Generation YES Blog

The other day I blogged about “Gizmo High” - a teacher’s opinion piece of how technology was forced on his school to the detriment of learning. As I read some of the reaction to the story and to my blog, I realized that I wasn’t clear about what the point of my post was. I “buried the lead” as they warn beginning journalists not to do. In fact, I buried it so deep it was completely missing.

So here’s my point. Forcing technology on a school won’t work and will likely result in resistance and resentment. To match that mistake, teachers, the community, and even students can resist change simply because it’s different. There are so many ways for technology integration to go wrong, and this story simply illustrated one of them.

So where’s the magic balance? What’s the secret of success? I thought a lot about it and have a theory to throw out here in the form of a chart.

• The horizontal axis represents collaboration and goes from the most authoritarian system (one person or group has complete say in what happens) to maximum consensus.
• The vertical axis represents control - by which I mean steering towards a vision, sort of like having a rudder. It goes from the bottom, where there is absolutely no vision about what to do to the top where someone (or a group) has a perfectly formed vision of the future.

I’ve labeled the quadrants with what I think happens with these combinations.

1. Resistance, resentment (top left) - this is where Gizmo High falls. Somebody with an extreme vision forced it on everyone else. That vision was something like “the one with the most goodies wins.”
2. Successful change (top right) - where everyone would like to be. The perfect storm of a shared, guiding vision and just enough process and consensus building to get everyone on board as it happens.
3. Paralysis (bottom right) - When there is so much consensus building going on that nothing of significance ever happens, it means that the vision is missing. The engine is running but there’s no one at the rudder.
4. Status quo (bottom left) - There’s not even a vision of change and there are plenty of people who feel passionate about keeping things just as they are.

Successful change is more than just gaining consensus from the participants about “what they want” without first establishing a vision of change. People can’t choose a future they’ve never seen before. Many times I think technology integration is considered successful if the teachers “feel comfortable” with the technology. Often this means that they are using technology to do the same old things with new gizmos.

So where does the vision look like? I can’t tell you — that’s exactly the point. My solution wouldn’t work for you, because that’s just a recipe for a “Quadrant 1″ style Gizmo High disaster. No one can come in and tell you what your vision of the future should be; you can’t follow someone else’s dream.

But you can stand on the shoulders of giants. One place I find my inspiration is by reading great thinkers about education like Dr. Seymour Papert. He painted a picture in the very early days of computers of how students could program computers, instead of computers programming children. He worked to create a programming language for children that would directly connect to math in a natural way. This language is still in use in schools around the world today and is the backbone of new ones like MicroWorlds and Scratch. His constructivist theories of how students learn are the basis of the One Laptop Per Child Initiative.

But don’t take my word for it. Read him, read others, and find your own.

Sylvia

David Crossland writes a nice post on the Understanding Limited blog with links to many, many resources and blogs (including my OLPC XO - Top Ten Checklist for G1G1 Reviews post) for people who have an XO. It’s a great reasource, even if you are just a fan of the project.  He includes the must read XO community-news mailing list,  cheat codes» for booting the XO in special ways, a discussion of why it doesn’t ship with Flash, and much more.

Sylvia

Many recipients of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Give One, Get One (G1G1) program in the US and Canada are starting to receive their XO laptops. This means people are starting to join forums and write about their experiences. That’s all terrific, but it’s important to remember that the intended 3rd world audience is very different than the lives of most of the G1G1 users. Here’s my public service attempt to create a reminder checklist for potential XO reviewers.

After the checklist, please enjoy my nomination for The Worst XO Review Ever…

G1G1 XO Top Ten Pre-Review Checklist

1. You aren’t the customer. Remember who this is made for. It’s not you, or even the child you hand it to to “try out.” Check the OLPC Wiki for some of the reports from the field. Try to remember that you and most likely your child have pre-conceived notions and advantages that you don’t realize. You are like a fish trying to ignore water.

