Greer's problem

Marcia Langton has comprehensively refuted Germaine Greer analysis that aboriginal men are perpetual and hopeless victims of rage in a magnificent essay (Greer maintains rage of racists)

What is Greer's problem?

• recycling slogans from the past that are partially true but one sided, a one sided slogan based view of history, taking partial truths and presenting them as essential truths
• sloppy psychological based analysis, fitting the world to her view, not seeking the truth rigorously, not listening to those who know better, not being objective
• She uses her ideology as a blinker, not a filter. We all have ideologies but need some way to keep them in touch with objectivity
  
• lofty and grandiose pronouncement from afar, not really being on the ground or in touch or up to date with the real, current indigenous problems
  
• a comfortable victim hood view of the world, victims can't get over it: "Trust me I've been a victim and know what you are suffering"
  

Earlier on Pamela Bone exposed Greer for her lack of solidarity with oppressed Muslim women. The dialectical wheel has turned full circle: Greer from liberator of women to oppressor of women.

These are real problems which I believe can be extended to other contentious issues such as the Iraq war (Iraq is now finally emerging as a democratic state) and the alleged environmental catastrophe. It's easy to fall back on long held beliefs that add together to become a world outlook, it's easy to avoid the hard yards of rigorous analysis, it's easy to be a comfortable victim of forces so powerful they are hard to deal with, it's easy to seek attention with short blog posts like this that ride off the hard work of others. It's hard to be objective, really hard.

In this case, it's clear to me that Marcia Langton has done the hard yards and Germaine Greer has not. Read her essay.

what alan kay said about Universals / Non Universals

What Alan Kay said about his Universals / Non Universals slide at the EuroPython 2006 keynote (transcribed by me from source). I've started a new page on the learning evolves wiki whose purpose is to expand and elaborate further on the meanings and educational implications of the list of non universals. Being accurate about what Alan said seemed to be a good place to start.

UNIVERSALS

• social
  
• language
• communication
• culture
  
• fantasies
• stories
• tools and art
• superstition
• religion and magic
• case based learning
• theatre
  
• play and games
• differences over similarities
• quick reactions to patterns
• loud noises and snakes
• supernormal responses
  
• vendetta, and more (about 300 of these have been identified across cultures)
  

"In effect anthropologists have been studying humans for about a Century now and firstly 3000 human cultures seem to be very very different. Then they start realising that they seemed surprisingly parametric. Every culture had a language, every culture told stories ... (goes through some of the items on the Universals list)

If you look at these you can see our modern internet culture - it's basically social, it enables us to communicate in various ways and so forth, basically a story based culture"

NON UNIVERSALS

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

"What's interesting is to look for things that are not universal, that seems to have some importance as well. Most people have lived and died on this Earth for 100,000 years without reading and writing, without having deductive maths and model based science .... (goes through non universals list)

These are a little harder to learn than the ones on the left because we are not directly wired to learn them. These things are actually inventions which are difficult to invent. And the rise of Schools going all the way back to the Sumerian and Egyptian times came about to start helping children learn some of these things that aren't easy to learn. It can be argued that if you are trying to be utopian about education what we should be doing is helping the children of the world learn these hard to learn things. Equal rights is a really good one to help children learn. No culture in the world is particularly good at it."

how the taboo was broken

Indigenous policy: this is about the historical unfolding of awareness and policy making in Australia in the last 50 years. Twilight of old radicals? by anthropologist Peter Sutton is a must read for those who wish to further their understanding of these issues. There is historical detail here about what unfolded politically in Queensland that I haven't seen before. I have written a summary and included some quotes below for my own benefit but suggest you read the original:

• Before 1960 the Left supported assimilation as a right offering opportunity to aboriginal people
• Some Missions were compassionate protectionists and did some good work but were dissolved by the 1970s
• The new "progressive" consensus was that these communities should be self managed with Land Rights
• Traditional culture would be encouraged; assimilation was seen as racist
• This 70s consensus has come undone as welfare dependency and drug abuse in many of these communities has spiraled out of control
• Queensland Aboriginal activists and administrators have led the way forward to a new analysis
• Things began to turn around in 1991 with the emergence of indigenous intellectuals such as Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton
• The old guard activists still held street march demos focused on the symbolic and rights agenda but the leaders workshopped alternative legislation for governments
• Wayne Goss (Queensland Premier) and Kevin Rudd (then Goss's cabinet office director-general) were far too precious as this unfolded

"In the meantime, the old rights-based progressivism in indigenous political thinking had a few more years to go before a relentless decline in the standard of living and safety of people in Aboriginal communities forced so many of us to ask an appalling question: Why did this descent into a seriously dysfunctional state seem to coincide with liberal progressive policies based on the rights agenda, and the creation of new degrees of community autonomy? The taboo on raising this was finally broken by an avalanche of evidence no one could ignore"

• Pearson broke the logjam of public discourse about community dysfunction in several hard-hitting papers published in 1999 and 2000
• print media in the north led the way forward and the southern urban soft Left has lagged behind discovering reality

"The issues now included welfare dependency, community autonomy, organisational corruption, the future of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, frontier history wars, racially differential morbidity and life expectancy, poor school attendance, declining literacy and numeracy, substance abuse, violence against women, child sexual abuse, customary law as a criminal defence, staying in versus leaving versus orbiting in and out of the ghettos, service mainstreaming, gang warfare and public rioting, the entry permit system and restrictions on media access, the future of funding for remote settlements, and the imminent expectation of rocketing urban migration by Aboriginal people leaving failing outback communities"

• The taboo on reporting aboriginal dysfunction became broken
• anthropologist have agonised over whether to report on the distinctive nature of Aboriginal communities or the overwhelming evidence of levels of dysfunction and abuse ...

