Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Hi Alan,

As a high school teacher, I often find that discussions of technology in education diminish 'education' to curricular and assessment documentation and planning; however, these artifacts are only a small element of what is, fundamentally, a social process of discussion and progressive knowledge building.

If the real work and progress with my students comes from our intellectual both-and-forth (rather than static documentation of pre-exhibiting knowledge), are there tools I can look to that have been/will be created to empower and enrich this kind of in situ interaction?

This is a tough one to try to produce "through the keyhole" of this very non-WYSIWYG poorly thought through artifact of the WWW people not understanding what either the Internet or computer media are all about.

Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media, and what the computer and pervasive networking should bring as real positive additions.

One way to assess what is going on now is partly a retreat from real literacy back to oral modes of communication and oral modes of thought (i.e. "texting" is really a transliteration of an oral utterance, not a literary form).

This is a disaster.

However, even autodidacts really need some oral discussions, and this is one reason to have a "school experience".

The question is balance. Fluent readers can read many times faster than oral transmissions, and there are many more resources at hand. This means in the 21st century that most people should be doing a lot of reading -- especially students (much much more reading than talking). Responsible adults, especially teachers and parents, should be making all out efforts to help this to happen.

For the last point, I'd recommend perusing Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", and this will be a good basis for thinking about tradeoffs between actual interactions (whether with people or computers) and "pondering".

I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....

In seeking to consider what form this “‘really good’ balance” might take, can you recommend any favored resources/implementations to illustrate what “real positive additions” computers and networking can bring to the table? I’m familiar with the influence of Piaget/Papert - but I would love to gain some additional depth on the media/networking side of the conversation.

Thank you for your thoughts. I feel similarly about the cultural regression of literacy.

With a good programming language and interface, one -- even children -- can create from scratch important simulations of complex non-linear systems that can help one's thinking about them.