2. Keep the stage of the project in mind. Are you used to being on the bleeding edge? Do you download alpha applications and help the developers track bugs? Do you “get under the hood” of your operating system or do any programming? Have you ever participated in an open source community or even edited Wikipedia? If that’s not your typical MO, take a second look before you complain about bugs, features that haven’t been implemented, or features that you think are essential. It’s going to crash, it’s going to have bugs, and you will probably have to do some detective work to figure things out, including how to keep it up to date. Having to go to terminal mode is not a failure of the design; for best results, think of it like a new adventure.

3. It’s not a “cheap” version of your laptop. Low cost was a design driver for the XO, but not the only one. Cheap is expensive if the laptop breaks in harsh conditions.

4. The collaboration features will seem broken and lackluster. It’s like playing volleyball by yourself - don’t be surprised if the ball doesn’t jump back over the net by itself. It doesn’t mean your ball is broken or the game of volleyball is poorly designed. The answer is that it’s not really volleyball without the rest of the team. In your case, the XO may seem as useful as half a zipper without a local community of users.

5. The operating system (OS) is young. The Sugar OS is a custom design that has different goals than Mac, Windows, or even Linux. Sugar was created to support a collaborative, constructive educational environment AND 3rd world conditions AND unique hardware. Decisions were made that may seem odd to you, but potentially make a lot of sense in that context. The OS will evolve. See this Tom Hoffman post for more details.

6. Your in-home wireless network with a fat pipe Internet connection is an anomaly. Let’s not start whining that you can’t stream episodes of The Office.

7. Your customer support is not a priority. OLPC created the G1G1 opportunity for a limited time with no plans to go into the business of shipping to and supporting individual American customers. If you want great tracking and toll-free support phone lines, call Amazon. It was clear from the G1G1 website that these computers came with NO TECH SUPPORT. I don’t want OLPC to waste their money hiring people to track packages, I would rather that money went to improve delivery to kids in the developing world. Of course you should get what you paid for. But look, if I pledge my local PBS station and get a coffee cup, I don’t expect perfect shipping and tracking either. You got your tax deduction and a cool invention. Enjoy them.

8. Your child is not the intended audience either. Giving the XO to your child and watching them struggle through the interface and applications does not “prove” that the laptop was poorly designed or that the constructivist philosophy of learning is a failure. The XO was built for children in a group, using it day in and day out at home and school, hopefully with adults around who can help guide them in educational pursuits. The concept of “neighborhood” is not a metaphor. Imagine kids sitting next to you, looking at what you do and saying, “hey, that’s cool, how did you do that?” The primary collaboration happens around the computer, not through the computer. It also happens because the use is expected and ubiquitous, not something squeezed in for 15 minutes on a Thursday night between homework, ballet and soccer practice. Your child’s XO experience will likely be lonely and frustrating. However, I predict a handful of kids will take to it like a duck to water. If you have one of these, say hello to your future programmer.

9. The mesh network is trying to do things you don’t need. The innovative mesh networking allows the XO computers to collaborate even when there is no Internet connection, or to share a single connection with others. In your home, it’s primarily going to suck your battery dry. As I used to say a lot when I was a programmer, “it’s a feature, not a bug!”

10. Last but not least - you and 150,000 other people did an amazing, generous thing and should be congratulated. The G1G1 program sent 150,000 laptops (Laptop Magazine) to homes in the US and Canada. People paid double to get an untested invention with no promise of any kind of support. As a direct result of this, 150,000 more children around the world got an XO laptop. My checklist may seem overly negative, but it’s only because I’m reacting to some early reports and anticipating others. The conversation around the XO is enhanced by all of our participation, but I hope people give it a fair shake and remember the true purpose of the XO. It’s going to take some time and some pain. It’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. I hope some of you get inspired to get into the guts of the thing and have some of the fun I used to have in the 70’s building computer kits and programming in octal. It’s the best!

And now, for your enjoyment, the worst XO review ever…

This review from The Economist, One Clunky Laptop Per Child would be laughable if it weren’t being read by “a global audience of senior business, political and financial decision-makers.” Surrounded by ads for first class travel, the article predictably complains about the difficulty of installing Flash to watch YouTube videos and not getting minute by minute shipping status on the package.

The “keys are too small” and don’t feel right. After using it an entire week, the writer experienced “occasional crashes.” And horror of horrors, “A discreet message sometimes flashes when the system boots up, warning of some sort of data-check error.”

