltalk-80 that is available for free via the Internet, at http://www.research.apple.com/research/proj/learning_concepts/squeak/ and other sites. It includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and image processing.
    [Show full text]
  • Learning with Squeak Etoys
    Learning with Squeak Etoys Cathleen Galas, Rita Freudenberg VPRI Research Note RN-2010-002 Viewpoints Research Institute, 1025 Westwood Blvd 2nd flr, Los Angeles, CA 90024 t: (310) 208-0524 Constructionism 2010, Paris Learning with Squeak Etoys Cathleen Galas, c.galas@uclalumni.net Squeakland Foundation, Galas Consulting Rita Freudenberg, rita@isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de Dept of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Squeakland Foundation Abstract This paper serves as introduction and overview of Squeak Etoys, an engaging computer media- authoring environment, and describes how it aids in the constructionist approach to learning, thinking, and education. Etoys development was inspired by LOGO, the constructionist ideas of Seymour Papert, and Piaget, Bruner, and Montessori. It was developed to help student exploration and discovery in learning and thinking deeply about powerful ideas in math and science. The design of Etoys includes a powerful user interface that will run on all platforms and allow users to author in multiple dimensions. Etoys is an object-oriented system that is built in Squeak, an open-source implementation of Smalltalk. The learning environment is an open world, a sandbox, ready for the creative visions of the user, and undisturbed by buttons and toolbars. Resources are readily available, a click away, stored in flaps, hidden windows that open to many new possibilities. Beginning activities involve creating and scripting objects, building collaboration between objects, and building, exploring, and sharing
    [Show full text]
  • Hypertalk: the Language for the Rest of Us
    HyperTalk: The Language for the Rest of Us Kyle Wheeler January 18, 2004 Contents 1 Introduction 1 Introduction 1 There is, perhaps, no piece of software written by Ap- ple Computer, Inc. more prone to generating extreme 2 History 1 emotions in its users than its operating system. Next 2.1 TheBirth ................ 1 below that, however, is HyperCard. Designed and re- 2.2 TheLife................. 2 leased in 1987 by Bill Atkinson [7], HyperCard was an 2.3 TheDeath................ 2 instant success. Leveraging the power and simplicity 2.4 TheLegend ............... 2 of its scripting language, HyperTalk, designed by Bill Atkinson and by Dan Winkler [1], HyperCard demys- 3 Goals 2 tified the art of creating software. The language has a grammar and syntax similar to English, and as such ap- 4 Syntax Semantics 3 pealed to computer hobbyists, teachers, and the uniniti- 4.1 Implementation Notes . 3 ated alike. The commands HyperTalk uses are similar to 4.2 Objects ................. 3 those used by the Macintosh Toolbox, the base-level API 4.3 Messages ................ 4 of Apple’s Macintosh operating system, and the logical 4.4 Handlers................. 4 structure is similar to Pascal and organized in an event- 5 Bibliography 4 driven manner [8]. A BNF 6 A.1 Scripts.................. 6 2 History A.2 Expressions ............... 6 A.3 Ordinals and Positions . 7 2.1 The Birth A.4 Chunks and Containers . 7 HyperTalk was born as the core scripting language of A.5 Objects ................. 7 the HyperCard application, developed by Bill Atkinson1 A.6 Commands . 8 for Apple Computer, Inc. in 1987 under the condition A.6.1 Command Nonterminals .
    [Show full text]
  • Simula Mother Tongue for a Generation of Nordic Programmers
    Simula! Mother Tongue! for a Generation of! Nordic Programmers! Yngve Sundblad HCI, CSC, KTH! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad! Inspired by Ole-Johan Dahl, 1931-2002, and Kristen Nygaard, 1926-2002" “From the cold waters of Norway comes Object-Oriented Programming” " (first line in Bertrand Meyer#s widely used text book Object Oriented Software Construction) ! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad! Simula concepts 1967" •# Class of similar Objects (in Simula declaration of CLASS with data and actions)! •# Objects created as Instances of a Class (in Simula NEW object of class)! •# Data attributes of a class (in Simula type declared as parameters or internal)! •# Method attributes are patterns of action (PROCEDURE)! •# Message passing, calls of methods (in Simula dot-notation)! •# Subclasses that inherit from superclasses! •# Polymorphism with several subclasses to a superclass! •# Co-routines (in Simula Detach – Resume)! •# Encapsulation of data supporting abstractions! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad! Simula example BEGIN! REF(taxi) t;" CLASS taxi(n); INTEGER n;! BEGIN ! INTEGER pax;" PROCEDURE book;" IF pax<n THEN pax:=pax+1;! pax:=n;" END of taxi;! t:-NEW taxi(5);" t.book; t.book;" print(t.pax)" END! Output: 7 ! ! KTH - CSC (School of Computer Science and Communication) Yngve Sundblad – Simula OctoberYngve 2010Sundblad!
