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Stripped out all the legacy "desktop UI" stuff, and replaced with a simpler "multi-page notebook" metaphor, then it could be massively more compelling to people. It then becomes a "personal notebook" for doing little sketches / experiments.If it's also "social" ie. has chat streams. Or is like the Smallest Federated Wiki. Or has other ways to sync sketches and pages etc. then this would be spectacular.And the Smalltalk VM / infrastructure is perfect for it.
I have found the GT/Lepiter GUI pretty compelling for learners in my local hackerspace and in the information science department, both spaces where I'm a facilitator/teacher. It provides a pretty focused experience and it is stripped down of the overwhelming initial experience of the Pharo/Squeak GUI. It is not well suited for "classical Smalltalkers" though. as I have been talking with some of them and they find the DX too much specific and even cumbersome for some task they usually do (it has been not our case so far).
In our last use case at the university, the students are creating a personal code repository in Fossil, with data narratives and they do a critic/annotated reading, using Hypothesis (this very technology), which is kind of a personal public wiki-like portfolio for data narratives. They put also the reading notes in their own repositories for the data stories I published previously where I introduce Smalltalk or and introduction to data representation and processing in Pharo.
This could be another approach for wikis in the classroom, that is alterative to our use of interpersonal wikis with TiddlyWiki. At some point and in a pretty organic way, the idea would be to have all them integrated and powered by "context aware" and thematic chatbots (made in Pharo).
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