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.

From atoms to bits

The final keynote speech at ALT-C 2011 was given by Professor John Naughton, who read directly from his notes with his head down, and used no visual media to support his at times somewhat mumbling and occasionally difficult to hear presentation. The message however, was quite compelling. The key theme in his 'the elusive technological future' speech, was that the future has already overtaken the music, advertising and publishing worlds, because they were completely unprepared for what was coming. He summoned up the words of author William Gibson, who famously said 'the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed' to drive his argument.

In a taciturn style, Naughton cited Napster and other music sharing sites as disruptive innovations that changed our world and the way we do business. He harnessed the 'atoms and bits' argument (first offered by Nic Negroponte in his book Being Digital) as an illustration of the rapid progress of web based delivery of content, direct from the originator to the consumer. He gave evidence that the digital future has supplanted the analogue quickly, remorselessly and unexpectedly. For Naughton, Craigslist had caused a dramatic and irreversible downturn in newspaper advertising revenue, and Wikipedia was hammering the nails into the proverbial coffin of the encyclopedia industry. Whilst this was perhaps a little sweeping and dramatic, Naughton's message still resonated with his audience. The almost unspoken question was whether the digital future would soon overtake the world of education. Are teachers and lecturers prepared for the brave new world of the digital? Are we still wasting time and energy shipping atoms when we should be dealing in bits?


From atoms to bits by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

All together now...

Last week I sent out a call on Twitter for people to send me interesting education questions for me to discuss, or issues to expose. Over the next few blog posts I'm planning to respond to some of the conundrums that were sent back to me. The first question I'm going to comment on came via Craig Taylor who asked how we should address 'the disconnect between how learners are learning to learn during their formal education years and the lack of tools/opportunities.'

This is an important question for all teachers to consider, but before they can address such a disconnect, they need to be aware that the problem exists, and then acknowledge it. There is a divide for example, between the technology children have at home and what they are provided with in school. Often, for poorer families, there is no computer at home, or if there is, it is an old computer, possibly with no internet connection. Even for children who do have internet connected computers at home, there may be limited, or no access because their parents or older siblings may get first use. Children who can't access computers at home are often at a disadvantage because they can't complete all of their homework, or they have no connection to send their assignments in to their teachers via e-mail. At the other end of the spectrum are those children from more affluent families who have technology at home that is far superior to the technology provided in the school. This may not seem to be as much a problem as the first scenario, but it nevertheless causes problems for some children. Whenever I visiting school (in the UK or in other industrialised nations) I notice that the children greatly outnumber the available computers. It's common to see several children grouped around each computer, all struggling to see the screen and competing for the keyboard and mouse.

Another problem related to the above, and one that is rarely considered, is the issue of transition from Primary to Secondary education. If a child transfers from a technology rich primary school into a technology poor secondary school, where resources are limited and need to be shared with many more children, other kinds of digital divide are experienced. What are the answers to these disconnects? Are there any? Well, as always, we can learn from initiatives in other countries.

There have been attempts to address the problem of ICT provision in poor regions of the world. Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child Project for example, was meant to be an answer to the digital divide. OLPC was an admirable project, but arguably and ultimately, it was has been less successful than was predicted. The low cost laptop was designed from the top down, with little or no consultation with those who would be the end users. Those who would be the main stakeholders were not consulted. It was essentially one man's crusade against poverty. Units were shipped out in their thousands, and although some were used, a large number of laptops gathered dust because no-one knew quite what to do with them. Ultimately, with declining government support and loss of sponsorship, the OLPC project downsized and laid off staff. It could be argued that OLPC was too far ahead of its time, but more realistically, the failure of the project was probably down to a lack of consulting and a failure to plan ahead.

At the 2010 IFIP World Computer Congress in Brisbane, I heard former Vice Chancellor of the British Open University Sir John Daniel compare OLPC with another project aimed at children in poverty - Sugata Mitra's highly successful Hole in the Wall initiative. Sir John said that the OLPC project resulted to a great extent on solo learning and discovery whilst Sugata Mitra's project involved young people learning together in small groups. The social aspect alone, he suggested, led to more success in learning outcomes and a richer experience. Either project could result in learning with no teachers present. The motivation to learn however, came not from having access to a computer, but from the curiosity of discovery within a social context, leading to opportunities to explore and gain knowledge together.

Whilst neither of the above examples actually offers a solution to the digital divides we witness between school and home, they do illustrate a very important point. Children learn more successfully when they are in small groups, and they learn more when they are interested and motivated. Perhaps the lack of computers in schools is having positive outcomes. Although it's not an ideal situation, there may be a silver lining to the cloud - with 2 or 3 children grouped around each computer may come the possibilities of richer social interaction and better connected thinking.

Image source by San Jose

All together now... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.