T Racing the D Ynabook : As Tudy of T Echnocultural T Ransformations
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
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 . ..