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.

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)

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)

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, the school was atypical in a sense (page 11, "the prestigious nature of the schools served to attract unusually experienced and dedicated teachers") - the above average teacher quality would have contributed significantly to the success

Duration of the project seems to have been fairly short --> 3 weeks (page 7)

The authors of the report are cautious about their claims:

"There was great willingness to please amongst the teachers and the students. This resulted in difficulties obtaining honest and accurate feedback. Whilst methods were devised to overcome this constraint it remained a constant factor through the trial ..." (page 12)

and

"it would be premature to draw summative conclusions concerning the overall efficacy of the programme at this stage ... " (page 13)

Some good discussion by Mokurai about this paper on the OLPC wiki:

The reported test results mostly concerned Eduvision's Melopo activities, rather than Sugar Activities. Since Melopo is also somewhat collaborative, the results should transfer.

The most important observation is that teaching with the laptops, even under the constraints of the prevailing system, changed teacher behavior toward more effective methods. Instead of reciting instructions without a chance to try them out, students began to be encouraged to work on the computers, following instructions as they are given.

Teachers began to use structured group activities and competitions, and to ask students to present material to the class. The structured techniques that the teachers put into their XO lesson plans then spilled over into their non-computer classes. Where before any question from a student was seen as an insult to the teacher, teachers began to offer individual instruction while other students were occupied on the computers. Students were encouraged to work in small groups, and began to help each other. After a time, teachers began to allow questions generally, and to set aside time for them.

Student motivation was observed to be higher because they could mark up their electronic texts with notes and highlighting. This is a critical software function. Document readers alone are not sufficient. Eduvision recommends adding hyperlinks and some software functions to electronic texts. (I recommend adding way more software functions.)

OLPC rollout

Community News July 6, 2008, provides an overview of the current OLPC rollout. Have a look at the pdf for a better graphical representation (and some pics of OLPC in Oceania):

Uruguay 130,000
Peru 70,000
Mexico 50,000
Birmingham, USA 10,000
Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, Mongolia approx 5,000 each provided by the Give1-Get1 program

Oceania rollout (of interest to me because close to Australia)
Trials have started or are in planning for these countries:

• Solomon Islands
• Papua New Guinea
• Nauru
• Kiribati
• Vanuatu
• New Caledonia
• Niue
• Tuvalu

More Oceania details here

Thanks Joel, for pointing out this information

XO pilot in Harlem

EVALUATION OF THE TEACHING MATTERS ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD (XO) PILOT AT KAPPA IV (pdf 33 pages)

... a pilot project to give the XO laptop to one class of sixth-grade students at Kappa IV, a middle school in Harlem

This report provides evidence for a few things about laptop computer use in industrialised or developed countries:

1) Getting the basics right is really important for school use - robust machines, batteries charged, students finding it easy to recover and get on with their work from session to session (from my experience the reliability / recovery / continuity issues are a significant problem even in computer labs where the machines are more protected from damage)

2) Students like the XO for many reasons

• ease of typing directly, faster and more legible
• ease of internet research
• take home for home work, show family, play games etc.
  
• small and light can be easily concealed in school bag to and from school
• cool design
• ability to take pictures, make videos, play games and chat
• personal ownership (most important IMO - this transforms everything)
• novelty

(note that some features of the XO were not significantly utilised, such as the various programming features like scratch, etoys etc.)

3) There are significant ways in which the XO still needs to improve - it's slow, the screen freezes and the cursor is jumpy

4) As we move from computer labs to individual use of computers at schools the computers have to be robust. Individual use with robust computers that can be taken home does work better than tablets (not robust enough) or trollies of laptops (it's a hastle getting them when you want them). There is a huge difference between a robust machine being always available to a student and having to organise use of computers and particular times and places only to find that they might be damaged in some way.

