SELF-TAUGHT
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Nov 2, 2012, 10:26:02 AM11/2/12
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http://spectrevision.net/2012/11/01/self-taught/
HACKED in MONTHS, with ZERO INSTRUCTION
http://spectrevision.net/2008/09/21/one-cellphone-per-child/
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/
Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
by David Talbot / October 29, 2012
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access
to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying
something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off
tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens. The
goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written
words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with
the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies,
cartoons, paintings, and other programs. Early observations are
encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT
Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week.
The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a
solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults
in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages
and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the
machines were actually used. After several months, the kids in both
villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the
machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even
spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal
pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.” The
experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20
first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One
village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000
feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley.
Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road
signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing
the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids
would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only
opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five
days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks,
they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months,
they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our
organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they
figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.” Elaborating later on
Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology
officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze
desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so
every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to
prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they
worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of
inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to
learning.”
“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn,” Negroponte
said (see “Emtech Preview: Another Way to Think About Learning”). In
an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early
results are promising, reaching conclusions about whether children
could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets
funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two
years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would
accept,” Negroponte said. “We’d have to start with a new village and
make a clean start.”
The idea of dropping off tablets outside of the context of schools is
a new paradigm for OLPC. Through the late 2000s, the company was
focused on delivering a custom miniaturized and ruggedized laptop, the
XO, of which about 3 million have been distributed to kids in 40
countries. Deployments went to schools including ones in Peru (see
“Una Laptop por Nino”). Giving computers directly to poor kids without
any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes.
“What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t
go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we give them tool to read anD learn
—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all
that?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU
ONE SMARTPHONE per CHILD (cont.)
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429206/emtech-preview-another-way-to-think-about-learning/
Another Way to Think about Learning
by Nicholas Negroponte / September 13, 2012
Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial
intelligence, once said: “You cannot think about thinking unless you
think about thinking about something.” Does this apply to learning?
Maybe not. Here is what I mean. As we industrialized learning and
created schools, we needed to measure the system’s efficacy and each
child’s progress. What you really want to measure is curiosity,
imagination, passion, creativity, and the ability to see things from
multiple points of view. But these are hard to measure other than one
on one, and even then, the assessment will be subjective. So instead,
we measure what a child knows, and from that we infer that the child
has learned how to learn. This is the real aspiration we have for our
children: learning learning.
I believe that we get into trouble when knowing becomes a surrogate
for learning. We know that a vast recall of facts about something is
in no way a measure of understanding them. At best, it is necessary
but not sufficient. And yet we subject our kids to memorizing. We seem
to believe that rote learning is akin to physical exercise, good for
their minds. And, quite conveniently, we can test whether the facts
stuck, like spaghetti to a wall. In some cases knowledge is so drilled
in that you know and hate a subject at the same time. The closest I
have ever come to thinking about thinking is writing computer
programs. This involves teasing apart a process into constituent
parts, step-by-step functions, and conditional statements. What is so
important about computer programs is that they (almost) never work the
first time. Since they do something (versus nothing), just not what
you wanted, you can look at the (mis)behavior to debug and change your
code. This iterative process, so common in computer programming, is
similar to learning.
The gods must be crazy
Have you watched a two-year-old use an iPad? The meteoric rise of
modern instructionism, including the misguided belief that there is a
perfect way to teach something, is alarming because of the unlimited
support it is getting from Bill Gates, Google, and my own institution,
MIT. While Khan Academy is charming and brilliantly nonprofit, Salman
Khan cannot seriously believe that he and a small number of colleagues
can produce all the material, even if we did limit our learning to
being instructed. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit association
that I founded, launched the so-called XO Laptop in 2005 with built-in
programming languages. There are 2.5 million XOs in the hand of kids
today in 40 countries, with 25 languages in use. In Uruguay, where all
400,000 kids have an XO laptop, knowing how to program is required in
schools. The same is now true in Estonia. In Ethiopia, 5,000 kids are
writing computer programs in the language Squeak. OLPC represents
about $1 billion in sales and deployment worldwide since 2005—it’s
bigger than most people think. What have we learned? We learned that
kids learn a great deal by themselves. The question is, how much?
To answer that question, we have now turned our attention to the 100
million kids worldwide who do not go to first grade. Most of them do
not go because there is no school, there are no literate adults in
their village, and there is little promise of that changing soon. My
colleagues and I have started an experiment in two such villages,
asking a simple question: can children learn how to read on their own?
