Being Negroponte

'Learning when there is no school'

In 1995 I read a little black paperback book that changed my view on the world. The title of the book was 'Being Digital' and the author was Nicholas Negroponte. Several key elements of Negroponte's book stood out for me and challenged my thinking. Firstly, he talks of a time when all media will be transformed from atoms into bits. This premise, written in the middle of the 90s, looked forwards to a time when newspapers, movies, music, television, photography, and a host of other media would reside exclusively within the digital domain. The repercussions would be that large businesses who relied on shipping 'atoms' would go out of business, whilst those who sent bits would thrive. Negroponte is a gentleman and doesn't have the hubris to declare 'I told you so', but a quick look around at the world of business will tell you that he was right. Large photographic companies, the music industry, book and newspaper publishers, high street chain stores and even the mighty Hollywood film industry are struggling to adapt, survive or maintain their preeminence in a world where everyone has a mobile phone with a camera, downloads of e-books exceed print based sales, iTunes is the favourite method of purchasing your favourite music, movies can be streamed online, and people are migrating en masse to online stores such as Amazon. Negroponte's vision was prescient indeed, and we ignore the man's ideas at our peril.

Secondly, Being Digital featured further predictions about touch screen computers, artificial intelligence and convergent technologies such as TVs and computers combining their functionality. The entire book is crammed full of these instances, and it is not hard to see why it had such a huge impact on me and many others like me almost 20 years ago.

It was a delight and a privilege to be invited to meet Nic Negroponte over dinner in the run up to the Learning Technologies Conference. I sat and chatted with him for more than two hours as he regailed me and my co-diners with story after story of his many exploits. Negroponte established the now legendary MIT Media Lab, and was also founder of Wired Magazine. I first became aware of his work by reading his then regular column. He is well connected too. Close friend and LOGO inventor Seymour Papert married author and cyberspace researcher Sherry Turkle in the living room of Negroponte's home. Negroponte and his then wife met with Alan Turing's mother and brother, and were given all his 'baby photographs'. He worked alongside legends such as artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky and in so doing, became something of a legend himself. In his opening keynote speech at Learning Technologies, Negroponte stalked across the stage reminding his audience that it is a big mistake to assume that knowing is synonymous with learning. 'We know that a vast recall of facts is not a measure of understanding,' he declared, 'and yet we subject kids in school to constant memorising to pass tests.' His answer? What we need to do in schools, he said, was to find ways to measure curioisty, creativity, imagination and passion, as well as the ability to view things from multiple perspectives.

Negroponte is now celebrated for his high impact initiative to provide children in poor countries to access learning through laptop computers. His One Laptop Per Child project has now given children from Ramallah to Rio access to the learning they previously never had a hope of having. The total number of laptop computers distributed through the 1LPC project now exceeds 2.5 million in 40 countries, and there are many heart warming stories to be told. Children are now teaching their own parents how to read, using the laptops as tools. In Ethiopia, over 5000 children are learning to write computer programs using Squeak. Plans to begin distribution of touch screen tablets are well underway, and it won't be long before we are talking about One Tablet Per Child. All of this is run on a charity basis, and is philanthropic to the core, with supporters including the Bill Gates Foundation and Salman Kahn's Academy.

If we have learnt one thing from the 1LPC project, says Negroponte, it is that children learn a great deal on their own, with little or no help from others. This echoes the work of pioneers such as Sugata Mitra, whose 'minimally invasive education' was demonstrated by the 'Hole in the Wall' experiments. Negroponte said that Mitra is now working with him and others at MIT - they have joined forces to advance these projects further. Children have a natural curiosity, Negroponte is at pains to point out, and discovering, making and sharing things is second nature to them. We should nurture these characteristics he warns, rather than stifling it in rigid school systems.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Being Negroponte by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Have the wheels come off?

A recent article written by Audrey Watters carries the emotive headline The Failure of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and there has been some heated response. In the article, which is actually balanced and measured, Watters comments on recent media reports that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project inspired by Nicolas Negroponte does not increase test scores. She goes on to discuss the implications of this supposed failure with a nod toward the anti-Edtech brigade, whom we assume are saying 'told you so', and also in the context of other technology projects which have had reasonable success. On such project mentioned is Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall project (HITW), where computers are placed in villages and deprived areas for children to use with no evident teacher support. A comparison between the two projects is quite helpful.