5) Home use is different from school use but is still educationally useful

6) Parents like it

The report doesn't even get to rigorous educational evaluations of the learning benefits. We are still at ground zero, working out the basics of how computers should be used in schools in industrialised countries. But due to dropping prices the computer lab is now a dinosaur and we need to at least begin to think about the concept of one laptop per child in the developed world - don't we?

extracts:

The main in-school differences between the laptops and the XOs, therefore, were that XOs were always available, always worked, and were student-specific (each student always had his/her own XO). These simple differences had major ramifications for classroom practice

The first and most important ramification was that students used the XOs more than they used the laptops, which means they spent more time doing research, wrote more, revised more, and published more. The second ramification was that the students took much more responsibility for the XOs than they did for the laptops, which means that they that they did not begin work only to find there were missing parts or that the battery was dead. And a third ramification was that the students were less likely to lose their work, not only because they always used the same machine but also because the XO has an automatic save feature that takes the user back to where he/she left off. Because of this, the students felt that they did not spend nearly as much time searching for, saving, moving, or reconstructing previous work as they did when working on the laptops .... (page 4)


Despite the fact that the tablets are assigned to individual students, they are nevertheless subject to several different types of damage, only some of which are due to age and many of which (according to the technology coordinators) happen almost immediately. These include hard drive crashes, dead batteries, cracked cases, cracked screens, lost or damaged pens, loose hinges, and missing keys. Broken screens, missing keys, and dead batteries were the issues most commonly cited for the laptops at the laptop school. On the other hand, in four months, only one screen on the XO broke (due to being dropped) and only one keyboard was torn (but was still usable). Broken screens on the XO can be replaced locally, which is not the case for the laptops or tablets (page 19)

Lots of interesting detail in the full report, which is a must read for educators interested in implementing mobile technology in schools. I picked this up from olpc-news, one laptop per new york city student a success

Here is a self organising map (SOM), from Gary Martin, generated for the report's text (click on it for larger view):

three differences in Arahuay

from Ivan Kristic, astounded-in-arahuay :

three differences that the OLPC has made to Arahuay, Peru (enhanced communication, sharing and legitimisation of school amongst parents):

As there are few roads in and around Arahuay, the children don’t communicate much outside of school — with anyone. The teachers started independently pointing out to Mr. Navarro that this was changing once the laptops arrived: kids started talking to each other outside of school hours over the mesh, and working together more while in school. They started talking a lot more with each other in person, and conquered their previously paralyzing fear of strangers.

The second thing, Mrs. Cornejo jumped in, is that the kids used to be pretty selfish, an unsurprising consequence of the abject poverty in much of Peru. It’s not that the kids are starving, it’s just that they don’t have very much; what they do have, they’re reluctant to share. With the laptops, the kids had to turn to each other to learn how to use them. Then they realized it was easy to send each other pictures and things they’ve written — and it became commonplace. The sharing, asserts Mrs. Cornejo, extended into the physical world, where once jealously-guarded personal items increasingly started being passed around between the kids, if somewhat nervously.

“Finally,” opened Mr. Navarro, and hesitated. He gave me another long look, clearly unsure if to proceed. I put on my best smile, and assured him it’s exactly the things he would hesitate to tell me that I want to hear most. He cleared his throat, and in a conspiratorial, low voice — despite the fact we were in an empty room in the town hall — explained he was sure, in the beginning, the pilot would fail.

“Children’s fathers used to seethe with fury when the laptops were passed out, because the kids no longer wanted to help work in the field all day,” he continued.

Mr. Navarro speaks in slow, measured sentences. He is thoughtful and confident, both reminders — along with his weathered face — of being, for many years, foremost a teacher.

“I didn’t know how we’d stop the fathers from revolting and making the kids return their XOs,” he says, shaking his head slightly. “The kids solved the dilemma for me: they taught their fathers how to use the Internet and a search engine.”

“Then they started showing them the work they were doing for school. The reports they wrote, the pictures they took, the notes they compiled. And the fathers had actual proof that their kids were learning,” he concluded.