To answer this question, we have delivered fully loaded tablets to two
villages in Ethiopia, one per child, with no instruction or
instructional material whatsoever. The tablets come with a solar
panel, because there is no electricity in these villages. They contain
modestly curated games, books, cartoons, movies—just to see what the
kids will play with and whether they can figure out how to use them.
We then monitor each tablet remotely, in this case by swapping SIM
cards weekly (through a process affectionately known as sneakernet).
Within minutes of arrival, the tablets were unboxed and turned on by
the kids themselves. After the first week, on average, 47 apps were
used per day. After week two, the kids were playing games to race each
other in saying the ABCs. Will this lead to deep reading? The votes
are still out. But if a child can learn to read, he or she can read to
learn. If these kids are reading at, say, a third-grade level in 18
months, that would be transformational. Whether this can happen has
yet to be proved. But not only will the results tell us how to reach
the rest of the 100 million kids much faster than we can by building
schools and training teachers, they should also tell us a great deal
about learning in the developed world. If kids in Ethiopia learn to
read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City
who do not learn even with school? The message will be very simple:
children can learn a great deal by themselves. More than we give them
credit for. Curiosity is natural, and all kids have it unless it is
whipped out of them, often by school. Making things, discovering
things, and sharing things are keys. Having massive libraries of
explicative material like modern-day encyclopedias or textbooks is
fine. But such access may be much less significant than building a
world in which ideas are shaped, discovered, and reinvented in the
name of learning by doing and discovery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TKjfgjiQs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxMLDZN77uo
or HOW to TEACH LEARNING
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/01/one-laptop-per.php
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php
by Evan Ackerman / Oct 30, 2012
What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to
Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five
months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing
the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled
hardware.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering
technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no
education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve
traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the
last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really
not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell
"neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing
facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn
by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead,
OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is
what this experiment is all about. Rather than give out laptops
(they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running
custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project
decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes
of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no
instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you
can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like,
the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No
books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or
goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect;
there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to
zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet
computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these
people how to use them, right? But that's not what OLPC did. They just
left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid
in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-
loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards
with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used.
Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas
Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:
"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction,
no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within
four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off
switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within
five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two
weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And
within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our
organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they
figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."
This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to
see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English.
Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't
even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no
schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for
the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it
has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too,
since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their
computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is
incredibly amazing and awesome.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain
well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal
Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the
OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example
of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids
learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized
lessons and traditional teaching methods:
Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel
turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to
her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?" She nods and listens to
a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little
more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named "Rahel"
like she is and that she likes to wear blue--but for now the green
book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to
trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you trace the R?" As
she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. "Run
starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog
named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess asks, "Can you find
something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a
nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find
something big and red?"
As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole
words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks
them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the
time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and
sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her
about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and
programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle
to draw different shapes). Rahel writes her own stories about the
Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that
she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to
invent silly songs about what she's learning. An older Rahel learns
that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used
to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses
the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has
just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which
uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count.
URUGUAY
http://olpc.tv/2011/11/12/a-laptop-per-child-uruguay/
After a repressive history, Uruguay’s left-wing government is paving
the way for a new generation of digital-savvy, globalised nationals by
being the first country to give every child their own laptop. Ex-
guerilla fighter, Jose Mujica, has been in office since 2010. He has
never given up his ideals of social justice. The aim of the ambitious
‘A laptop per child’ program is to help close the divide between rich
and poor, and between developed and developing countries. Many parents
and teachers were initially sceptical; years without proper social
policies still shape life in the slums. ”I don’t want to know anything
about computers. It is a child who knows something about computers and
technology that throws bombs.” Yet despite early skepticism, the
program is now being widely embraced. “We need to educate the children
differently so that they understand the world of today.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0EP25yp9HU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUCFbzoWvk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXgHXwm6vNk
a LESSON from NELL
http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf
Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy
by C. Scott Ananian, Chris J. Ball, Michael Stone of the One Laptop
Per Child Foundation
Abstract: Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children in
the developing world. A novel modular narrative system guides
learning, even for children far from educational infrastructure, and
provides personalized instruction which grows with the child. Nell’s
design builds on experience with the Sugar Learning Platform [17],
used by over two million children around the world.
Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel
turns on her new tablet computer. The solar-powered machine speaks to
her: “Hello! Would you like to hear a story?” She nods and listens to
a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little
more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named “Rahel”
like she is and that she likes to wear blue—but for now the green book
draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace
shapes on the screen. “R is for Run. Can you trace the R?” As she
traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. “Run
starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog
named Rover.” Rover barks: “Ruff ! Ruff !” The Princess asks, “Can you
find something Red?” and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on
a nearby bush. “Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find
something big and red?” As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not
just letters, but whole words. The book’s responses are written on the
screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn’t need to leave the
sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her
special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New
stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing
certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a
notvery-bright turtle to draw different shapes). Rahel writes her own
stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The
book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin
to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she’s learning. An
older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the
turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her
special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm
game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and
Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn
to count.
The interaction design of the Nell system described above is inspired
by the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” in the Neal Stephenson novel
The Diamond Age, from whose pro-tagonist Nell takes its name. Nell’s
design embodies four key ideas: it is a Narrative interface using
Direct Interaction which Grows with, and is Personalized for, the
child. Nell uses these four key concepts to build a novel learning
platform which addresses several challenges we’ve encountered in
earlier work.
2.1 Narrative
Children (like all humans) are hard-wired for stories [4]. In our
earlier learning software, we’ve seen some of our favorite pedagogical
activities neglected because children had difficulty finding their way
into the material without an enthusiastic teacher’s guidance. In
response, Nell uses a Narrative Interface [3, 6] to pave a path for
the child user through the learning material. In the narrative
interface, all system actions are shaped by a storybook metaphor, and
interactions with the system are framed as interactions with one of
the system protagonists. Nell’s overall story is a multi-character
serial adventure, taking cues from The Diamond Age and from the
UNIVERSE narrative-generation system [9]. Each of the several
characters represents a specific skill or subject area, and each
adventure represents about a year’s curriculum. Adventures are further
subdivided into story modules, which match the scope of a traditional
lesson plan. The serialized multi-character design improves modularity
and allows updates and decentralized authorship. Nell’s characters are
always-available agents layered above a particular system activity
(application) which provides specialized functionality. The agents are
not always foregrounded: constructionist learning occurs when the
child plays freely to “make things” with the base activity. The
handwriting tutor is fundamentally a drawing activity; the adventure
involving the magical musical lock is also a musicmaking activity. The
narrative system is hooked into each activity to provide passive
guidance (congratulating the child when it notices they’ve drawn a
letter), active guidance (Apple-Guide–style [11] contextual help), or
system services (switching activities; jumping into a related story
module). A system-wide achievement system provides goals and rewards.
2.2 Personalized
Children learn in different ways. Nell provides multiple story modules
for its plot points/lessons to engage the child’s interests and cater
to multiple intelligences [8]. Selecting between the alternatives can
depend on either explicit choices made by the child (“fractions in
outer space,” if the child chose a space-themed story or previously
indicated an interest in space) or prior success with a given lesson
style (a large number of accomplishments in musical-rhythmic tasks
suggests a rhythmic approach to fractions). Similarly, several
different achievements can coexist, rewarding different ways of
accomplishing the same pedagogical goal. The record of past choices
and accomplishments is stored in a Journal and can be reviewed by the
child. The contents of the Journal can be rearranged to create a
Portfolio [16] demonstrating the child’s progress. In order to
encourage fearless play and experimentation, the Journal also supports
pervasive undo; the child can rewind and replay the narrative starting
at any past point in the journal. Content can be remixed for further
personalization. The child is encouraged to rename characters and
change clothing, colors, and other superficial details. In the future
we expect to accomplish further narrative customization by
recombination of story elements. Lebowitz [9] and Riedl [13] show how
a planner can be used to recombine and adapt story fragments. We have
less ambition than the cited work: instead of attempting to generate
thousands of stories from tens of templates, we hope to select and
then modestly adapt from hundreds of story modules created in a
decentralized manner by teachers—and eventually by the students
themselves.
2.3 Growable
Children grow. Nell aims to provide a “low floor and no ceiling” to
grow with them, along three main axes.
