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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#331

Post by dredmorbius »

alankay1 wrote: post #197
testmonkey wrote: post #96

If you were to design your own high school curriculum for gifted students, what would it look like?

I would work on the early grades for all students, especially gifted ones. The epistemological stance you wind up with gets set fairly early -- not in stone but also hard to work with -- and the early grades are where we should be putting our resources and efforts.

What topics, methods, or activities would you see more of?

Which less?

Is there any specific cognitive, childhood, intellectual, educational, etc., development model that this is based on?

How would you account and adapt for different proclivities and/or interests?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#333

Post by alankay1 »

trsohmers wrote: post #294

Hi Alan, We met at a retreat last fall, and it was a real treat for me to hear some fantastic stories/anecdotes about the last 50 years of computing (which I have only been directly involved with for about 1/10th of). Another one of my computing heroes is Seymour Cray, which we talked about a bit and your time at Chippewa Falls. While a lot of HN'ers know about you talking about the Burroughs B5000, I (and I bet most…

Seymour Cray was a man of few words. I was there for three weeks before I realized he was not the janitor.

The "Chippewa OS" is too big a story for here, but it turned out that the official Control Data software team failed to come up with any software for the 6600! Hence a bunch of us from Livermore, Los Alamos, NCAR, etc. -- the places that had bought the machine -- were assembled in Chippewa Falls to "do something".

Perhaps the most interesting piece of unofficial software was a multitasking OS with graphical debugger for the 6600 that had been written by Seymour Cray -- to help debug the machine -- in octal absolute! I had the honor of writing a de-assembler for this system so we ordinary mortals could make changes and add to it (this was an amazing tour de force given the parallel architecture and multiple processes for this machine). And it was also a good object lesson for what Cray was really good at, and what he was not so good at (there were some really great decisions on this machine, and some really poor ones -- both sets quite extreme)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#334

Post by jbrennan »

alankay wrote: post #307
germinalphrase wrote: post #297

Hi Alan, As a high school teacher, I often find that discussions of technology in education diminish 'education' to curricular and assessment documentation and planning; however, these artifacts are only a small element of what is, fundamentally, a social process of discussion and progressive knowledge building. If the real work and progress with my students comes from our intellectual both-and-forth (rather than sta…

This is a tough one to try to produce "through the keyhole" of this very non-WYSIWYG poorly thought through artifact of the WWW people not understanding what either the Internet or computer media are all about. Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media,…

>I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....

This is the meta-thing that’s been bugging me: how do we help people realize they’re “missing their actual potential as thinkers”?

The world seems so content to be an oral culture again, how do we convince / change / equip people to be skeptical of these media?

Joe Edelman’s Centre for Livable Media (http://livable.media) seems like a step in the right direction. How else can we convince people?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#335

Post by alankay »

spamfilter247 wrote: post #188

Hi Alan. What are your thoughts on how rapidly GUIs are evolving nowadays? Many apps/services revamp their UI fairly often and this oftentimes hurts muscle memory for people who have just about gotten a workflow routine figured out. Also, what big UI changes do you foresee in the next 10 years - or would like to see. Thanks.

Or devolving?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#336

Post by dredmorbius »

Do you have any thoughts or favourite authors on the topic of technology and innovation, and the process of that specifically?

I've been particularly interested lately in the works of the late John Holland, W. Brian Arthur (of PARC & Stanford), J. Doyne Farmer, Kevin Kelley, David Krakauer, and others (many of these are affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute).

In particular, they speak to modularity, technology as an evolutionary process, and other concepts which strike me being solidly reflected in software development as well. Steve McConnell's Code Complete, for example, first really hammered home to me the concept of modularity in design.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#337

Post by johntyree »

alankay1 wrote: post #234
diiq wrote: post #120

As a community, we often think on quite short time-scales ("What can we build right now, for users right now, to make money asap?"). I feel like you've always been good at stepping back, and taking a longer view. So what should a designer or a developer be doing now, to make things better in 10 years, or 100 years?

What does the world actually need?

Love, sweet love.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#339

Post by alankay1 »

iyn wrote: post #16

Thanks for doing this AMA. Q: How do you think we can improve todays world (not just with technology)? What do you think is our species way forward? How as a civilization can we 'get to higher level'? Specifically, I'm interested in your views on ending poverty, suffering, not destroying the Earth, improving our political and social systems, improving education etc. I understand that these are very broad topics witho…

"What Fools these Mortals be!" Puck meant that we are easy to fool. In fact we like to be fooled -- we pay lots of money to be fooled!

One way to look at this is that the most important learning anyone can do is to understand "Human beings as if from Mars" -- meaning to get beyond our fooling ourselves and to start trying to deal with what is dangerous and counterproductive in our genetic (and hence cultural) makeups. This is quite different than what most schools think they are supposed to be about -- but the great Jerome Bruner in the 60s came up with a terrific curriculum for 5th graders that was an excellent start for "real anthroplogy" in K-5.

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