The fact that XO has generated competition from other computer manufacturers who have suddenly woken up to the low cost laptop market is listed as a problem. And even stranger, the “hubris” of OLPC developers is mentioned. I guess OLPC developers aren’t supposed to be proud of their innovations or defend their decisions. What silliness.

My parting shot…

The Economist Looks At OLPC XO

Illustration: The Modern Living Room by Humphrey Weston. (slightly altered)

Sylvia

John Dvorak (PC Magazine) recently wrote a column called One Laptop per Child Doesn’t Change the World. He asked, “Does anyone but me see the OLPC XO-1 as an insulting “let them eat cake” sort of message to the world’s poor?” He goes on to belittle the computer, calling it “cute” and after citing hunger statistics, drops his sarcastic solution.

“So what to do? Let’s give these kids these little green computers. That will do it! That will solve the poverty problem and everything else, for that matter.”

Well, yes, actually, that’s the point. Maybe it will solve the poverty problem and everything else.

The developed world has tried all sorts of interventions to help developing countries, and from what I can see, most have ended up in failure. Our skewed ideas about how to help have historically ended up with many good intentions gone awry, mired in corruption, or worse.

So how about we give the developing world the gift of the most powerful intellectual tool ever invented. Then, here’s an idea, we let them solve some of their own problems and stop blaming them for being poor. And how about we use a different distribution method than the usual aid.

Using children as the focal point for change is an innovative (and controversial) aspect of OLPC. Some detractors have ridiculed this as meaning that teachers aren’t important or necessary. Yet this is far from true. It’s simply not an either/or situation. In my recent post, The Hole in the Wall, I discussed that fact that there is ample evidence that children figure out how to use computer technology, even without instruction. Years of research also showed that although adults did not need to participate in order for the kids to learn, having caring adults around amplified the impact.

So is the XO project just more imperialist nonsense about encouraging people to pull themselves up with their own bootstraps when they have no boots? No, and the facts are beginning to come in from the pilot projects to prove it.

Consider this Peruvian XO pilot project in Arahuay, a poor, rural town in the Andes. This project was profiled in the Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2007 In Peru, a pint-size ticket to learning. The monthly income for most villagers is less than the cost of one laptop.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the workweek in fields many hours’ walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished. When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

So did these people sell the XO laptops for food? No. Were they stolen? No. Were the children confused by Slashdot and entangled in email scams (as John Dvorak suggests)? No.

At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library/videocamera/audio recorder/musicmaker/drawing kits. At night, they’re dozing off in front of them — if they’ve managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant. Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer. Kevin, 11, wants to play trumpet. Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town’s recent Fiesta de la Virgen.

Today they are drawing pictures, tomorrow they may draw plans for an invention to make farming more productive, and then fabricate it using techniques found online. Maybe they will communicate with a rural Cambodian village that successfully built a wind-powered electrical generator and build one for themselves. One day not far in the future, a ten year old might save his mother’s life with medical information found online. Today Saida is making a video about her village, tomorrow she could be running for public office using video to communicate her message.

Should we helicopter in a few more bags of rice instead?

What these kids are doing is building intellectual prowess that might lift their village out of the unending cycle of rural poverty that is destroying their families and their future. They are seeing a world of opportunity, information and solutions. Maybe, just maybe, this IS the catalyst they need to solve the problems they consider most important, most likely in ways that we could never imagine.

These kids are smart, creative and in the understatement of the century, have a world of authentic problems to solve. Plus, there are caring adults who could help if given the chance. The least the “developed world” can do is give kids, their parents, and teachers access to the most powerful intellectual amplifier ever invented - the computer, and a connection to the world of information and expertise.

And then get out of their way.

Sylvia

PS If you read Spanish, check out this story about the OLPC pilot in Arahuay - Reportaje NAPA 26: OLPC, laptops en Arahuay. There is a great video about the laptops coming to the village, and even if you don’t understand the narration, the pride on the kids’ (and parents’) faces says it all. All the stills in this blog post are clipped from that video.

I got my G1G1 XO laptop before Xmas but haven’t had much time to do much. Holidays and all!