"We have tended to be protective of the people with whom we have worked, to the point where the recent descent of so many places into dire conditions seems almost scientifically inexplicable"

• two important factors which have been neglected but must be faced are the social and cultural factors influencing mental health, and the nature of changes in sexual behaviour

"Truth is not necessarily a good uniter of people. Fictions or simplifications so often better bind us, at least for a time"

• the pieces of this puzzle are in the air, no one yet knows where they will fall

question 22

walter bender's question 22:

(22) What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe?

I've been providing what I think is a good answer to these questions for some time now (since December 2006: what should schools teach?) but often the response is muted and contradictory. It's not my original answer, it originates from alan kay and his analysis originates from anthropologists.

The answer is not that children should learn the universals but what Kay has called the "non universals". From anthropological research of over 3000 human cultures, Kay presented two lists, the first were universals, the things that all human cultures have in common. This list included things like:

• language
• communication
• fantasies
• stories
• tools and art
• superstition
• religion and magic
• play and games
• differences over similarities
• quick reactions to patterns
• vendetta, and more

He then presented a list of non universals, the things that humans find harder to learn. This list was shorter and included:

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

The non universals have not arisen spontaneously, they have been discovered by the smartest humans after hundreds or thousands of years of civilisation. Hence, it follows that children need guidance in learning them, they will not be discovered by open ended discovery learning. There is an objective need for some version of “school” - where advanced knowledge is somehow communicated from those who know it to those who don't.

The resolution of the tension (between how children learn and the complex, non spontaneous nature of the development of advanced scientific or Enlightenment ideas) is to develop an honest children's version of the advanced ideas. For some of these ideas (not all) the computer can aid this process. Which ones? The list would include the laws of motion, turtle geometry, calculus by vectors, exponential growth, feedback and system ecologies. I think this should be the starting point or at least one of the starting points for thinking about how computers should be used in schools.

Part of the discussion here is establishing that computers are not currently used to their full potential in schools. IMO once the above vision of how computers could be used in schools is understood then it becomes obvious that they are currently poorly used in schools.

I've been wondering why this particular idea, the non universals, is not spreading more. I think it's because it goes against the culture of pseudo progressiveness which advocates that process is more important than content, that discovery is more important than knowledge and/or that education should be entertaining or at least laid back, that we shouldn't put too much pressure on children. The problem is how to teach the non universals without sounding like a "back to basics" fundamentalist. But that is a real problem that needs to be faced and resolved.

Is this an example of the unsane, the mental state where our ideas don't fit reality, the map doesn't represent the territory. We like to think of ourselves as mostly "sane" and contrast that with a few "insane" personal moments or the more permanent state of a few unfortunates. But the "unsane" idea makes room for a different self perception. What if more often than not we are unsane?

reference:
powerful ideas discourse (follow the links there for a fuller discussion)
in general programmers are not creatures of the Enlightenment (or why I quit teaching year 9 computing skills and went back to teaching maths and science)
our human condition "from space" (sources the unsane idea)
alan kay's educational vision (summary of a presentation I gave about alan kay's ideas)

walter bender's 23 questions

twenty-three questions on technology and education

Seymour Papert asked a number of probing questions about the nature of School and the use of computers in School, which originated from Piaget's ideas about how children learn and which initially focused around a piece of software or "object to think" with called logo. I see Walter's list as continuing in this tradition with some updates involving issues arising from networking, the prospect and new reality of far cheaper, mobile computers, the FOSS model, the need to scale learning democratically and others.

Some of the questions strike a strong chord with me (eg. 2, 9, 10, 11, 14, 18, 22) whilst others push me in the direction of the need to expand my areas of knowledge or expertise. For me, the main point is not that the questions are the best possible questions or whether the categories are correct but the meta issue that new innovative hardware / software (OLPC or Sugar as "object to think with") creates the need for thinkers to step forward and ask questions like this that span multiple disciplines (computer science, engineering, education, economics and social sciences). We need polymaths.

I think the stage we are at is getting the questions right as well as the answers - that walter's act of modelling such a process would bear fruit if others took up the same challenge that he has taken up, to be a grass roots intellectual spanning disciplines as well as having expertise in particular domains. In many ways this is going against the dominant trend of intellectual discourse (truth slips from view ... ), so I'm grateful to Walter for giving it a try.

genocide in darfur

Two views on what to do about genocide in Darfur

Team Darfur is a website created by elite athletes who are attempting to make a difference about genocide in Darfur. The founder, Joey Cheek, has had his visa revoked by the Chinese government, preventing him from competing in the Beijing Olympics. More here and here

another view:
Why China won't save Darfur (June 2007)
China is a convenient whipping boy for celebrities and governments who are evading a more determined approach to the issue of genocide in the Sudan

But threatening a “Genocide Olympics” alone will not bring peace (or peacekeepers) to that troubled region. No amount of criticism will convince Beijing to pursue a coercive strategy and a nonconsensual deployment of U.N. peacekeepers that Khartoum rejects. Yes, China has the economic leverage to gain the ear of President Bashir, but that hardly means it has the ability—or, more to the point, the will—to bully him into accepting a large U.N. peacekeeping contingent in Darfur. China’s multibillion dollar investments in Sudan’s petroleum industry are a much-needed source of energy for its mushrooming economy. Beijing may make tactical moves to pressure Sudan, but it will not choose human rights over oil, a matter of paramount national interest.

