[Edu-sig] Tracing the Dynabook: A Dissertation

Hi, Over the past few years, I have been working on a historical study on Alan Kay's Dynabook vision and how it has played out over the past three and a half decades. This has been part of my PhD work in education at the University of BC -- as such, I am working from an educational perspective, rather than a compsci one. I recently (November 2006) finished the dissertation and successfully defended it, and so I'm posting this in the hopes that some of you will find some value in it. I've been reading this edu-sig list since its inception, and in the past 6 months or so I've noticed an enormous surge of interest in (and controversy around) Squeak and Alan Kay's Dynabook concept. I've been reading these discussions with great interest, as much of it touches directly on what I've been writing. While I haven't written about Python per se in my dissertation, it is implicitly there for the simple reason that Python has been my own language of choice for the past 4 or 5 years; much of what Paul Fernhout written recently about appreciating Smalltalk while still finding Python more practical is very close to my own experience. The entire work is roughly 300 pages. This link leads to a PDF of just under 2 megabytes. At some point, if I have some time, I want to break this out into some more granular web pages, but I'm already late in releasing it, so here it is in its entirety. You can find it (along with a brief abstract and ToC) at: http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/dissertation I'm very interested in any comments you might have. - John Maxwell Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Simon Fraser University jmax at sfu.ca