Our overall goal with Waveplace is to teach children to become digital storytellers. Just what that means, and can mean, is really the crux of where we're headed. I've been thinking a great deal about this. Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They're missing the point. That's like saying, 'If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you're literate.' Literature is first and foremost about having ideas important enough to discuss and write down...

We've just posted two new videos from the St John Waveplace pilot, which concluded three weeks ago. The first shows mentoring during the pilot. The second shows students presenting their Etoys storybooks. 1) Scenes from the St John pilot (4 minutes) 2) The St John Storybook Awards (8 minutes) We will be posting the actual storybooks to our website soon. In other news, the Haiti pilot will resume next week, since things have calmed down in Port-Au-Prince. The kids and teachers are well....

Had a great trip to Saint John last week, finishing up our ten week Waveplace pilot with the fourth grade class at Guy Benjamin School. I got to teach the class one day, which was great fun, and for our last class, we had each student present their storybooks, then gave out four iPods as prizes. The judges were me, Dionne Wells (their principal), and Jamie Elliot (a local reporter). Mid-trip we presented the results of the pilot to the new USVI Education Commissioner by having A'Feyah, one of the students, sit with the Commissioner and show her what she...

Today I read some very nice comments from a few of the people who donated their XO laptops to children in our Haiti pilot. Last week I posted photos of the children that got their laptops as well as a new video. The first donor comment was from Emily Davidow, who also blogged: Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful program! Seeing the pictures and movie made me so happy. Looking forward to following the progress in Haiti and all your programs through the newsletter. The next was from author David Weinberger, who blogged as...

Just received some photos from the start of our Haitian pilot, along with some new photos from our St John pilot, which is in its sixth week. * Haiti photos * St John photos...

Today we're starting our pilot in Haiti, at one of the Mercy & Sharing schools in Port-Au-Prince. Our very own Bill Stelzer, leader of our St John pilot, will be teaching Emile Roulsa Jean and two others to become Haiti's first Waveplace mentors. They'll then start a ten-week pilot using the nineteen laptops we were able to receive in time. Our greatest thanks go to the ten kind souls who donated their XOs last weekend, along with David Weinberger, Jerry Michalski, and Wayan Vota for helping spread the word. David & Jerry are A-List blogerati and Wayan runs OLPC News,...

Just sent out a plea to forums and bloggers I know. David Weinberger not only posted it, but he's sending us his XO! Here's the plea: Waveplace is a non-profit starting an XO pilot in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days. OLPC was going to be giving us laptops, but it fell through, which is why I'm trying to get twenty XOs from elsewhere. Your laptop may end up in the hands of one of the most needy children in the Western Hemisphere. The school where the laptop will be sent is run by Susie Scott Krabacher, who has been the...

Great article about Waveplace in the St John Tradewinds. Talks about our Virgin Islands pilot, which is into its second week. We also launched our new website, which has a terrific new video from our trip to Haiti earlier this month....

Yesterday in a talk with OLPC, we were again confronted with their "airdrop model" of laptop distribution (the term is mine). OLPC advocates a "full saturation" approach to giving laptops to schools and countries. When Waveplace then says, "Our plan is to start with a smaller pilot and scale teacher training to assure effectiveness", they counter with their belief that larger numbers have a magic all their own. Their experience is that full saturation is more important than scaled training. Now these are smart guys with a lot of experience at this, so I'm tempted to believe them. I'm also...

Today I posted my twentieth Etoys tutorial in the Squeaky Tales series, bringing the total to five hours of ten planned. Each fifteen-minute screencast forms the basis for an hour of hands-on instruction with a child, with the mentor first presenting the concepts in their own fashion, then leading the class for the remainder of the time. The videos themselves are aimed at the mentor, not the students, though I suspect older students could watch the videos on their own. Now half done, I've been spending time on techniques to manage complexity. Just like a real software project, the beginning...

Been a pretty cool week so far. On Monday, Viewpoints Research contracted Immuexa to redesign their Squeakland website. Given that Etoys is the crown jewel in the OLPC lineup, we're pretty excited. We're hoping to launch this winter. On Tuesday, OLPC started mass production of the XO laptops. I've been a fly on the wall listening to their team talk for months. Having been entrenched in development mayhem much of my life, let me simply say it's a big accomplishment. Congrats to all. On Wednesday, we launched the beta of Blazemark 2.0, which is being shown at a fire-fighting convention...