And, even if China were capable of delivering Bashir, the Sudanese government is not the only impediment to an effective peace process. Nowadays, more people may well be dying from tribal clashes than from marauding janjaweed or government forces. The infighting of fractured rebel groups and the sheer number of displaced people with no homes to return to are also immediate and significant obstacles to peace. But China has little influence over the rebel movements and is ill-positioned to act as a mediator between them.

Nor is China a good choice to be our moral compass. The West embraces human rights and international humanitarian law, but China emphatically does not. The continuing crisis not only threatens the lives of millions, but the weak Western response undermines those grandiose principles such as the “responsibility to protect” — hallmarks of our international moral code. Moreover, it is the U.S. government, not Beijing (nor the U.N., for that matter), that has invoked the label “genocide” to describe the Darfur crisis. Morally and legally, the responsibility to lead is America’s.

Ending the Darfur conflict requires much more than what China alone can offer. Rhetorical flourishes from world leaders, limited Western unilateral sanctions, and promises of firmer action at some indeterminate time in the future are also patently insufficient. Only a top-level, sustained, and aggressive multilateral mediation effort backed by the United States, the European Union, and African, Arab, and Chinese governments can stop the violence and reverse the massive displacement of people.

engaged

Beautiful photo from Carla Gomez Monroy in the capital of Mongolia; Ulaanbaatar. OLPC is currently deploying 20,000 laptops to Mongolia. The laptops were funded by the generosity of doners during the Give One, Get One program of late 2007 (source)

cotton wool culture

A major study by Play England, part of the National Children's Bureau, found that half of all children have been stopped from climbing trees, 21 per cent have been banned from playing conkers and 17 per cent have been told they cannot take part in games of tag or chase. Some parents are going to such extreme lengths to protect their children from danger that they have even said no to hide-and-seek ...

The Play England study quotes a number of play providers who highlight the benefits to children of taking risks. 'Risk-taking increases the resilience of children,' said one. 'It helps them make judgments,' said another. Some of those interviewed blamed the 'cotton wool' culture for the fact that today's children were playing it too safe, while others pointed to a lack of equipment or too much concrete in place of grass. The research also lists examples of risky play that should be encouraged including fire-building, den-making, watersports, paintballing, boxing and climbing trees
- Kids need the adventure of 'risky' play

the missing piece of the jigsaw

Finding the "missing piece of the jigsaw" in the quest to shift Aborigines from welfare to work

Noel Pearson has been more subdued publicly since the election of the Rudd government, with far fewer opinion pieces written for The Australian. I have been fearful that real indigenous policy reform, which Pearson leads, might have stalled at the Federal level - despite the ongoing welfare reform gains in Queensland. Pearson and Rudd have an antagonistic history going back to Rudd's "Dr Death" days in Queensland politics.

So, it's great to see today's announcement about an initiative from Andrew Forrest (Australia's wealthiest person) to guarantee 50,000 indigenous jobs within two years. And that this initiative has the full support of the Rudd government.

Pearson's article: Off welfare, upstairs to work

Note Pearson's staircase metaphor of welfare and his looking ahead proposal to extend the Queensland reforms:

A work opportunity covenant should be available to any indigenous person whether living in Blacktown, Sydney, or Aurukun, Cape York. Wherever an individual seeks to climb the staircase to a better life through work, they should be backed.

If you can imagine the first steps on a staircase, with the first step being higher than the second. This first step upon which too many of our people are situated we call the welfare pedestal. The price on this pedestal is higher than the price on the real staircase: that is why our young people choose to stay there. Remaining on welfare, under the prevailing incentives offered by the welfare system, is a rational choice. The problem is that the small comforts of the pedestal become a permanent destination. And our people are perpetually condemned to missing out on sharing in the country's wealth, not least in the mining boom occurring in our back yards.

So it is the first step downwards that is the most bracing step. It requires a decision on the part of communities to embrace welfare reforms so that our people can step down from the pedestal and start climbing the staircase of opportunity. Four communities in Cape York Peninsula have charted these reforms for their people.

Even where communities have yet to embrace welfare reforms, the Rudd Government should enable individuals - wherever they are - to opt in to welfare reforms that apply to them as individuals. A work opportunity covenant should represent a deal between an indigenous individual, a corporate employer, and the federal Government. Under this covenant, the individual would commit to certain welfare reform conditions, the federal Government would commit to providing training and other support, and the employer would commit to the guaranteed job opportunity.

Another report: Twiggy eyes 50,000 Aboriginal Jobs

I like this touch from Andrew Forrest:

At the end of the press conference, Mr Forrest gathered Mr Pearson, Sir Rod, Mr Mundine and Mr Rudd into a semi-circle and called on them to place their hands on top of his.

When they did Mr Forrest, said: "This is the Australian Employment Covenant."

need to integrate different approaches to AI (Minsky)

Two different ways to represent an apple - a semantic network and a connectionist network

Minsky argues that to explain intelligence we need to integrate both of these approaches and not take an either / or attitude. The popularity of a connectionist only approach has retarded research into intelligence.