Today I decided to get more serious. A while back, Tom Hoffman posted about creating a new network so XO users could chat, called XOchat.org. The XO is initially set up to find nearby XOs so you can chat with nearby folks, but there’s nobody here on my block! (The post says not to share this, but later he said it was OK.)

My networks helped me out. I read Tom’s post, and another post on the OLPC News forum. Then my Twitter* network stepped up. Andy Schmitz and Thomas Han were online and wanted to check out XOchat.org too. So we got online and Andy helped us get to the right place. It took a few minutes and voila! tons of new friends.

It needs to be said that I don’t really “know” either Thomas or Andy, they just happened to be on Twitter when I needed them. And as I later wrote this post, I discovered that Andy is a senior in high school, and Thomas works for Apple. Who knew!

Once I redirected the XO to look for XOchat.org as the “Jabber” server, it took a few minutes for my view of my Neighborhood to change from this:

to this:

I chatted with several folks, found out about some known bugs that will be fixed in the next release, and made some new friends. And I created this blog post.

By the way, today is the LAST DAY to get your own XO through the G1G1 program. C’mon, you know you want to!

* If you are wondering what Twitter is - it’s a place where you can chat with people - you decide who you talk to (you “follow” them), but what you say is open to those who choose to follow you. I’ve spent the last 3 months building up a network, and it’s both fun and handy. Today it was indispensible.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the organization behind the global project to put laptops in children’s hands has launched a “give one, get one” (G1G1) program that will allow residents of the U.S. and Canada to purchase two laptops for $399.

G1G1 website - Takes credit card or PayPal

I’ve written previously about the OLPC and what it can mean for education. This is an opportunity to be part of that mission.

One laptop will be sent to the buyer and a child in the developing world will receive the second machine. G1G1 will offer the laptops for just two weeks, starting today, November 12. Delivery is not guranteed by the holidays, as originally promised, but the website suggests ordering ASAP as these orders will be filled first.

$200 of your donation is tax-deductible (the $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will receive.)

For all U.S. donors who participate in the Give One Get One program, T-Mobile is offering one year of complimentary HotSpot access. (This alone is worth $350!)

The terms and conditions offer an additional insight into OLPC - this is not a “product”, instead, the purchase will be an entry into the worldwide community of OLPC users.

“Neither OLPC Foundation nor One Laptop per Child, Inc. has service facilities, a help desk or maintenance personnel in the United States or Canada. Although we believe you will love your XO laptop, you should understand that it is not a commercially available product and, if you want help using it, you will have to seek it from friends, family, and bloggers. One goal of the G1G1 initiative is to create an informal network of XO laptop users in the developed world, who will provide feedback about the utility of the XO laptop as an educational tool for children, participate in the worldwide effort to create open-source educational applications for the XO laptop, and serve as a resource for those in the developing world who seek to optimize the value of the XO laptop as an educational tool. A fee based tech support service will be available to all who desire it. We urge participants in the G1G1 initiative to think of themselves as members of an international educational movement rather than as “customers.”

I just ordered one - and I’m looking forward to opening the box and becoming part of an international educational movement with the potential of changing the world.

Seems pretty reasonable for that!

Sylvia

At the entrance, there was a black dog taking a rest. Beside the dog was Rajiv, in first standard, working on his XO while it was charging, plugged to the outlet on the wall. At the foot of the wall, on a long mat, there were some XOs, being charged.

On the other side of the door, sitting on long, thin mats on the floor, there was a small group of girls and boys working on eToys. Some were trying out all the sample projects while others were making their own. Among them were Gayatri and Sarasvati, two girls, in third standard, who usually go around the classroom helping others.

So starts a long diary entry on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) blog from Khairat school, one of the OLPC test sites in India, covering September 26 – October 13, 2007. The report includes copious details about how the pilot implementation is going at the school, including the teacher preparation, parent and community reaction, and lots of anecdotes that provide a well-rounded story.

Almost immediately, the laptops start to create a different kind of classroom, one where the teacher is still the leader, but students naturally collaborate while learning.

