Tuesday, November 04, 2008

interviewed by Phil and Belinda

Recently, Phil and Belinda, two Flinders University education students visited my year 10 class, interacted with the students and after lesson interviewed me. It was for a project for a Digital Media course run by Trudy Sweeney who is also currently President of the Computers in Education Group of South Australia (CEGSA)

The questions were about Scratch, learning environments, etoys and the OLPC. The interview goes for about 30 minutes and is available as an mp3 on this page (also available as smaller question length segments)

Belinda and Phil's whole project about Squeak, Scratch and Etoys is available here

I was impressed by Belinda's ideas for using Scratch to teach Japanese and Phil's expert linux knowledge - and the fact that he went to an anti digital censorship campaign back in the Senator Harradine moral crusade days when he (Phil) was 15 yo! (unfortunately we now have new moral crusaders pushing the same barrow today)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing this interview.

What was the name of the Scratch textbook you mentioned in the interview? I tried searching Amazon.com for the title Phil mentioned but wasn't able to find it.

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,
Scott.

Bill Kerr said...

hi scott,

It was a book written for etoys, not scratch. "Powerful ideas in the classroom" by BJ Allen-Conn and Kim Rose. It can be downloaded in various languages (but not English, not sure why) from here . The ideas in this book are very well thought out and the afterword by alan kay, "Our Human Condition 'from Space' " is simply magnificent (reviewed here )