Connectionist networks (based on numbers showing strength of associations) can learn to recognise many important types of patterns - without any need for a person to program them. But number based networks have limitations. Every relationship is reduced to a number or strength so there remains almost no trace of the evidence that led to it, eg. the number 12 could represent all sorts of things

Minsky:

I see the popularity (of Connectionist Networks), in recent years, as having retarded the search for higher level ideas about human psychological machinery ... research on commonsense thinking kept advancing until about 1980, but then it was clearly recognised that further progress would need ways to acquire and organise millions of fragments of commonsense knowledge. That prospect seemed so daunting that most researchers decided to try, instead, to invent machines that could learn, by themselves, all the knowledge that they would need - in short, to invent new kinds of "baby machines" ...

Quite a few of these learning machines did indeed learn to do some useful things, but none of them went on to develop higher-level reflective Ways to Think - and I suspect that this was mainly because they tried to represent knowledge in numerical terms....

... I do not mean to suggest that such networks are not important ... it seems safe to assume that many of the low level processes in our brains must use some form of Connectionist Networks
- Minsky, pp. 289-91, The Emotion Machine

This helps me situate the work of Rodney Brooks (behavioural AI) as important but limited.

Logical vs.Analogical or Symbolic vs. Connectionist or Neat vs. Scruffy - this paper by Minsky (1990) has more detail

update: I'm still summarising minsky's book on the learning evolves wiki minsky page

one indigenous boy's story

Young Australian indigenous students have a far better chance of success in life if they leave their remote communities and attend boarding school in the metropolis.

Read the story of Cyril Johnson, a year 11 student at Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview, on Sydney's North Shore, One teenage boy says it all

extract:

Sue and Bucky kept looking after me and I became a part of their family and they adopted me, due to the thumbs up from my mum. I could tell Rebecca, my adopted sister, things I hadn't told anyone before and I wouldn't understand why she would get all emotional and start crying.

I told her what it was like not to have eaten for two weeks. You start getting pains in your stomach, your head starts spinning and you feel dizzy and weak...

It took me a while to see a new way of life. When Sue and Bucky had a few drinks at Christmas night I just thought it would turn to violence, but surprisingly it didn't. I'd just gotten so used to people drinking and being violent...

My first days at Riverview [last year] were difficult - I was so scared. I hated it so much. I hated everything … It was so different. The city was big, flash, full of cars; the school looked like a castle. I went into the dorms and they were really small and I had this massive room to myself … I felt so lonely, empty and frightened. I didn't move from that room for a week. I was shy. [Then] Ed McManus came into my room and I asked him for some help to fix my fan. He really helped me and I think that was the first friend I had made ...

I have moved away from my family to attend this fine school. I am the first person in my family to have received my School Certificate. I have travelled overseas … I am determined to finish year 11 and 12. I will be the first person in my family to receive my Higher School Certificate and maybe even the first to attend university.

It wasn't until I started going back over my life that I truly realised exactly how far I have come and how much further I can go.

There are many disadvantaged children out there, living the life I used to. I really hope that in the future that I can give back and help all Australians, especially indigenous Australians

stand tall, tony abbott

Tony Abbott, Liberal MP, shadow minister for indigenous affairs, will spend three weeks of the parliamentary winter break working with aboriginal people in the township of Coen, north of Cairns (one of the most disadvantaged areas of Australia)

He will teach remedial reading to Aboriginal children in the mornings and work with an income management group in the afternoons, helping families manage their welfare payments

Tony Abbott:

"The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' — we fly in, scratch around and fly out ... You learn a hell of a lot more living in a place than just going in and talking to people about what it's like"
- Abbott teachers what he preaches

Sadly, this down to earth, commonsense, gutsy action by an Australian politician strikes me as so extraordinarily unusual that I feel compelled to draw attention to it.

why No Child Left Behind fails

Students who attend Disadvantaged schools do not leave their social class, family backgrounds, behaviours etc. in a blue bin outside the school gate (thanks, Pat)

So, it's good when an academic, James Heckman, documents all of this and proposes some solutions - early intervention

Schools, Skills and Synapses (pdf, 95pp) by James Heckman:

This paper discusses (a) the role of cognitive and noncognitive ability in shaping adult outcomes, (b) the early emergence of differentials in abilities between children of advantaged families and children of disadvantaged families, (c) the role of families in creating these abilities, (d) adverse trends in American families, and (e) the effectiveness of early interventions in offsetting these trends. Practical issues in the design and implementation of early childhood programs are discussed.

If you don't have time to read the whole thing (I haven't read it yet) then read the 15 point summary in the introduction.

The distinction is made between cognitive abilities, which are measured in tests, and "socioemotional skills, physical and mental health, perseverance, attention, motivation, and self confidence" which provide the necessary and essential foundation for building those cognitive skills and which are often missing in children from disadvantaged backgrounds. This in turn is used to critique the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) policy which demands that teachers achieve improvement in cognitive results without providing the means to improve the socioemotional (or non cognitive) skills of these students

This is the reality for teachers and students in Disadvantaged schools, the day to day sad, funny, wretched, frustrating, stressful, exhilarating lived reality that does not need belated academic confirmation, but nevertheless, will welcome it

anti politics

I can see these parallels between Rudd and Obama:

• Cross cultural sensitivity, rather than real policies to achieve clear political goals (Rudd is multi-lingual and speaks Mandarin, Obama has mixed racial background)
• Sorry talk - sorry to indigenous people, sorry for destroying the environment (and for rising petrol prices even though that helps the environment), sorry for the Iraq war, sorry kids that you don't all have computer access, sorry for the economic downturn. Don't expect us to actually fix any of this, but sorry.
  