Although the teacher conducts the activities and is the leader and most knowledgeable one in the room, there reigns an atmosphere of independent work and independent grouping and consultations. The smaller ones are natural scouts and keep on exploring the laptops on their own, and when they find something interesting or need some help, they go to others to show them their findings or be helped out.

Parents and the community pitch in and help, and the teacher starts to teach differently too, using project-based teaching to unify the curriculum. The teacher says that his relationship with the children is closer, in the sense that they are exploring the XO laptop together.

The diary is well worth reading, not just as a chronicle of what is happening in one pilot site, but a verification that these machines could indeed change lives, and change the world.

Sylvia

When I joined the group of educators in Second Life called the CAVE (see previous post) I promised myself I would do two things: 1) approach Second Life with an open mind and 2) write about it along the way.

I have written about it to some extent (another previous post, My First Second Life Lesson), but it still feels like I have a long way to go. The last dozen times I’ve been there it’s been a very frustrating technical experience (freezes, crashes) and very little real time to do anything interesting. Even when it works, it still feels like a place that is looking for a use in education, or just reminds me of the dozens of other places I’ve hung out at in my long life online, like Tapped In or various text-based virtual worlds.

My thinking has somewhat crystallized around 3 topics:

• Second Life as a place for professional development (vs. professional collegiality)
• Second Life as a place for learning with K-12 students (have to save for next time!)
• Second Life as a platform in general (another next time!)

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. It’s both too long and too short. Too long for a blog, too short for real insight. It’s a work in progress, and I only really got to one of my intended three topics. so please forgive me!

And finally, to gain any REAL insight and perspective, I needed to re-read more seminal works in this area. I’m still working my way through some and I’ve written about them at the end of this post. It’s easy to get carried away with small technological advances, and think about Second Life (or any currently available 3D virtual world) in a vacuum. But why not stand on the shoulders of giants? So if you want to skip my musings in this much too long blog post, jump down to the end and read some of the people who really count in this field!

Professional development vs. professional collegiality
It’s been fun having nice chats with educators in Second Life, some random, some planned. I can really see the need for educators, who are a traditionally isolated profession, to bond in new ways with other like-minded individuals. Like many conferences, I’ve found that simple conversations and random meetings with new people are more interesting than the formal events. This is more about collegiality than professional development. Also like many conferences, the format of formal events is even much more instructionist than in real life, simply because of the limits of the interface. Sitting in a virtual lecture hall is hardly revolutionary, even if you do it wearing wings or a cat costume.
Isolation of professional development from professional practice
Professional development, in my opinion, has to have a component that links back to your actual place of professional practice, and for most teachers, this is a classroom. Lectures alone cannot be professional development, even in real life. Professional development to me has to include professional practice, and unless you are learning to teach in Second Life, it seems like a distancing element, rather than one that enhances professional practice for a classroom teacher.

For K-12 educators especially, Second Life constrains any educator/student relationship because of the age regulations. The forced separation of teachers and students, except for isolated instances, creates an experience that is further distant from the teacher’s own classroom. For professional development to be ultimately successful, I think that it has to re-integrate at some point with the teacher’s actual professional environment, which is the classroom. Second Life offers a dead-end in that regard. (I’m planning to write more about the age separation issues later!)

Collegiality - it’s a good thing!
I think Second Life used as a professional collegial environment is terrific, but similar to other such environments such as Tapped In–in other words, not terrible, but hardly revolutionary. I know, I know, there are people who love it and have learned a lot. You can certainly learn through collegial interaction with other professionals, and really, there should be a lot more opportunities for teachers to do that. But counting on Second Life as a platform for more than just voluntary, informal collegial interaction seems premature at best.

Some people are going to be taken with the fun of flying around or visiting virtual museums, but many more are going to be put off by the “bleeding edge” aspect of constant freezes, crashes, high bandwidth demands, and the difficulty of simply moving your avatar around. At this point, I think the constraints of the platform overwhelm any advantage as a reliable professional development environment for educators.