When compared to Negroponte's OLPC project there are clearly some differences. Although both Negroponte and Mitra believe fervently in a 'minimally invasive education' where children are allowed to explore for themselves, OLPC is conducted largely on a 1-1 computer to child ratio. Ostensibly, this sounds sensible, and with personalised learning high on the political agenda, OLPC has been welcomed with open arms by many governments worldwide, particularly those with widespread poverty. In a real sense, OLPC has been a very real attempt at bridging the socio-economic divide. OLPC does exactly what it says on the tin - it provides one highly resilient laptop computer for each learner.

In the HITW project on the other hand, computers are almost always used by small groups of children, who together work through their exploration, negotiate their meaning and solve problems collaboratively. Perhaps this is the first important difference we need to contend with. Are children better learners when they learn on their own, or when they learn with their peers? Swiss psychologist and child development theorist Jean Piaget would have agreed with the OLPC project. The child is a solo scientist, in Piaget's terms, and this makes discovery learning a most valid approach. Learning on your own, according to Piaget was just as valid as going to school to learn communally. Russian constructivist psychologist Lev Vygotsky would have disagreed with this position, and would probably have pointed to HITW as the most effective way to learn, because in his terms, children acquire their skills through conversation, the use of language and collaborative learning - or in his terms, through the asymmetric relationships that exist within the zone of proximal development.

Notwithstanding this kind of theoretical posturing, a second point to consider is that the HITW project situates computers in communal spaces where they cannot be moved. Does this in some way also situate what is learnt, so that those gathered around it gain something extra that they would not gain from the OLPC's fairly mobile device that can be used in multiple contexts? OLPC and HITW are different, but one is not necessarily any more effective or powerful than the other.

Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, we need to consider the tests used. Are we simply to accept that the tests used by a variety of authorities to measure OLPC children's learning gain are accurate, or appropriate? Are they actually measuring what we should be measuring? As highlighted by several of the comments on the Audrey Watters blog, many are rightly sceptical. Can we (and should we) actually measure the sheer joy of discovering something new? Are we not ignoring the excitement generated by new experiences? Can we quantify how powerful this is as it generates motivation and the impetus to go on and learn more, both inside and outside of the classroom? Can we really accurately capture the many sensory experiences children enjoy when they are learning, and reduce these to a single grade or mark of overall achievement? Finally - is the measure used to gauge the contribution OLPC has made toward learning really necessary? Surely these are immeasurable, and the only reason anyone would attempt to do so, is because there is a hidden political agenda that emerges as  a measure of peformativity (i.e. school league tables). It seems a shame that much funding for innovative education projects relies on centralised government money.  One Laptop Per Child is a Herculean effort at liberating and democratising learning. It should be praised not buried.

Image by Steve Wheeler


Have the wheels come off? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

House of cards

Our first keynote speaker this morning had a very appropriate title for his talk, given the unseasonable wet weather we've been experiencing here in Brisbane. In 'Bringing the Cloud down to Earth' Nick Carr - author of The Shallows, and controversially, an article entitled "Is Google making us stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.''- raised a number of issues about technological change and agency, and tracked the history of similar innovations through history. Ironically, one of his illustrations was a picture of one of Google's data centres. Carr's declaration that Cloud computing is the most important innovation since personal computing was not challenged. 'PCs put the power of computing on your desk' he said, 'and cloud computing has put the power of a data centre in your hand'. And it's true. Businesses are in the process of seceding their data and computing resources to the care of centralised, remote services, in much the same way businesses did with their energy needs when the first big centralised power stations began to draw in their customers. By implication, education is also in the throes of surrendering its content and connections to the Cloud. Carr discussed the risks and the benefits. He convinced most of us that the benefits outweighed the risks. If we are in the mind set iof lease, buy and manage, he said, then working remains fragmented. As a disruptive technology, he promised, the Cloud will easily outstrip any previous technology and quickly take its place. Fragmented working has had it's day, and the Cloud is replacing it as companies and institutes outsource all their computing power. The Cloud is here to stay, and as Bruce Hornsby put it, 'that's just the way it is'.