First, Nell tracks the child’s growing intelligence and capability
with increasingly challenging story material. As the child accumulates
achievements and demonstrates proficiency, the serial story moves on to
more advanced topics. Second, Nell seeks to grow its authoring
community. Decentralized authorship ensures that Nell’s instructional
content continues to increase in the number of topics and
customizations. There are no ceilings between children and teachers:
Nell contains a story editor and everything necessary to author and
publish story modules. To further promote collaboration, Nell is free
and open source and implemented in standard web technologies
(JavaScript, HTML5, and WebGL) with offline caching. Resources are named
by URL, even when disconnected from the internet, which simplifies the
distribution of updates to story modules and the Nell system. URL-
based identifiers also allow third parties to manage their own
namespaces when extending Nell. Finally, Nell is designed to allow a
capable child to learn about the construction of the system itself,
eliminating the ceiling between the child and the authors of the Nell
system. Nell can teach about itself, and its source code is open for
exploration within Nell. Meaningful changes can be performed without
external tools.
2.4 Direct interaction
The constructionist learning philosophy emphasizes creation and
tangible interaction. Nell uses direct interaction on a tablet
computer to maintain the child’s connection to their work (Figure 1).
In particular, Nell uses handwriting recognition as a primary
interface. The direct interaction model lowers the floor by eliminating
the need to learn an abstract touchpad or mouse interface. It also
supports our literacy goals by allowing direct handwriting instruction
and development of motor skills.
Technology
Our implementation choices further our goals of modularity and
decentralization. In this section we describe the technologies that
enable Nell’s four key ideas. New story modules can be downloaded from
the Internet in connected deployments. In disconnected deployments,
new stories might be distributed once a year on USB sticks or shared
among friends. In a classroom environment, a teacher can share stories
for the day’s lesson at the start of class. Story modules can be
inherited and extended. This makes it easy to take an existing story
and modify it to better suit particular interests, a particular type
of learner—or just to add variety. This can lead to conflicts: multiple
versions of a story, or scenes within a story, may have their
preconditions satisfied simultaneously. Conflicts are resolved by
consulting a group associated with each scene. Each group has a
default priority and names a scene to be invoked when a conflict
exists; the actions associated with that scene will (eventually) alter
the priorities of the conflicting scenes to resolve the conflict. The
resolution scene may include any number of actions. It may select
randomly among the conflicting scenes or base its selection on the
child’s preferences, curriculum progress, or inferred learning style.
The resolution scene may even initiate a new multi-scene story. For
example, the story-intro-group used in Figure 2 defaults to a low
priority so that continuing a story in progress is preferred above
starting a new story. When a story module is completed, several new
story openings will be in conflict.
3.2 Extensible dialog
Nell’s use as an interactive diary and portfolio [16] is enhanced by
the child’s collaboration in the fiction that Nell is intelligent—what
Turkle [18] calls the “ELIZA effect.” Convincing discourse is a hard
problem, but reasonable approximations do not have to be difficult; even
the rudimentary conversational abilities of ELIZA elicited hours of
conversation.We’ve chosen to allow the child to directly converse with
the Princess and other agents within Nell. Our implementation extends
AIML [1], the markup language developed for the Loebner Prize–winning
AliceBot. Each story module can include AIML fragments extending the
conversational capabilities of Nell’s agents. Figure 3 shows an AIML
fragment augmenting an agent with commands suitable for a text
adventure story module. In such a story the child might write
instructions such as go north, go east, or open door in addition to
the usual dialog with the agent. These new commands fire events which
are referenced by scene preconditions. For example, north may trigger
a scene which causes the activity to draw a new location on the page,
causes the agent to write and speak a description of the new location,
and finally causes a shift in the AIML topic to enable additional
vocabulary suitable for the new location.
Conclusions
We have described the design of a novel narrative directinterface
system for education, starting with literacy, which is personalized
for and grows with its child owner. Personalized direct interface
engages the child, and narrative guides them through pedagogic
material. Low-cost solarpowered hardware allows Nell to reach further
into the leastdeveloped areas of the world to help those without
traditional educational infrastructure.
References
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[18] S. Turkle. Alone Together: Why We Expect MoreFrom Technology and
Less From Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.
[19] B. Wilcox. Beyond Fa¸cade: Pattern matching for natural language
applications. http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/Documentation/Pattern_Matching_for_Natural_Language_Applications.pdf,
Feb. 2011.
