Just watched Program for the Future after having read Bill Kerr’s blog post. It strikes me how the comment from Alan Kay between 00:56:13 and 0:58:20 seems to apply to our project! (Bold from me)

“[...] I believe for most education problems, having to do with things with we have deemed important for a long time [...] have to be handled by a user interface that can mentor its users. This is another one I would aimed at Google because, Google has every reason to actually be able to make a user interface that can teach its users new things because, that allows them to expand what user interfaces can do, not just what the actual applications can do.  So, this is another one of these very very deep, very important problems that has been part of the province of AI for litteraly 15 years  now and has not even been really funded with any strength that I know of over the last, at least, 15 years.

[...]

There has to be some set of processes that can help people learn, [...] that could make a large community that is actually at a higher level of skill than just at the entry level for decades and decades.  I believe we have to do that and just as a person who doesn’t hate user interface design enough not to do it at all, I believe this is where all the user interface focus should actually go over the next 5 years. If they can think about something that, as an interesting possibility like the OLPC initiative going in the third world, where we are putting a machine in the third world,  without shipping it with a teacher, that is better than no teacher, that is better than a bad teacher, it is not gonna have the impact that it needs. ”

I am totally convinced that to be successful, the OLPC project must not only provide a platform that facilitate learning through educational activities, but also carries on with itself everything needed to improve the platform itself, not just the source code and the knowledge to modify it but also a way to present that knowledge so that users will acquire efficiently a proficiency to adapt the platform. This is were our tutor comes in.

I must say that I have been following, for 3 years now, a lot of what Alan Kay brought to the table in terms of the fundamental possibilities the computer opens up, so it comes as no surprise that this project is tainted by his vision.  But still, it has been elaborated before I heard about this talk and I now have a(nother) confirmation we are working on something really important.

Now let’s make it happen!