• End of unilateralism, replace it with global concerns and reaching out - if only we could all come together, end racism, join hands and save the planet (particularly noticeable in Obama's recent Berlin Wall speech)
  

At this stage the voters support Rudd's contribution to saving the planet through an emissions trading scheme: "... 77 per cent believe Australia should press ahead and cut its greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do" (SMH)

The weakness of this sort of politics is that it is anti politics. It is hollow. Our political crisis is that the politicians are afraid to be political, to act decisively to change the world. It's too hard to change the world because not everybody agrees about what to do. But everyone can see that we are decent, caring people who are doing our best.

I like the Piping Shrike blog for it's analysis of the Australian political scene:
Flaws in the Machine
Rudd's Agenda
The Lurch

Raymond Lister's paper

After the Gold Rush: Toward Sustainable Scholarship in Computing (pdf, 16pp) by Raymond Lister, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Mark Guzdial, on his blog, described this as a "great paper" and then uses it to promote Cognitive Load Theory and its critique of constructivism or constructionism (link to Mark Guzdial's post)

Cognitive load theory keeps coming up again and again as an alleged refutation of constructivism. So, I read the Lister paper with that in mind. I have previously written a rebuttal of the Kirschner et al paper which claims that minimal guidance during instruction does not work (one of the relevant paper cited by Lister)

The Lister paper is about the authors journey from being a bad teacher of computer programming to a better teacher and some of the attitudes and pitfalls encountered along the way. It's an admirable paper from that point of view, of someone becoming aware of what emerges as rather extreme deficiencies of many teachers and deciding to begin to tackle this seriously.

Here is a brief summary of some of the problem attitudes identified, at length, by the author:

1. the assumption that all students learn in similar ways (one mould fits all)
2. the reluctance of those who have been successful within a system to question deeply the way that system does things
   
3. more years of teaching means you teach better
4. the most outspoken individuals often dominate curriculum change
5. teachers don't criticise other teachers, the culture of silence
6. Anecdotal flag planting, I tried this and it worked
7. Lack of real evidence
8. Systemic separation of the theory of teaching and learning from particular disciplines
9. Teachers resist researching their own teaching
10. Teachers blame their colleagues at lower level levels when their students don't know stuff
11. If students fail then blame the student, not your teaching. Students might be lazy, spend too much time in paid work or are genetically deficient (common belief amongst teachers when it comes to learning how to program)
12. the need to move past the industrial model paradigm to a more ecological model, in harmony with the teaching and learning environment

For the author the wakeup call was too many of his students failing and students not learning how to program.

He describes some ways in which his teaching has become more interactive with his students and various papers he has read in his search to become a better teacher and also to understand the reasons for the decline in IT enrolments. He takes the trouble to find out the real reasons why students are obtaining wrong answers to "easy" questions and explores some interactive techniques, such as asking students to explain "in plain English" what a short piece of code did.

So far, so good

But along the way the author has quoted from some papers on Cognitive Load Theory and agrees with those authors that constructivism is deficient. He goes onto say that the Australasian University Teaching and Learning (T&L) communities are heavily influenced by constructivism and contrasts this with "discipline based academics" who tend to focus mainly on their disciplines at the expense of teaching and learning theory. Towards the end, however, the author repeats his call for the bringing together of theory and practice based on a "social constructivist view of the world"

The authors view of constructivism is taken uncritically from the Cognitive Load Theorists (link to the original Kirschner, Sweller and Clark paper) and is then oversimplified further by him to equate constructivism with problem solving:

On the basis of that definition, computing education has used constructivist approaches for decades. For example, many of us introduce students to programming via the problem-solving approach, which McCracken et al. (2001) defined as an approach where we provide students with a problem description, and then require them to decompose it into sub-problems, implement them, test them, then assemble the pieces into a complete solution (Lister, p. 6)

Hence, Lister misunderstands the issue of what the Papert version of constructionism is because he relies on the inadequate definition emanating from these critics of constructivism. (Rather than researching what supporters of constructivism are saying.) As I pointed out in my earlier rebuttal there is only a single Papert reference in the Kirschner, Sweller and Clark paper even though Papert is recognised as an authority and has authored many papers, books and supervised many PhD theses. Now we see this harm being spread to Lister and then onto Guzdial.

Most tellingly, many of the positions that Lister puts as problems to be overcome are in fact similar to issues that the constructionist Papert has long ago identified as problems to be overcome. For example, Lister explains at some length about the problem of constructivist theory (T&L departments) and the practice of disciplines being kept separate. But Papert has famously said:

You cannot think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something

In their paper, Software Design as a Learning Environment (1990), Idit Harel and Seymour Papert, focus on and discuss in detail four important issues in developing constructionist learning environments, in this case, in the learning of fractions:

• Development of Concept - the need to move beyond rigid, particular and isolated understanding to more flexible, generalised and connected understanding
• Appropriation of the Project - taking personal ownership enhances learning
• Time Frame and Rhythm of Work - School time is organised in rigid and fragmented segments, whereas experts and an apprenticeship model has a totally different feel to it
• Metacognitive Awareness - thinking about ones own knowledge and understandings is an important part of learning

Plenty of scope for interactive teaching here.