In addition, what early adopters of any new technology often fail to realize is that the things that hook them about new technology are exactly the reasons the next wave of adopters will hate it. The high-risk, high learning curve, first-to-market excitement that is so attractive to early adopters is like a big red warning light to the next wave. Enthusiasm for the new new thing has a short shelf life, and most people are quite willing to wait for someone else to shake all the bugs out. So while Second Life as a professional development platform may be just the ticket to rev up the engines of early adopters, the rest of the educator population is going to look at every crash, every naked avatar that shows up in the middle of a meeting, and every interface quirk as confirmation that technology is not ready for real classrooms or worthy of their time.

The S-word
Second Life is primarily a platform for adults to explore their sexual identity. Ignoring the overtly sexual nature of Second Life is like going to a strip club and then wondering why there are naked people there. The owners of Second Life, Linden Labs, have expressed their support for education, and have discussed their intent to provide more educationally appropriate worlds. However, this is a business model that has to work for them and it’s not going to be driven by education no matter the best of intentions.

It’s perfectly fine to explore Second Life as a platform for different kinds of professional interaction, but getting married to specific features or its proprietary scripting language seems short-sighted, given that the platform will always be tuned to make more money from the primary function of the world, which is sexual in nature.

Epiphany as the ultimate educational goal
Finally, I can see that people who get deeply excited about Second Life have had a life-changing experience, a learning epiphany, that they want to evangelize. I have the feeling that it’s not a function of Second Life that they find transformative, it’s the experience of learning something that’s hard fun that clicks for them. I know that when I found programming, it did the same thing for me, and even after 30 years, I still have difficulty not yaking about programming as a transformative experience that everyone should be doing.

Learning ABOUT Second Life is different than learning IN Second Life, but the two get conflated. Learning to navigate in a new world and becoming an expert in something that very few people know about are heady experiences. The experience of learning Second Life also tends to confirm what many educators feel about learning, that learning by DOING is the way they learn and the right way to facillitate all learning, adults and children. Dusty research articles and ed-psych terms that were meaningless in grad school suddenly come to life. The excitement of learning, and of sharing that experience with others sparks ideas and interests in learning more, sharing more, and evangelizing.

Even now as I share my doubts about Second Life, I would NEVER begrudge someone else their epiphany. I hope educators who are having transformative experiences in Second Life continue to share them with others, but realize that it’s the epiphany that counts, not the vehicle. Providing multiple avenues for such learning epiphanies, for both educators and children, should be the ultimate goal, not to force others to re-experience your own personal transformative event.

Re-reading seminal works
Back when computers were first connected to each other, some of the earliest uses were text-based chats and virtual spaces where people could hang out. I’m even so old that I had access to ARPANET when I was an engineering student at UCLA. I think I’ve had the same conversation in Second Life as I did on ARPANET with teletypes chattering out one line at a time. (Where are you? What time is it there? What do you do? How’s the weather?) I think the only conversation I’ve had in SL that I’ve never had before typically starts out, “where did you get your shoes?” and I probably have enough of those in real life anyway!

People really aren’t that complicated, and it doesn’t matter if you can “see” an avatar or not. Imagination can fill in most blanks. Believe me, there were text based and 2D long-distance love affairs, people who were “addicted” to dial-up BBS worlds, spats, identity crises, crazy times, and serious discussions. There were people who could program fairy-tale lands full of unexpected surprises around every corner, using scripting languages that had no user manual and no relationship to any known programming language. It was just as fun as Second Life, really!

There were also serious researchers who took on the job of documenting this new culture like anthropologists, predicting where it would go, what impact it would have on human culture, and how it could be used for education. No serious consideration of Second Life would be complete without re-reading these works. Here are just a few I’ve been reading — I’m sure there are many more.

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit by Sherry Turkle. I took this off my bookshelf a while back and re-read it. Written in 1984 (and she worked on it for 6 years before that), this book is about identity and self in the age of the computer and specifically talks about children and computers. Even the chapter titles are timely, “Adolescence and Identity: Finding Yourself in the Machine”, “Hackers: Loving the Machine for Itself”, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”, for example. It’s tempting to try to explain the book in a few sentences or link to Dr. Turkle’s wikipedia entry (ok, here it is), but really, it’s a book you have to read for yourself. (If you buy a new copy, be sure to the the 20th anniversary reissue.)