SEE ALSO: EMPTY LOT, OCEAN VIEW
http://spectrevision.net/2010/06/24/charter-cities/
HACKED in MONTHS, with ZERO INSTRUCTION
http://spectrevision.net/2008/09/21/one-cellphone-per-child/
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/
Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
by David Talbot / October 29, 2012
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access
to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying
something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off
tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens. The
goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written
words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with
the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies,
cartoons, paintings, and other programs. Early observations are
encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT
Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week.
The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a
solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults
in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages
and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the
machines were actually used. After several months, the kids in both
villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the
machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even
spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal
pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.” The
experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20
first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One
village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000
feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley.
Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road
signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing
the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids
would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only
opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five
days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks,
they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months,
they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our
organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they
figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.” Elaborating later on
Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology
officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze
desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so
every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to
prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they
worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of
inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to
learning.”
“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn,” Negroponte
said (see “Emtech Preview: Another Way to Think About Learning”). In
an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early
results are promising, reaching conclusions about whether children
could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets
funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two
years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would
accept,” Negroponte said. “We’d have to start with a new village and
make a clean start.”
The idea of dropping off tablets outside of the context of schools is
a new paradigm for OLPC. Through the late 2000s, the company was
focused on delivering a custom miniaturized and ruggedized laptop, the
XO, of which about 3 million have been distributed to kids in 40
countries. Deployments went to schools including ones in Peru (see
“Una Laptop por Nino”). Giving computers directly to poor kids without
any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes.
“What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t
go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we give them tool to read anD learn
—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all
that?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU
ONE SMARTPHONE per CHILD (cont.)
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/429206/emtech-preview-another-way-to-think-about-learning/
Another Way to Think about Learning
by Nicholas Negroponte / September 13, 2012
Seymour Papert, a computer scientist and pioneer in artificial
intelligence, once said: “You cannot think about thinking unless you
think about thinking about something.” Does this apply to learning?
Maybe not. Here is what I mean. As we industrialized learning and
created schools, we needed to measure the system’s efficacy and each
child’s progress. What you really want to measure is curiosity,
imagination, passion, creativity, and the ability to see things from
multiple points of view. But these are hard to measure other than one
on one, and even then, the assessment will be subjective. So instead,
we measure what a child knows, and from that we infer that the child
has learned how to learn. This is the real aspiration we have for our
children: learning learning.
I believe that we get into trouble when knowing becomes a surrogate
for learning. We know that a vast recall of facts about something is
in no way a measure of understanding them. At best, it is necessary
but not sufficient. And yet we subject our kids to memorizing. We seem
to believe that rote learning is akin to physical exercise, good for
their minds. And, quite conveniently, we can test whether the facts
stuck, like spaghetti to a wall. In some cases knowledge is so drilled
in that you know and hate a subject at the same time. The closest I
have ever come to thinking about thinking is writing computer
programs. This involves teasing apart a process into constituent
parts, step-by-step functions, and conditional statements. What is so
important about computer programs is that they (almost) never work the
first time. Since they do something (versus nothing), just not what
you wanted, you can look at the (mis)behavior to debug and change your
code. This iterative process, so common in computer programming, is
similar to learning.
The gods must be crazy
Have you watched a two-year-old use an iPad? The meteoric rise of
modern instructionism, including the misguided belief that there is a
perfect way to teach something, is alarming because of the unlimited
support it is getting from Bill Gates, Google, and my own institution,
MIT. While Khan Academy is charming and brilliantly nonprofit, Salman
Khan cannot seriously believe that he and a small number of colleagues
can produce all the material, even if we did limit our learning to
being instructed. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit association
that I founded, launched the so-called XO Laptop in 2005 with built-in
programming languages. There are 2.5 million XOs in the hand of kids
today in 40 countries, with 25 languages in use. In Uruguay, where all
400,000 kids have an XO laptop, knowing how to program is required in
schools. The same is now true in Estonia. In Ethiopia, 5,000 kids are
writing computer programs in the language Squeak. OLPC represents
about $1 billion in sales and deployment worldwide since 2005—it’s
bigger than most people think. What have we learned? We learned that
kids learn a great deal by themselves. The question is, how much?
To answer that question, we have now turned our attention to the 100
million kids worldwide who do not go to first grade. Most of them do
not go because there is no school, there are no literate adults in
their village, and there is little promise of that changing soon. My
colleagues and I have started an experiment in two such villages,
asking a simple question: can children learn how to read on their own?