One final point, briefly. Having now read Marvin Minsky's book The Emotion Machine, I can now see ways to improve my rebuttal of the Kirschner, Sweller and Clark paper. This does connect to Lister's concerns about the relative inadequacy of "folk pedagogy" and citing Cognitive Load Theory as an antidote. I can see now that Cognitive Load Theory might just be another form of folk pedagogy with pseudo scientific terms like "working memory" and "long term memory", concepts that sound scientific but have yet to be explained. See Minsky, page 243.

At any rate, to suggest, as the Lister paper does, that Papert's constructionism is a theory that eschews a deep study of interactivity with the learner, that it means something like give them a problem and walk away, is a gross misrepresentation. (although, to be fair, this may well be true of some of the University based Teaching & Learning faculties, so muddied have the constructivist waters become)

fight for life

Addressing Indigenous Disadvantage in Cape York - “Fight for Life” (pdf, 14pp)

Listen to the people on the ground who are telling us how bad the situation is in Cape York and other remote indigenous communities

Dr Lara Wieland: Medical Practitioner who has worked for years in Cape York as both a doctor and doing volunteer youth work

Dr Richard Heazlewood: Established Paediatric Outreach Team to Cape York, Torres Strait and Tablelands providing remote paediatric services for over 15 years as well as sitting on SCAN child protection team for the region

For some of these diseases of social disadvantage and the third world, Cape York has the dubious honour of having some of the highest rates in the world.

So much of the damage done and that is being done is intergenerational and potentially permanent and we are faced with a time in history where we believe we have one last opportunity to provide the platforms needed to give Cape York people the choices they are entitled to as human beings....

The following eight areas of suggestions through which to address Indigenous disadvantage in Cape York are a synthesis of Ken Henry's seven platforms for addressing Indigenous disadvantage, the Canadian Aboriginal Horizontal Framework and Dr Richard Heazlewood's 2020 summit submission on an intervention into Cape York communities as all three have a large degree of overlap. It also contains personal thoughts gleaned from observation and thousands of conversations over years with people in Cape York ranging from specialist doctors, principals, elders and police through to parents struggling with alcoholism and children of all ages who speak frankly and honestly from their heart. I have found people's thoughts and hopes and aspirations in private are astonishingly similar across this range.

Colleagues who work closely with Northern Territory (NT) communities have stated that the rhetoric surrounding the NT intervention and it's implementation was damaging and hurtful, disempowering and not well thought out, but the flow of resources and a lot of what has been done has been very positive. Surely there is room for an 'intervention' that is done 'right', that has the sense of urgency and cuts across bureaucratic barriers but without being threatening, hurtful, disempowering and poorly implemented?

1. Health
2. Substance abuse
3. Child protection
4. Learning
5. Safe and sustainable communities
6. Housing
7. Economic opportunity
8. Accountability

(far more detail in the full report)

Taking action on the situation in Cape York requires courage, risk-taking, political will and high level leadership as well as ensuring effective implementation on the ground.

Each month that goes past means more lives damaged, often irreparably. If something radical is not done soon, we will be judged far more harshly for this and the effects will be far more damaging and far-reaching than anything that has occurred in generations past

mental modelling, all the way down

Some of the language of the following quote is mangled (bits missing) but the meaning is still clear:

Education is another area in which the computer scientist has confused form and content, but this time the confusion concerns his professional role. He perceives his principal function to provide programs and machines for use in old and new educational schemes. Well and good, but I believe he has a more complex responsibility–to work out and communicate models of the process of education itself.

In the discussion below, I sketch briefly the viewpoint (developed with Seymour Papert) from which this belief stems. The following statements are typical of our view:

– To help people learn is to help them heads, various kinds of computational models.
– This can best be done by a teacher who has, in his head, a reasonable model of what is in the pupil's head.
– For the same reason the student, when debugging his own models and procedures, should have a model of what he is doing, and must know good debugging techniques, such as how to formulate simple but critical test cases.
– It will help the student to know something about computational models and programming. The idea of debugging [note 2] itself, for example, is a very powerful concept-in contrast to the helplessness promoted by our cultural heritage about gifts, talents, and aptitudes. The latter encourages "I'm not good at this" instead of "How can I make myself better at it?"

These have the sound of common sense, yet they are not among the basic principles of any of the popular educational schemes such as "operant reinforcement," "discovery methods," audio-visual synergism, etc. This is not because educators have ignored the possibility of mental models, but because they simply had no effective way, before the beginning of work on simulation of thought processes, to describe, construct, and test such ideas
- Marvin Minsky, Turing Award Lecture, 1970

Teacher and student mental modelling are rather important, including debugging, and can be facilitated by computers properly used. But this requires a teacher who can both program the computer and understand the importance of mental modelling. If those prerequisites are missing then it's not all that surprising to discover that someone has done a research project showing that "it doesn't work".

scratch resources

This page (teaching children computer programming by using scratch) on kidslike.info contains a number of links to good Scratch resources, the best of which I'll summarise below

1) Programming concepts and skills supported in scratch (pdf) (doc)
What problem solving, project design skills, fundamental ideas about computers and programming, and specific programming concepts does Scratch support (and for the latter does not support)? This is an excellent summary, highly recommended, you need to download for the examples (code snippets) provided too, which are really good. Also note this discussion thread on the Scratch forum about this document, especially the comments by kevin karplus and responses by natalie, the document author, to his suggestions