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (table of contents and synopsis by the author) Written 10 years later, this book continues her ethnographic exploration into computer culture and human identity. This book could be written about Second Life, and has some really interesting early insights into people using virtual worlds to try on different identities, genders, and personas. (Sherry Turkle website)

Tapped-In. A virtual world for teacher professional development since 1997. Research conducted in and on Tapped In is extremely relevant for Second Life educators.

MOOSE Crossing - PhD project of Amy Bruckman. (Dissertation) This virtual world was designed specifically for children and research into Seymour Papert’s theory of constructionism within a virtual community. A terrific read!

“The central claim of this thesis is that community and construction activities are mutually reinforcing. Working within a community helps people to become better dancers/programmers/designers and better learners. Conversely, working on design and construction projects together helps to form a strong, supportive community.”

and

“In research about the Internet, too much attention is paid to its ability to provide access to information. This thesis argues that the Internet can be used not just as a conduit for information, but as a context for learning through community-supported collaborative construction. A “constructionist” approach to use of the Internet makes particularly good use of its educational potential. The Internet provides opportunities to move beyond the creation of constructionist tools and activities to the creation of “constructionist cultures.”

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology - Howard Rheingold wrote this series of essays in 1985 about the pioneers of the computer age, from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage to Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, and many more. I have a newer edition published in 2000 that contains what Howard calls a “retrospective futurism” where he re-addresses his predictions in the light of what really happened. Before I went to see Alan Kay speak at Educomm in June (that post here), I pulled out Tools for Thought and read the chapter “The Birth of the Fantasy Amplifier”. The perspective gave me a different lens with which to view Alan Kay’s speech. Even though he was talking about the One Laptop per Child global initiative and the programming language Squeak, the seeds of the “Fantasy Amplifier” concept that fueled his many contributions to this field were evident.

Seymour Papert. Even though Dr. Papert didn’t specifically focus on virtual worlds, he’s the father of educational computing and constructionism, and is a key link between everything I’ve mentioned here. I think I’m going to have to save that discussion for later, since this has gotten WAY too long! But here’s a link to some of his articles and speeches that exist online. His three books, Mindstorms (for researchers), The Children’s Machine (for teachers), and The Connected Family (for parents), are also amazing and have changed the way many people view the computer as a “tool to think with.”

Sylvia

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is an global education project that is working to make it possible for developing countries to purchase laptops for their children. OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with a core of Media Lab veterans, and is based on the pioneering work of Seymour Papert, the father of educational computing and constructionism, who has spent his life putting the power of computational technology into children’s hands.Very recently, beta laptops were delivered to children in Nigeria. This would seem to be a cause for celebration, however there has been much skepticism about the plan. It’s too complicated to go into all the arguments for and against this plan, but two of them are of particular interest to us here at Generation YES.

One objection seems to be centered around the personality of Mr. Negroponte. He’s been called “pushy” “overbearing” “self-aggrandizing” and much worse. This sounds really familiar to us. I’ve heard many of these things said about Dennis Harper and others who have a passionate belief that it is their responsibility to change the world for the better. It takes a big personality to dream up big changes, challenge the status quo, and make them happen.

The second objection is that the OLPC implementation plan is based on “magic” - that handing out laptops to children will fail because there is no implementation plan. This is of course ridiculous and silly name calling. People may not like the plan–it’s clearly revolutionary because it focuses on children, not the adults. Read more here.

The alternative plans often touted typically involve first teaching teachers how to use the laptop, giving them carefully scripted lessons to teach the children, developing educational software for them, and then carefully phasing in laptop use by actual children. (Sound familiar?)

I was recently asked to do a guest blog on the OLPC News website (not affiliated with the OLPC project.) OLPC News tries to be an “independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion” of the OLPC project. Although it skews towards skepticism, they do try to be fair overall. They asked me to share some insight on how our Generation YES experience might shed some light on the OLPC project. I did so in this guest blog post on their site.

I realized it would be a somewhat hostile audience, but it’s worth it to get the message out that Dr. Papert’s pioneering work and belief in “Kid Power” is not magic. Generation YES schools are testaments to that.

I hope I made some good points and don’t get hammered too hard in the comments!