PyCon: Keynote: Adele Goldberg

One Laptop Per Child is going to change the world.
The US schooling system is in crisis.
The Internet is very free, but schools are very rigid.
Schools aren't succeeding.
She mentioned The Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford University
Social interaction has a positive impact on eLearning.
"Teaching to the test" is destroying education.
nickjr.com is amazingly educational.
Constructivist teaching is great, but it's hard.
Programming is one of the most beneficial eLearning activities.
Not enough time is given in schools to eLearning; it doesn't matter because they're too constrictive anyway.
Let kids learn at their own pace.
Inquiry-based, project-based, group-based learning is good.
Lecture-oriented classrooms are bad.
The best learning is the type kids do when they aren't in school.

Adele was very passionate, but she didn't elicit the same passionate response that Ivan Krstic did in his One Laptop Per Child talk. I felt like she was saying, "I'm working hard to change the world, why aren't you?" instead of, "We're going to change the world, and you can help!" However, since I have children of my own, I hope she continues to forge ahead and that she meets with success.

Comments

Lee Capps said…

Yours is the first weblog entry on Goldberg's keynote that gets it right. Perhaps many people were too busy checking their email to follow her evidence-heavy and nuanced argument.

Or maybe people were so put off by her seemingly negative initial thesis (which of course was meant to be a trope, a turning) that they just didn't listen to the rest.

Anyway, thanks for providing some evidence that I may not be losing my mind. You heard the same speech I did.

9:01 PM

jjinux said…

Thanks for the positive feedback ;)

3:19 PM

Ubuntu 20.04 on a 2015 15" MacBook Pro

I decided to give Ubuntu 20.04 a try on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro. I didn't actually install it; I just live booted from a USB thumb drive which was enough to try out everything I wanted. In summary, it's not perfect, and issues with my camera would prevent me from switching, but given the right hardware, I think it's a really viable option. The first thing I wanted to try was what would happen if I plugged in a non-HiDPI screen given that my laptop has a HiDPI screen. Without sub-pixel scaling, whatever scale rate I picked for one screen would apply to the other. However, once I turned on sub-pixel scaling, I was able to pick different scale rates for the internal and external displays. That looked ok. I tried plugging in and unplugging multiple times, and it didn't crash. I doubt it'd work with my Thunderbolt display at work, but it worked fine for my HDMI displays at home. I even plugged it into my TV, and it stuck to the 100% scaling I picked for the othe

Drawing Sierpinski's Triangle in Minecraft Using Python

In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B

ERNOS: Erlang Networked Operating System

I've been reading Dreaming in Code lately, and I really like it. If you're not a dreamer, you may safely skip the rest of this post ;) In Chapter 10, "Engineers and Artists", Alan Kay, John Backus, and Jaron Lanier really got me thinking. I've also been thinking a lot about Minix 3 , Erlang , and the original Lisp machine . The ideas are beginning to synthesize into something cohesive--more than just the sum of their parts. Now, I'm sure that many of these ideas have already been envisioned within Tunes.org , LLVM , Microsoft's Singularity project, or in some other place that I haven't managed to discover or fully read, but I'm going to blog them anyway. Rather than wax philosophical, let me just dump out some ideas: Start with Minix 3. It's a new microkernel, and it's meant for real use, unlike the original Minix. "This new OS is extremely small, with the part that runs in kernel mode under 4000 lines of executable code.&quo

JJinuxLand

Search This Blog