Scratch supports these Specific Programming Concepts:
sequence, iteration (looping), conditional statements, variables, threads (parallel execution), synchronisation, real-time interaction, boolean logic, random numbers, event handling, user interface design

Scratch does not currently support data structures (arrays, etc.), procedures and functions, recursion, inheritance, defining classes of objects, exception handling, parameter passing and return values, text input, file input/output

2) Scratch Programming Projects
Ten excellent projects described in just the right amount of detail, with requirements and extras:

1. "Chasing/Eating" (Pac Man Type Game)
2. Red Light/Green Light
3. Pong
4. Target Game
5. Communication Project
6. Animation of a short story
7. Virtual Musical Instrument
8. Virtual Board Game
9. Basic Space Target Game
10. Shape Drawing Robot (Polygon Robot)

3) Shark eats fish
Introductory tutorial, clearly explained with screenshots

4) Comparison of different languages (thread in Scratch forum)
This comment by pkimelma presents a well thought out sequence for teaching Scratch using a games theme.

Other comments in this thread compare Scratch with Phrogram (which has 3D graphics), Alice, Starlogo and others.

5) Kevin and Abe Karplus Scratch page looks to have a nice collection of scratch exemplars

reading Minsky

The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky

Minsky has studied many great writers who have thought deeply about the human mind. Not only contemporary thinkers but he ranges across the centuries (Aristotle, Augustine, Descarte, Darwin, Franklin, Poincare, Freud etc.). Many of the sections of his book begin with quotations and summaries from these writers and then proceed onto Minsky's own independent evaluation of them.

To provide just one example (there are many) in section 7-7 he uses quotations from a book written by Henri Poincare in 1913 as the basis for a discussion and presentation of his own views on a 4 stage model of unconscious processes (preparation, incubation, revelation and evaluation)

In reading Minsky, carefully, I obtain a strong feeling that I am receiving a distillation of some of the best thoughts from the best thinkers in human history from one of the current best thinkers who also happens to be a great writer

As well as that I'm discovering a very plausible view of what the research agenda for our understanding the mind ought to be.

I've been summarising some of it on the learning evolves wiki. In some ways it's a deceptively simple book but quite hard to hold all of it in your mind as an integrated whole.

iraq war planning

A new book, war and decision by Douglas J. Feith Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005 seems to provide an authoritative account of what really happened inside the Bush administration whilst planning the Iraq war.

The misconceptions page is interesting

Here is a critical and serious interview (video) by jon stewart of the author

evaluating Sugar in the developed world

How teachers in the developed world can run the Sugar software and activities in our computer labs which run only Windows!!

Problem: Shortage of OLPC machines in the developed world, ie. you need to be able to play with it, immerse yourself in it in order to be able to evaluate it. That's how computer learning works.

Educational objective: I will get my year 10 IT class to systematically evaluate the Sugar software and activities

Summary: Make a bootable USB key of the XO-LiveCD image and setup the BIOS on each computer to boot off the USB key

Details:

1. Download the bleeding edge joyride version of the XO-LiveCD, currently XO-LiveCD_080607.iso
2. Burn an image CD
3. (It's not practical for me to use the CDs at school since the CD drives have not been enabled due to student vandalism in the past)
4. download unetbootin-windows-241.exe from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
5. format your usb drive under windows (or delete all the files of it if already in windows format)
6. run the downloaded file unetbootin-windows-241.exe
7. it should find your usb drive
8. click on the diskimage radiobutton
9. browse to your XO -live CD iso (must have it in iso format - cant use a burnt cd)
10. click on OK
11. wait till files are copied (it takes a while)
12. go into BIOS and setup to boot of USB-HDD key
13. reboot off USB Drive

Update:(7th August)
With the above there is a problem that the USB key does not boot into the introductory menu seen on the bootable CD, which enables you to select the bleeding edge joyride version and choose your language. It boots into the default German language standard version of Sugar.

To fix this problem:

1. Open the syslinux.cfg file (on the USB key) in notepad or some other editor
2. Change lb_country=6 to lb_country=1 (German to English)
3. Change lb_config=update.1 to lb_config=joyride
4. Change lb_system=build-708 to lb_system=joyride-2024
5. Save and reboot
   

A one gig usb drive is the minimum requirement because the joyride CD is 700 mb

Thanks to tony, joel and paul for help with this

OLPC Pacific rollout links

OLPC Oceania
starting point, overview ... 8 Pacific countries listed for trial deployment of OLPC ...Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Kiribati, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Niue, Tuvalu

RICS - Rural Internet Connectivity System
RICS is designed to provide 2-way Internet connectivity to all Pacific Island Countries. It uses 1.20m Satellite Antennas and provides average speeds between 128 to 512 kbits per second

OLPC Solomon Islands
This page provides a comprehensive overview of the Pacific trial process, more so than any other Oceania page on the OLPC wiki.

Ian Thomson

"Mr Ian Thomson has been appointed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) to coordinate its work on the Pacific Rural Internet Connectivity System (Pacific RICS) and Oceania One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) projects ...