To answer this question, we have delivered fully loaded tablets to two
villages in Ethiopia, one per child, with no instruction or
instructional material whatsoever. The tablets come with a solar
panel, because there is no electricity in these villages. They contain
modestly curated games, books, cartoons, movies—just to see what the
kids will play with and whether they can figure out how to use them.
We then monitor each tablet remotely, in this case by swapping SIM
cards weekly (through a process affectionately known as sneakernet).
Within minutes of arrival, the tablets were unboxed and turned on by
the kids themselves. After the first week, on average, 47 apps were
used per day. After week two, the kids were playing games to race each
other in saying the ABCs. Will this lead to deep reading? The votes
are still out. But if a child can learn to read, he or she can read to
learn. If these kids are reading at, say, a third-grade level in 18
months, that would be transformational. Whether this can happen has
yet to be proved. But not only will the results tell us how to reach
the rest of the 100 million kids much faster than we can by building
schools and training teachers, they should also tell us a great deal
about learning in the developed world. If kids in Ethiopia learn to
read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City
who do not learn even with school? The message will be very simple:
children can learn a great deal by themselves. More than we give them
credit for. Curiosity is natural, and all kids have it unless it is
whipped out of them, often by school. Making things, discovering
things, and sharing things are keys. Having massive libraries of
explicative material like modern-day encyclopedias or textbooks is
fine. But such access may be much less significant than building a
world in which ideas are shaped, discovered, and reinvented in the
name of learning by doing and discovery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TKjfgjiQs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxMLDZN77uo
or HOW to TEACH LEARNING
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/01/one-laptop-per.php
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php
by Evan Ackerman / Oct 30, 2012
What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to
Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five
months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing
the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled
hardware.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering
technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no
education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve
traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the
last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really
not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell
"neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing
facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn
by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead,
OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is
what this experiment is all about. Rather than give out laptops
(they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running
custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project
decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes
of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no
instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you
can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like,
the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No
books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or
goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect;
there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to
zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet
computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these
people how to use them, right? But that's not what OLPC did. They just
left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid
in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-
loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards
with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used.
Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas
Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:
"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction,
no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within
four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off
switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within
five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two
weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And
within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our
organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they
figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."
This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to
see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English.
Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't
even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no
schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for
the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it
has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too,
since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their
computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is
incredibly amazing and awesome.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain
well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal
Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the
OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example
of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids
learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized
lessons and traditional teaching methods:
Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel
turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to
her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?" She nods and listens to
a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little
more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named "Rahel"
like she is and that she likes to wear blue--but for now the green
book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to
trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you trace the R?" As
she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. "Run
starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog
named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess asks, "Can you find
something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a
nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find
something big and red?"
As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole
words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks
them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the
time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and
sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her
about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and
programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle
to draw different shapes). Rahel writes her own stories about the
Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that
she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to
invent silly songs about what she's learning. An older Rahel learns
that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used
to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses
the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has
just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which
uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count.
URUGUAY
http://olpc.tv/2011/11/12/a-laptop-per-child-uruguay/
After a repressive history, Uruguay’s left-wing government is paving
the way for a new generation of digital-savvy, globalised nationals by
being the first country to give every child their own laptop. Ex-
guerilla fighter, Jose Mujica, has been in office since 2010. He has
never given up his ideals of social justice. The aim of the ambitious
‘A laptop per child’ program is to help close the divide between rich
and poor, and between developed and developing countries. Many parents
and teachers were initially sceptical; years without proper social
policies still shape life in the slums. ”I don’t want to know anything
about computers. It is a child who knows something about computers and
technology that throws bombs.” Yet despite early skepticism, the
program is now being widely embraced. “We need to educate the children
differently so that they understand the world of today.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0EP25yp9HU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxUCFbzoWvk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXgHXwm6vNk
a LESSON from NELL
http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf
Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy
by C. Scott Ananian, Chris J. Ball, Michael Stone of the One Laptop
Per Child Foundation
Abstract: Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children in
the developing world. A novel modular narrative system guides
learning, even for children far from educational infrastructure, and
provides personalized instruction which grows with the child. Nell’s
design builds on experience with the Sugar Learning Platform [17],
used by over two million children around the world.
Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel
turns on her new tablet computer. The solar-powered machine speaks to
her: “Hello! Would you like to hear a story?” She nods and listens to
a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little
more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named “Rahel”
like she is and that she likes to wear blue—but for now the green book
draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace
shapes on the screen. “R is for Run. Can you trace the R?” As she
traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. “Run
starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog
named Rover.” Rover barks: “Ruff ! Ruff !” The Princess asks, “Can you
find something Red?” and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on
a nearby bush. “Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find
something big and red?” As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not
just letters, but whole words. The book’s responses are written on the
screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn’t need to leave the
sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her
special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New
stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing
certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a
notvery-bright turtle to draw different shapes). Rahel writes her own
stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The
book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin
to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she’s learning. An
older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the
turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her
special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm
game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and
Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn
to count.
The interaction design of the Nell system described above is inspired
by the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” in the Neal Stephenson novel
The Diamond Age, from whose pro-tagonist Nell takes its name. Nell’s
design embodies four key ideas: it is a Narrative interface using
Direct Interaction which Grows with, and is Personalized for, the
child. Nell uses these four key concepts to build a novel learning
platform which addresses several challenges we’ve encountered in
earlier work.
2.1 Narrative
Children (like all humans) are hard-wired for stories [4]. In our
earlier learning software, we’ve seen some of our favorite pedagogical
activities neglected because children had difficulty finding their way
into the material without an enthusiastic teacher’s guidance. In
response, Nell uses a Narrative Interface [3, 6] to pave a path for
the child user through the learning material. In the narrative
interface, all system actions are shaped by a storybook metaphor, and
interactions with the system are framed as interactions with one of
the system protagonists. Nell’s overall story is a multi-character
serial adventure, taking cues from The Diamond Age and from the
UNIVERSE narrative-generation system [9]. Each of the several
characters represents a specific skill or subject area, and each
adventure represents about a year’s curriculum. Adventures are further
subdivided into story modules, which match the scope of a traditional
lesson plan. The serialized multi-character design improves modularity
and allows updates and decentralized authorship. Nell’s characters are
always-available agents layered above a particular system activity
(application) which provides specialized functionality. The agents are
not always foregrounded: constructionist learning occurs when the
child plays freely to “make things” with the base activity. The
handwriting tutor is fundamentally a drawing activity; the adventure
involving the magical musical lock is also a musicmaking activity. The
narrative system is hooked into each activity to provide passive
guidance (congratulating the child when it notices they’ve drawn a
letter), active guidance (Apple-Guide–style [11] contextual help), or
system services (switching activities; jumping into a related story
module). A system-wide achievement system provides goals and rewards.
2.2 Personalized
Children learn in different ways. Nell provides multiple story modules
for its plot points/lessons to engage the child’s interests and cater
to multiple intelligences [8]. Selecting between the alternatives can
depend on either explicit choices made by the child (“fractions in
outer space,” if the child chose a space-themed story or previously
indicated an interest in space) or prior success with a given lesson
style (a large number of accomplishments in musical-rhythmic tasks
suggests a rhythmic approach to fractions). Similarly, several
different achievements can coexist, rewarding different ways of
accomplishing the same pedagogical goal. The record of past choices
and accomplishments is stored in a Journal and can be reviewed by the
child. The contents of the Journal can be rearranged to create a
Portfolio [16] demonstrating the child’s progress. In order to
encourage fearless play and experimentation, the Journal also supports
pervasive undo; the child can rewind and replay the narrative starting
at any past point in the journal. Content can be remixed for further
personalization. The child is encouraged to rename characters and
change clothing, colors, and other superficial details. In the future
we expect to accomplish further narrative customization by
recombination of story elements. Lebowitz [9] and Riedl [13] show how
a planner can be used to recombine and adapt story fragments. We have
less ambition than the cited work: instead of attempting to generate
thousands of stories from tens of templates, we hope to select and
then modestly adapt from hundreds of story modules created in a
decentralized manner by teachers—and eventually by the students
themselves.
2.3 Growable
Children grow. Nell aims to provide a “low floor and no ceiling” to
grow with them, along three main axes.
