[sword-devel] OLPC activities not OLPC rejection Re: olpc discussion

Thu May 3 06:56:24 MST 2007

Please let me help you develop a somewhat familar and
somewhat different thought pattern if you want to work 
with me or others to develop activities which will be
accepted into the activity repositories of One Laptop 
Per Child.

The Bible was written so that people could follow the 
instructions in it in order to live life as God intended 
and have eternal life.  Following instructions, imitating
others, and participating in discovery learning are all
activities that a child can enjoy while becoming a 
better person.  In OLPC terminology this is playful 
learning.  Reading is an activity but for most children
it is not playful learning unless it is enhanced with 
goals, feedback, and the other crudements of enjoyment
and education which enhanced and indeed made possible 
by computers and in particular the One Laptop Per Child.

Many of the best web pages are put together by a team 
that may include a business manager who is not able to do
web design or programming, a programmer who is unable to
do business management or web design, and a web designer
who is unable to do business management or programming.  
Playful learning Bible software that will be put into the 
repositories of laptop.org or the other repositories from 
which a child will check out an activity will most likely
be put together by a team.  A very multi-talented person
might be able to build a few Bible-based playful learning
activities which would pass the strict scrutiny of 
repository authorities who would otherwise reject anything
from believers.  Solomon said there is wisdom in an 
abundance of counselors.  The need for multiple counselors 
and multiple talents increases as undertakings become
bigger, more difficult, and more important.  

At Pycon 2007, some Python experts worked with me on the 
simple task of using discovery learning to identify what 
huge mess of English spellings are used in traditional
orthography to represent each of the sounds in one dialect 
of English.  The phonology of Japanese as it existed a few 
decades ago was described with 8 rules.  I was told that
someone wrote 31 pages of rules for English then gave up.  
I still view it as a simple task compared to the traveling 
salesman problem.  Although I am not sure of a perfect 
solution, obviously partial solutions exist with computer
assistance that are better and faster than what a child
could do without computer assistance.  However in working 
with this simple task we quickly discovered ways to make 
it much more playful and much more educational if we had 
the benefit of a bottom-up data-driven parser.  Although 
data-driven parsers have been written in other languages 
it has a much greater chance of acceptance by OLPC if it
is written in Python so that the child can use discovery 
learning for the dialect of Arabic, English, Japanese, 
or Zzuluwahali which the child is learning.  If it is in 
Python then the child can hit the button intended to help 
the child learn the computer program source behind the 
computer assistance which the child is receiving to most 
easily move from the sounds of the language to the proper 
spelling of those sounds.  So I am looking for programmers 
better than I, to help me construct a data-driven Python 
parser plus the playful learning ways to use it to help 
the OLPC users for this simple task and much more complex 
playful learning activities using the words, the discourse 
structure, and the other attributes which make the Bible
the world's best selling book.

The strongest plank in the OLPC human interface 
is that it will run activities for children not applications.
GnomeSword, BibleTime and other Sword applications are great
applications for mature Bible truth seekers who are have 
been raised where they often hear the world's best selling
most quoted book.  These applications are designed to search 
for terms that the truth seeker has heard or to just enable 
someone to read the Bible who has access to a computer with 
sufficient memory.

Ages ago, I taught high-school history while studying for 
my first graduate degree.  I used to teach those students
that the world has undergone 4 great stages of learning.  
#1 God spoke to the most ancient prophets.  Only a very 
few people heard, obeyed, and reaped the benefits.  #2 
God had Moses write down His Message.  Most of a whole 
nation and occassionaly some people from other nations, 
sometimes studied, obeyed, and reaped the benefits of that 
Message.  #3 Jesus Christ completed His work on earth 
and the Holy Spirit descended, the early church was busy 
every day in every house doing and teaching that same 
Message and how it must penetrate and change every activity 
of every believer.  This revolution spread until it was
heard by every creature.  But then it the dark ages came
when only the religious leaders studied the Message.  #4 
When the Message was printed, it spread resulting in 
universities, hospitals, and even the United States of 
America being built by people who wanted to obey that 
Message and reap the benefits of obedience.  

Now #5 is before us.  The computer enables the Message to 
be spread with enjoyable activities.  People who do not 
care to read the printed Bible could become addicted to 
spending a little time every day in enjoyable Bible 
learning activities with some of my designs.  I once did 
a project which was shown at the National Computer 
Conference with the assistance of only two programmers. 
Both of them started by saying the project was not 
possible without a larger much better educated team and a
timeline of no less than 1250% of the available time before 
NCC.  It involved the use of the most sophisticated 
compiler-compiler available to me at the time.  Yes, a 
data-driven parser in Python or any other language is 
more difficult.  But we can do it and many other things 
before OLPC is widely distributed if we will believe and
use everything God will supply.

If you do not know anything about what I have said thusfar 
but you know how to read and respond to e-mail, please 
contact me at the e-mail address of this post.  This post 
is already too long.  But I will make another post to show 
how you could use the Sword to develop a OLPC activity 
that could be accepted into a few local OLPC repositories.

Thank you for your attention.  I hope we can help each 
other to use Python to get into the best OLPC repositories.  
If you cannot, then I hope that you will use my upcoming
design to get something you do into some repositories.
My little love and God's BIG LOVE,
a volunteer, DrStovallFoundation.com

--- "Troy A. Griffitts" <scribe at crosswire.org> wrote:

> First, my apologies for being so absent lately.  I'm excited to see all 
> the traffic.  Should be back in the swing of things in a week or so.
> 
> Sean Kennedy wrote:
> > Since these devices are supposed to be networked most of the time, maybe 
> > a web app would be a better fit.
> 
> We have a full-featured web application available at:
> 
> http://crosswire.org/study/
> 
> As much work as we have put into this application (and honestly, I use 
> it more than any other application for my personal study), as was 
> commented in another post, I also think it would be nice to allow the 
> users to download and take home a Bible or two when they have internet 
> access, which Bibletime and Gnomesword allow with their builtin remote 
> module installers.  Was there still any hope either of these might run?
> 
> 	-Troy.
> 
> 
> 
>    I think that would have appeal beyond
> > the OLPC crowd ... of course, then someone has to host it ... unless it 
> > is small enough to be run right on the local machine (in which case 
> > everything would have to be done client side, because there won't be a 
> > server daemon on that hardware)
> >  
> > Programming is fun again when hardware limitations have to be considered!

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