The Pacific RICS aims to provide Internet access to rural and remote Pacific communities that are currently not serviced by commercial operators. The technology uses small 1.2 or 1.8 metre satellite dishes and therefore requires low power to operate, which means it can be solar powered. A ‘network-in-a-box’ server provides the networking capability that allows Internet connectivity, a laser printer, WIFI wireless access and computers networked via cables.

Ian will be establishing the 16 RICS pilot sites across the region. The first site was launched a month ago in Gaire, a rural community located an hour’s drive southeast drive of Port Moresby. The other pilot site in Papua New Guinea is in Bougainville, with the remaining sites in Cook Islands, Kiribati (2), Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands (2), Tokelau, Tuvalu, Tonga and Vanuatu"

David Leeming
has been developing infrastructure in the Solomon Islands (Solomons PFnet pdf) for some years. He stresses the need for a bottom up approach.

control through scarcity

Christoph Derndorfer:

OLPC Boston (and close associates, like Brightstar) appear to have all the power. All that power is in one single nerve pressure point which is very easy to control: the availability of XOs
- The Lost Tribe of OLPC, Continued ...

On the surface initially making OLPCs only available to children in disadvantaged countries seems admirable and egalitarian. One of the side effects was that it made it difficult for someone like me, a supporter in the industrialised world with mainly educational knowledge (not a python hacker), to get involved. OLPCs are still quite rare in Australia.

Until Christoph's post I hadn't seen this clearly as a means of controlling potential supporters. But in any organisation control is exerted through the way in which things of value are distributed. Be it information, hardware or something else.

I used to be a member of a communist party which had a very top down, unelected, hierarchical leadership and which encouraged its members to go into the workplace or to be activists, to look outwards to the needs of "the masses" but not to look inwards at the quality of the leadership. There are lots of ways in which "leaders" can pretend to be doing great work for the people while at the same time shoring up their position as important leaders. It boils down to a division of labour where an elite group does the important ideological, thinking work while the rank and file members are expected to be workers, activists etc. ie. it's just a reproduction of the boss-worker relationship which the "communist party" was meant to be overthrowing. Easy enough to see how this could be translated into the OLPC community - hard working software developers who aren't all that interested in the politics of it all, in the first place. It can be hard to sort out and devastating when you finally figure out you've been led down the garden path.

I mentioned earlier, Ursula LeGuin's, The Dispossessed , where she describes perfectly how groups founded on equality and continually proclaiming equality can generate incredibly sophisticated and devious methods of power seeking

btw I like the open and above board style in which Walter Bender appears to manage the Sugar project (without knowing a great deal about it but my first impressions are positive)

paul goodman

Tom Hoffman has a series of very interesting quotes from paul goodman on his blog, illustrating the point that a quality writer from 1964 might be thinking more deeply about the present than 99% of the blogosphere:

• on dewey
• on discovery learning
• history is real
• progressive education
• Peace Corps / TFA
• Leisure / Summerhill
  

Very rich quotes, please click.

I looked Goodman up on wikipedia and googled around

I found it difficult to situate him with regard to the double headed monster of progressivism until I realised that at first he was embraced by the new left as saviour but later he turned against the new left when they jettisoned content from the Enlightenment and began to see all social thinking as brainwashing

These reviews helped, and the one by susan sontag is very touching:

under the sign of saturn by susan sontag
the relevance of paul goodman by john judis

This Goodman quote from the john judis article:

"If we start from the premise that the young are in a religious crisis, that they doubt there is really a nature of thing and they are sure there is no world for themselves, many details of the present behavior become clearer. Alienation is a powerful motivation, of unrest, fantasy, and feckless action. It can lead.. to religious innovation, new sacraments to give life meaning. But it is a poor basis for politics, including revolutionary politics."

And this one from the wikipedia entry:

For instance, after a hostile exchange with student radicals who had heckled him "heatedly and rudely" at a campus appearance in 1967, Goodman wrote, "suddenly I realized that they did not believe there was a nature of things. [To them] there was no knowledge but only the sociology of knowledge. They had learned so well that physical and sociological research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they were doubtful that there was such a thing as simple truth, for instance that the table was made of wood--maybe it was plastic imitation...I had imagined that the worldwide student protest had to do with changing political and moral institutions, and I was sympathetic to this. But I now saw that we had to do with a religious crisis. Not only all institutions but all learning had been corrupted by the Whore of Babylon, and there was no longer any salvation to be got from Works."

I renew my request for people to read Furedi, one of the few modern writers who is applying this sort of analysis to today's world:
how the left became conservative
truth slips from view in the sea of post modern knowledge

XO study in Ethiopia

Ethiopia Implementation Report, September - December 2007 (pdf 14pp) by eduvision ("a Swiss company that offers an innovative turnkey solution for state-of-the-art education")

This report does provide some evidence for success in a method used to break down rigid, hierarchical teaching methods, which are part of a culture where it is seen to be impolite to question a teacher

In broad terms the method was to find ways of establishing some continuity with the existing culture and then, down the track, ask questions about what learning is being achieved through existing instructionist methods. In this case the way of joining but tweaking the existing culture was to provide interactive digital textbooks, rather than paper textbooks. The interactive features began to be used and appreciated by students and teachers

Melepo, an interactive book reader developed by Eduvision (http://www.eduvision.ch/en/OurService/melepo.php) was added to the OLPCs and for the older classes seems to have been the main software used (younger kids used games too). I think this software is commercial so, in that sense, it is difficult to generalise too much from this study.

Also, t