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.

Steps reunion

How often do you see teachers giving up their precious weekends to spend time learning more about their work? Not often, because most teachers spend what little free time they have marking, preparing lesson plans and generally trying to catch their breath. And yet this weekend I was very privileged to take part in a weekend away with teachers from Saltash.net Community School at the Engage and Inspire staff development event in Bedruthan Steps Hotel, near Newquay.  The hotel plays host to the event every year, and I recall with fondness being invited last year by Dan Roberts (aka @chickensaltash) to keynote the event alongside the likes of  Sugata Mitra. Well, Dan Roberts has moved on to warmer climes, but the campaign to aspire to better pedagogy continues. Saltash.net is a remarkable school and quite unique in the ways it harnesses technology to engage and inspire. That is one reason why Microsoft has decided to sponsor the Bedruthan Steps event time after time. This year at the Steps the invited speakers included Stephen Heppell and Steve Bunce, both of whom challenged their audiences to reach further using technology to inspire and engage learners. And what an inspirational weekend it turned out to be.

Stephen Heppell, in his inimitable way showed his audience a range of innovative new ways to engage learners in school, including shoeless education, olfactory schools, sound scapes, mirror walls and 100 faces.  Stephen talked about how mood lighting can psychologically influence learning. Provide red lighting in the morning, and it wakes students up, whilst blue lighting after lunch has a calming influence. Just changing the positioning of chairs can have a positive influence on how the students respond, he said, while converting tabletops to whiteboard drawing surfaces can raise the levels of creativity in the room. Many of Stephen's ideas don't rely heavily on technology, and we were warned that technology on its own does not solve problems, but he did suggest that where technology is involved, everything goes exponential, especially the quality of learning. Many of Stephen Heppell's tried and tested ideas have been shown to transform the learning experience in a variety of different cultural contexts in countries around the world.

A session led by James Edwards (Saltash School) and Ray Chambers (Lodge Park School, Corby) exposed the many ways in which games based learning can be harnessed in secondary education. The session became a dynamic workshop where teachers were given the opportunity to try for themselves some of the non-touch, natural gesture driven tools powered by the X-Box 360 Kinect.

The session by Steve Bunce was focused on challenge and mission, and involved the teachers splitting up into several teams as they tackled all the activities they were given to complete. One mission involved the teams trying to recreate and capture a famous movie scene and a scene from history using modelling clay, tiny figurines and anything else they could get their hands on. Links to several stop-go motion movies and digital images soon began to appear on the #saltash12 twitter stream as teachers shared their fun. Another task was to create a 1-1 scale map of a beauty spot somewhere within the spectacular surroundings of the cliffside hotel grounds. Many of the missions and tasks were taken from the Mission Explore collection of learning resources.

It was great to see teachers leaving the event enthused and inspired, armed with innovative new ideas to try out to see how far they could go in enhancing and enriching their students' learning experiences. I don't think there was a single teacher who regretted going the extra mile and spending their weekend learning a little more about how to be an inspirational teacher. Thank you Saltash.net for inviting me to share your experience this weekend.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Steps reunion by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

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.

Broadband is a human right

The 2011 ALT-C Conference is being held at the University of Leeds on a campus that is as convoluted as the maze of arguments and discussions we are enjoying. This year's event is co-chaired by John Cook and Sugata Mitra, and the programme and as always, is packed with far too many choices, you are bound to miss something you would really like to see. Too much choice is not the only problem we have to face. Just trying to navigate your way around the Leeds campus to find the rooms can be difficult, and there is a lot of walking around outside, up and down many steps and slopes.  The intermittent rain showers don't help either, but as they keep telling me - it's grim up north. Finding your choice of sessions then, certainly requires stamina and tenacity. And we will need these in equal measure throughout the conference, because all of the sessions I have attended so far have sought to go beyond the run-of-the-mill conference papers of old, to challenge preconceptions, problematise old knowledge and generally rattle a few cages along the way.... of which more in later posts from ALT-C 2011.