First, Nell tracks the child’s growing intelligence and capability
with increasingly challenging story material. As the child accumulates
achievements and demonstrates proficiency, the serial story moves on to
more advanced topics. Second, Nell seeks to grow its authoring
community. Decentralized authorship ensures that Nell’s instructional
content continues to increase in the number of topics and
customizations. There are no ceilings between children and teachers:
Nell contains a story editor and everything necessary to author and
publish story modules. To further promote collaboration, Nell is free
and open source and implemented in standard web technologies
(JavaScript, HTML5, and WebGL) with offline caching. Resources are named
by URL, even when disconnected from the internet, which simplifies the
distribution of updates to story modules and the Nell system. URL-
based identifiers also allow third parties to manage their own
namespaces when extending Nell. Finally, Nell is designed to allow a
capable child to learn about the construction of the system itself,
eliminating the ceiling between the child and the authors of the Nell
system. Nell can teach about itself, and its source code is open for
exploration within Nell. Meaningful changes can be performed without
external tools.
2.4 Direct interaction
The constructionist learning philosophy emphasizes creation and
tangible interaction. Nell uses direct interaction on a tablet
computer to maintain the child’s connection to their work (Figure 1).
In particular, Nell uses handwriting recognition as a primary
interface. The direct interaction model lowers the floor by eliminating
the need to learn an abstract touchpad or mouse interface. It also
supports our literacy goals by allowing direct handwriting instruction
and development of motor skills.
Technology
Our implementation choices further our goals of modularity and
decentralization. In this section we describe the technologies that
enable Nell’s four key ideas. New story modules can be downloaded from
the Internet in connected deployments. In disconnected deployments,
new stories might be distributed once a year on USB sticks or shared
among friends. In a classroom environment, a teacher can share stories
for the day’s lesson at the start of class. Story modules can be
inherited and extended. This makes it easy to take an existing story
and modify it to better suit particular interests, a particular type
of learner—or just to add variety. This can lead to conflicts: multiple
versions of a story, or scenes within a story, may have their
preconditions satisfied simultaneously. Conflicts are resolved by
consulting a group associated with each scene. Each group has a
default priority and names a scene to be invoked when a conflict
exists; the actions associated with that scene will (eventually) alter
the priorities of the conflicting scenes to resolve the conflict. The
resolution scene may include any number of actions. It may select
randomly among the conflicting scenes or base its selection on the
child’s preferences, curriculum progress, or inferred learning style.
The resolution scene may even initiate a new multi-scene story. For
example, the story-intro-group used in Figure 2 defaults to a low
priority so that continuing a story in progress is preferred above
starting a new story. When a story module is completed, several new
story openings will be in conflict.
3.2 Extensible dialog
Nell’s use as an interactive diary and portfolio [16] is enhanced by
the child’s collaboration in the fiction that Nell is intelligent—what
Turkle [18] calls the “ELIZA effect.” Convincing discourse is a hard
problem, but reasonable approximations do not have to be difficult; even
the rudimentary conversational abilities of ELIZA elicited hours of
conversation.We’ve chosen to allow the child to directly converse with
the Princess and other agents within Nell. Our implementation extends
AIML [1], the markup language developed for the Loebner Prize–winning
AliceBot. Each story module can include AIML fragments extending the
conversational capabilities of Nell’s agents. Figure 3 shows an AIML
fragment augmenting an agent with commands suitable for a text
adventure story module. In such a story the child might write
instructions such as go north, go east, or open door in addition to
the usual dialog with the agent. These new commands fire events which
are referenced by scene preconditions. For example, north may trigger
a scene which causes the activity to draw a new location on the page,
causes the agent to write and speak a description of the new location,
and finally causes a shift in the AIML topic to enable additional
vocabulary suitable for the new location.
Conclusions
We have described the design of a novel narrative directinterface
system for education, starting with literacy, which is personalized
for and grows with its child owner. Personalized direct interface
engages the child, and narrative guides them through pedagogic
material. Low-cost solarpowered hardware allows Nell to reach further
into the leastdeveloped areas of the world to help those without
traditional educational infrastructure.
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[18] S. Turkle. Alone Together: Why We Expect MoreFrom Technology and
Less From Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.
[19] B. Wilcox. Beyond Fa¸cade: Pattern matching for natural language
applications. http://chatscript.sourceforge.net/Documentation/Pattern_Matching_for_Natural_Language_Applications.pdf,
Feb. 2011.
SEE ALSO: EMPTY LOT, OCEAN VIEW
http://spectrevision.net/2010/06/24/charter-cities/
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