    [Show full text]
  • April 22 -- STEPS NSF 2012 Report
    ! 2012 REPORT ! STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems ! “A#Science#Experiment”# ! by# (In#random#order)#Yoshiki#Ohshima,#Dan#Amelang,#Ted#Kaehler,#Bert#Freudenberg,# Aran#Lunzer,#Alan#Kay,#Ian#Piumarta,#Takashi#Yamamiya,#Alan#Borning,#Hesam# Samimi,#Bret#Victor,#Kim#Rose*# VIEWPOINTS#RESEARCH#INSTITUTE# # # *These#are#the#STEPS#researchers#for#the#year#2012.#For#a#complete#listing# of#the#participants#over#the#length#of#the#project#see#the#section#on#the# NSF#site#which#contains#this#report.# TABLE OF CONTENTS — The STEPS Project for the General Public Summary of the STEPS project . Origin . STEPS aims at personal computing . What does STEPS look like? . STEPS is a “science project” . General approach . “T-shirt programming” . Overall map of STEPS . General STEPS results . Making “runnable maths” . Assessing STEPS Summary of STEPS research in 2012 . Inventing & building a language for STEPS “UI and applications”, and rewriting Frank in it . Producing a workable “chain of meaning” that extends from the screen all the way to the CPU . Inventing methods that create automatic visualizers for languages created from metalanguages . Continuing the start of “What vs How” programming via “Cooperating Languages and Solvers” Reflections on the STEPS Project to Date References Outreach Activities for final year of NSF part of the STEPS project Publications for the NSF part of the STEPS project Appendix I: KScript and KSWorld Appendix II: Making Applications in KSWorld ——— ! The$STEPS$Project$For$The$General$Public$ If#computing#is#important—for#daily#life,#learning,#business,#national#defense,#jobs,#and#
    [Show full text]
  • Tinlizzie Wysiwiki and Wikiphone: Alternative Approaches to Asynchronous and Synchronous Collaboration on the Web
    TinLizzie WysiWiki and WikiPhone: Alternative approaches to asynchronous and synchronous collaboration on the Web Yoshiki Oshima, Takashi Yamamiya, Scott Wallace, and Andreas Raab [Also published in the Proc. of the 5th International Conf. on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing (C5 2007)] VPRI Technical Report TR-2007-001 Viewpoints Research Institute, 1209 Grand Central Avenue, Glendale, CA 91201 t: (818) 332-3001 f: (818) 244-9761 TinLizzie WysiWiki and WikiPhone: Alternative approaches to asynchronous and synchronous collaboration on the Web Yoshiki Ohshimay Takashi Yamamiyay yoshiki@squeakland.org tak@metatoys.org Scott Wallacey Andreas Raabz scott.wallace@squeakland.org andreas.raab@qwaq.com yViewpoints Research Institute zQwaq, Inc. 1209 Grand Central Ave. 460 S California Ave #304 Glendale, CA 91202 Palo Alto, CA 94306 Abstract they exhibit possible future directions for collaboration on the Web. This paper presents TinLizzie WysiWiki and WikiPhone, two systems which explore new approaches to media-rich end-user collaboration on the World Wide Web. 1 Introduction TinLizzie WysiWiki enables authoring of interactive, media-rich documents, containing graphical objects bear- The World Wide Web, or Web, has been very successful. ing user-defined scripts, on the Web. In TinLizzie WysiWiki, It seems nowadays to dictate not only many end-users' be- a user manipulates text and active objects in a WYSIWYG havior, but also the mindsets of researchers and software graphical editor in a manner similar to Squeak eToys. vendors; the perception is that a new system should run A notable aspect of TinLizzie WysiWiki is that it allows in web browsers to be successful. As a consequence, im- both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration among provement in the overall user experience in applications has multiple users.
    [Show full text]
  • The Development of Smalltalk Topic Paper #7
    The Development of Smalltalk Topic Paper #7 Alex Laird Max Earn Peer CS-3210-01 Reviewer On Time/Format 1 2/4/09 Survey of Programming Languages Correct 5 Spring 2009 Clear 2 Computer Science, (319) 360-8771 Concise 2 alexdlaird@cedarville.edu Grading Rubric Grading Total 10 pts ABSTRACT Dynamically typed languages are easier on the compiler because This paper describes the development of the Smalltalk it has to make fewer passes and the brunt of checking is done on programming language. the syntax of the code. Compilation of Smalltalk is just-in-time compilation, also known Keywords as dynamic translation. It means that upon compilation, Smalltalk code is translated into byte code that is interpreted upon usage and Development, Smalltalk, Programming, Language at that point the interpreter converts the code to machine language and the code is executed. Dynamic translations work very well 1. INTRODUCTION with dynamic typing. Smalltalk, yet another programming language originally developed for educational purposes and now having a much 5. IMPLEMENTATIONS broader horizon, first appeared publically in the computing Smalltalk has been implemented in numerous ways and has been industry in 1980 as a dynamically-typed object-oriented language the influence of many future languages such as Java, Python, based largely on message-passing in Simula and Lisp. Object-C, and Ruby, just to name a few. Athena is a Smalltalk scripting engine for Java. Little Smalltalk 2. EARLY HISTORY was the first interpreter of the programming language to be used Development for Smalltalk started in 1969, but the language outside of the Xerox PARC.
    [Show full text]
  • Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language
    Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language Shaobai Li Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2017-215 http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/EECS-2017-215.html December 14, 2017 Copyright © 2017, by the author(s). All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language by Patrick S. Li A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering { Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Koushik Sen, Chair Adjunct Professor Jonathan Bachrach Professor George Necula Professor Sara McMains Fall 2017 Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language Copyright 2017 by Patrick S. Li 1 Abstract Design and Implementation of an Optionally-Typed Functional Programming Language by Patrick S. Li Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering { Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley Professor Koushik Sen, Chair This thesis describes the motivation, design, and implementation of L.B. Stanza, an optionally- typed functional programming language aimed at helping programmers tackle the complexity of architecting large programs and increasing their productivity across the entire software development life cycle.
    [Show full text]