Miguel Brechner's keynote this morning focused on the CEIBAL one-laptop-per-child project in the schools of Uruguay. Uruguay is only a small South American country, about the size of Wales, and with a small population, and in the past it has not been particularly well known for its educational achievements. But today the spotlight was well and truly on Uruguay. In a gently humourous style, and laced with football analogies (he delighted in reminded his audience that Uruguay had once beaten Brazil to win the Soccer World Cup), Miguel Brechner demonstrated how giving a free laptop to each child has liberated them to learn in their own way and in their own time. Children now really want to go to school he said, and are upset if they miss even a day. He showed how the education landscape has been changed in Uruguay, and how social equality is being achieved among the youth of his country. Clearly very passionate about his cause, Brechner argued that not only is access to broadband absolutely essential for education, in today's connected world, it should also be considered a human right. While many of us had heard these mantras before, given that Negroponte's vision has been in existence for well over a decade, we were all nevertheless impressed by the manner in which this project had been implemented, in humility, with a great sense of purpose and with an eye on the future for Uruguay's youth. 


In some ways, OLPC could be said to run counter to the ideals of Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall Project. OLPC is very focused on solo learning, where each child uses his laptop in his own way, and is more or less autonomous, against the Hole in the Wall project where learners work together around a social space which involves a single computer. The minimally invasive education of Mitra's work, when measured against the individualised and personalised learning approach of OLPC leaves a lot of questions open. What is the best way for children to learn? With a communal technology that forces social contact, or with individual technologies where social contact is optional? This has indeed been the subject of discussion throughout the day during the breaks. It would be good to get Sugata Mitra (who is here on Thursday) and Miguel Brechner together to debate this, to hear their respective arguments.


Broadband is a human right 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.

Engage and inspire

I don't normally enjoy working over a weekend, but I'm looking forward to this one. Saltash.Net School, one of the premier technology early adopter schools in the United Kingdom is holding its annual staff conference down on the north coast of Cornwall this Friday and Saturday, and its Deputy Head Dan Roberts, has managed to get hold of some exceptional speakers for the event. Both 'slum-dog Professor' Sugata Mitra and Afghanistan war hero and double amputee Ben McBean will give keynote speeches on Friday evening, after which there will be a question and answer session, with invited panellists Stuart Ball (Microsoft Education), the blogger and journalist Merlin John, and yours truly.

The following morning, it will be my turn to speak, and I will be providing a keynote entitled: 'Teachers and Technology: The Big Picture' in which I will talk about how teachers can harness the power of new and emerging technology to inspire and engage learners. I will post my slides up on my Slideshare site after the presentation. There will be workshops later in the day led by Dan Roberts and Stuart Ball on how to use Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning, and the entire event will be searchable under the Twitter stream #saltash11. Much of the conference will also be live streamed at this site. Here is the list of people attending the conference. I'm looking foward to it.

Image source

Engage and inspire 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.

Image source

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

Summit to look forward to

I'm flying off to Barcelona in a few weeks - I have been invited to attend the Open EduTech Summit at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya by Professor Albert Sangra, whom I last met when we both presented keynote speeches at the Polish Virtual Universities Conference in Warsaw, back in June. UoC have booked me in for three nights at the Hotel Catedral, 5 minutes from las Ramblas and the Cathedral, Gaudie's unfinished masterpiece. I'm going to be talking about best practice in Web 2.0 for education at the event - the blurb runs like this:

"A small group of around 30 open, educational and technology experts will get together to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments. The meeting’s main objective is to build a community by bridging communities (technology, pedagogy, policy) and provide an opportunity for collective collaboration. Some of the sessions will be videotaped and shared with the community. The Open EdTech meeting will also generate a white paper that targets the big challenges discussed during the meeting. The Open EdTech meeting aims to become an annual meeting, hosted by one the meeting’s participants, to ensure that continuity is brought to the discussions".

These are lofty ambitions indeed, and I feel flattered to have been invited to attend as one of the 35 or so e-learning 'experts'. A look down the list of others invited reveals some very big names, and then there is little old me in amongst them, feeling like a chihuahua in with all the Rottweilers. It will be interesting rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sugata Mitra (Newcastle University), Neil Selwyn (University of London), Mark Bullen (British Columbia), and Vijay Kumar (MIT) and I am certain I will learn a lot from them. These blog pages will be the first to know...