The second keynote of the day came from Sir John Daniel, whom I had bumped into as he emerged, slightly confused, from the lift earlier in the day. He smiled when he recognised me, and after a few pleasantries, then asked if he was on the correct floor for the convention centre. I showed him the way, and then, in his keynote, he reciprocated by showing all of us the way. In a brilliant, erudite and critical evaluation of a number of school computer projects, he posed the question; 'Computers for Secondary School Children: A busted flush?' Daniel pointed out in his opening gambit that around 400 million children between the ages of 11-17 years have never been to secondary school, and don;t stand a chance of ever doing so. Primary school is the only mandatory schooling for many emerging nations. When secondary specialities need to be taught, they are often found to be too expensive for the state funds of most poor countries, so children past the age of 11 don't get the opportunity unless their parents can pay.

But, he asked, do initiatives aimed at trying to provide computers for such children to offer escape routes from this poverty trap actually help? Well, yes and no, was Sir John's answer. No, in the case of Nick Negroponte's One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, which was aimed at an ambitious 150 million, only 1 million have actually been distributed. Yes, in the case of 'Slum Dog Professor' Sugata Mitra's hole in the wall project. The difference between the them, said Sir John, lay in the concept and theory behind the two projects. OLPC was premised on the theory of constructivism, where the child, as a solo explorer, could use his laptop to learn independently. Mitra's project on the other hand, discovered that children actually learn best (and even teach themselves) when they are in small groups. Minimally invasive education has been shown to be better than direct instruction for promoting intellectual maturity. Thus, said Sir John, social connectivism trumps constructivism for third world child learning. Oh, and by the way a busted flush is not a leaky toilet - in a card game it's a seemingly good thing which fails to reach its full potential.

More reporting from the World Computer Congress tomorrow.

Image source

House of cards by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Speaking through the holes

At the start of Sugata Mitra's keynote today I joked on Twitter that he was about to speak through a hole in the wall. I have seen one of his previous speeches about his famous 'Hole in the Wall' projects and I know how astounding the results are. But my joke turned out to be quite apposite, because in my estimation, Professor Mitra spoke through many holes that are appearing - in the wall that we call formalised, traditional education.

It's important to grasp the significance and impact of Sugata Mitra's ongoing studies on our concept of education and how it should be conducted. Essentially, he has placed computers in the slums of India, and in remote places in other countries, and has made videos of how children interact and learn when they are left alone with the technology. He has discovered that children very quickly learn how to use the computer to search and find content, and learn from it in a self organised way. In one case he cited, he equipped a computer with voice recognition software, but only flat, unaccented English was acceptable to the machine. The children he observed, not only figured out how to learn to speak some rudimentary English using the computer, they also taught themselves how to eliminate their strong Indian accents too. In another experiment, he discovered that children could learn very complex concepts such as scientific principles, without the attentions of any qualified teacher. He warned though, that the best results were always obtained when children were gathered around the computer in groups of 4 to 6. Some of the teachers who worked with the Hole in the Wall children reported that they were increasing their test scores, and also writing in a deeper, more analytical style, as a result of their exposure to self organised learning using the computers.

Teachers were not redundant, Mitra was at pains to stress. They will need to take on different roles, he said, but the truth is this: All the answers are already out there on the Web. What it takes to enliven this is the teacher asking the right questions and the children finding and then making the connections by learning the answers. In a very endearing, humourous, slightly self deprecating style, and with lashings of great story telling, Sugata Mitra restored many delegates faith in the true place of the keynote at a conference - to inspire, provoke and entertain all at the same time. Just looking around the packed auditorium and seeing the smiles on people's faces showed that he had succeeded. Professor Mitra's work can be explored in more detail here - it includes a link to his excellent TED talk.

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Speaking through the holes by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Ich bin ein Berliner

I love Berlin, and cannot believe it has taken me so long to come back here. It is truly magical at and around Christmas time, with many of the trees in the streets lit up with lights. I am at Online Educa and have just witnessed one of the best keynotes I have ever seen. Let me attempt to encapsulate some of the content from the first session.

The first keynote was presented by Professor Sugata Mitra, seen above left, who is an Indian national who now works at the University of Newcastle. He reported on a 5 year long and ongoing project to place computers in Indian villages. He set up videocameras to record children as they interacted with the computer and each other, in what has been dubbed the Hole in the Wall project. Amazingly, he showed evidence that not only do the children teach themselves to use the computers, they also learned English as a result of their use of browsers such as Google. To cap it all, he amazed the 2000 plus delegates with the question - does language matter... and showed evidence that not only had the children learnt to speak English - they had also learned complex and difficuly concepts such as genetics, and could answer questions when prompted.

More to follow as time and space allow, but for now, goodnight from a very chilly and festive Berlin!