Towards an order of magnitude improvement in the quality of output from the collaborative activities of children:
Goal: The XO architecture is intentionally designed, from the ground up, to foster high quality output from the collaborative activities of children. Requirement #1: The history of work and contributions of all members of the community of children are visible to any participant in that community. Requirement #2: Children (and adults!) need a safe place to think about their contributions to the collaborative effort. Solution bias for requirement #1 -> All data are shared by default and an explicit action is required to make work private. Solution bias for requirement #2 -> All data are private by default and an explicit action is required to make work public. Assumption underlying conflict between biases: The space within which the children collaborate publicly is the same space in which they do their private thinking, so we cannot simultaneously set conflicting defaults. Example of an environment where this conflict does not exist: git Hair-brained idea #332 of #663 which must be stressed is _not_ expected to be considered as a solution but rather one of many ideas which may be heading in the vague general direction of a solution: The school server has git repositories holding the Journal contents for each class over the course of a school year. Children have their own Journal on their local machines and check in contributions to the 'master' Journal on the server. - a -- "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." - Melvin Conway _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