In the year 2000, world leaders made eight pretty incredible promises, which are known as the Millennium Development Goals. The first of these goals is to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1 USD per day. More than 1.5 billion people qualify, which is roughly 1 out of every 4 people alive. Two-thirds of these people don't have access to clean water, and malnutrition is so bad that six million children die EVERY YEAR before their fifth birthday. That's a holocaust-sized catastrophe...

I've just posted my eighth 15-minute Squeaky Tales tutorial, bringing the collective time to two hours of Etoys fun. My plan is to create four 15-minute movies each week for the next eight weeks for a total of ten hours of video tutorial. What topics will I cover? Well, I'm trying to make the Squeaky Tales series as subject-neutral as possible. My hope is that this approach will allow mentors to adapt the concepts to different ages and subjects more easily. By necessity, there will be rudimentary math concepts like addition and multiplication, but these will be presented as a...

Just had the Shift Happens video link sent to me. Quite an eye opener, as is the terrific Pay Attention video, which focuses more on teaching. Put simply: within our lifetime, the "rote jobs" will ship overseas. It's clear from the numbers. What's left are "spark jobs" ... high creativity jobs. Our schools aren't teaching spark. They're teaching rote....

Towards the end of yesterday's Squeaky Tale, I tried changing the color of something and found (while recording) that I didn't know what I was doing. My first reaction was "Oh geez, I should reshoot that" lest I lose face to the viewing public. Instead, I left my mistake in the video, since it helps demonstrate an important point. Programming is about making mistakes. You try something, see how it goes, try something else, and grin at your flaws. A programmer that thinks he knows everything in advance is a bad programmer. Such an approach might seem alien, since our...

Over the long weekend, I got some very positive feedback regarding my Squeaky Tales series. People seemed to like my movies, though my first attempts had some video compression snags which forced me to temporarily abandon Flash video in favor of Quicktime. The downside was that the movies took a long time to start, since they were essentially fully downloading before beginning. Today I worked out the kinks and encoded them back as Flash FLV movies. They should start up more quickly and should also be more compatible with different systems. FLV is the video format used on YouTube. I...

I've just posted the first two screencast tutorials on Squeak Etoys. Originally, the plan was for us to be in St John right now, prepping for our three-day Etoys workshop at Caneel Bay. Since the funding didn't materialize, I'm making these short movies instead, hoping they're enough for Bill & Mary to struggle through on their own. The first movie discusses how to install Squeak Etoys and the latest OLPC Etoys image on your computer (particularly if you own a Mac). The next shows Etoys in action for about fifteen minutes. My next screencast will be on Tuesday. Let me...

In the last two days, I've been teaching twenty-year-old Nicole to use Squeak Etoys. She's never done any programming before, nor does she really know why she'd want to be a programmer, which puts her in the majority. I'm teaching her as warm-up for some video tutorials I'm making for the general public, the first of which is rendering right now. Teaching a novice to program is a humbling task, particularly for an expert. I'm mindful of the pacing of my presentation. Too much and eyes glaze over, too little and boredom sets in. Constructionism is a great fit to...

Yesterday we received our very own XO laptop from OLPC to play with. We'd seen one up close at Squeakfest last August, but now we've got time to get to know it and show it off to others. Here Paula's trying Squeak Etoys on it: As you can see next to her 15" MacBook, the XO is made for little hands. I was very pleased with its performance. Fedora & Sugar booted in a minute and Etoys loaded in about ten seconds which is plenty fast enough. Also very impressive was the reflective display. You really can read things in...

So here I am, with three months of research, and nowhere to use it. Over the summer, I immersed myself in the writings of Seymour Papert and the works of Alan Kay and Mitch Resnick, both of whom drew inspiration from Papert. I've been walking around with a running dialogue in my head, inspired by the same ideas that launched OLPC and countless other efforts. So what's Papert's point? What's the common gist of the half-dozen books he's written, starting with "Mindstorms" in 1980? Okay, I'll give it a shot. Seymour Papert thinks that we're programming our kids in school...

Somewhere along a distant shore a child walks with eyes that burn. She sees everything, from the mother dog and pup searching through garbage for food, to the tangle of fishing line in the sea grapes. She takes in the details, both beautiful and terrible. She braces through flood of feeling. At home, she cannot speak of it. At school, she fears response. In her heart, there is a passion for the world. Her talent is on the edge of immeasurable. Would that we could say to her, "Be true" ... to tell her this flood might someday sustain her,...