The fathers, I later heard, all decided an education could stop their children from having no choice but to work the field all day as they did. With the laptops in place, the school was no longer a black box whose efficacy had to be taken on faith: the kids could prove they were learning. Schooling had gone open source. So their parents started having them help out only when necessary, and left them to read and write on their XO the rest of the time

Nothing else could make these three differences for a fraction of the cost. Also check out the magnificent photos at Ivan's blog. Carla Gomez Monray complements Ivan's account of Arahuay with an earlier very detailed, factual report from when they were first introduced. (OLPC Peru/Arahuay)

XO-LiveCD

Following the instructions on Tony Forster's blog (sharing with sugar) I downloaded the XO-LiveCD-080321.iso image, burnt an image CD and booted the latest OLPC software on my PC. Thanks Tony.

This partially solves the problem of the difficulty of educators in the developed world investigating the potential of the OLPC software and Sugar

I was pleasantly surprised to see how many different activities are now available, ranging from Paint, Write, Chat, music composition, multiple programming environments (Scratch is now on) and lots of games. I counted 41 different Activities.

I plan to take a couple of the Live CD's to school and see if we can setup Sugar collaboration there, as Tony has done on his home network (connecting a networked PC to his OLPC machine)

untangling Free, Sugar and Constructionism (walter bender)

Walter Bender Discusses Sugar Labs Foundation

I agree with the way that Walter Bender talks about Free, Sugar and Constructionism as though they are different things which can be brought together synergistically to enhance the overall learning impact. I think it's important not to mix up these words in a fuzzy jumble, to be able to speak clearly about the different aspects of something you support, the OLPC, [no, not necessarily the OLPC but whatever material construct that Free, Sugar and Constructionism becomes embodied in]

Also, in an imperfect world where you can't achieve everything at once it's important to try to tease out the relative impact of each piece of the mix. If we can't obtain OLPCs for Australian schools, for instance, then it still might be possible to do something along similar lines if we understand the issues deeply.

Free:

We should provide tools that skew the odds towards appropriation, without being proscriptive. For example, you could give a child a book as a PDF file or in a Wiki format. In both cases, the child can read the book. But the choice of representation does make a difference: the chances that the child will add a comment to a PDF file, which is read-only, are much less than to a Wiki page, which has built-in affordances for annotation.

Bringing the concepts together, the culture that is embodied in the FOSS movement — a meritocracy that is built upon both collaboration and critique — is synergistic with some core principles of learning, so, where possible, I try to embrace that culture. (The guidelines when I was still at OLPC were to choose FOSS tools over proprietary tools when there was not a significant difference in terms of the impact on learning.)

So, for Walter learning is more important than FOSS but if the software is roughly equivalent then choose FOSS. I agree.

Sugar:

Sugar revisits how computers can be used for education: it explicitly promotes sharing and collaborative learning. At its core is the concept of an “Activity”. Activities are software applications such as a web browser, a word processor, or even a calculator, that, when “Sugarized”, are enhanced by three key features:
(1) the application is readily shared with others; for example, to share what you are reading with others requires just one “button click”; in the word processor, Sugar provides the ability to do peer-to-peer editing, again with just one click; a chat window is always available for seeking help, sharing ideas, or exchanging data;
(2) a journal entry is created every time an application is run; not only are files and data automatically saved, but a diary is created so that a child, his/her teacher, and parents can monitor progress; and
(3) applications run full-screen in a simplified framework, yet there is no upper bound on the complexity that can be reached; for example, TamTam, a music Activity that is bundled with Sugar, enables a child to progress from playing a single instrument to layering multiple instruments and rhythms to playing music in synchrony with other children to composing music to designing new instruments to programming music.

I would summarise this three points of what it means to be “Sugarized” as:
(1) Shareable with one click, ease of sharing, conversation and community
(2) All edits can be tracked through the journal (it's invaluable for a teacher to know which students are editing since many students don't edit)
(3) low entry, high ceiling

I think this clarifies what Sugar is, not just a new User Interface, with different features than Windows, but also a way of doing things that is built into the Activities (which replace Applications). Others have acknowledged the confusion of identifying clearly what Sugar is. In the Power of Sugar Christoph Derndorfer pins Sugar down as a "gravitational force" ie. there is a cloud of different concepts floating around in idea space and Sugar is a unifying concept that picks out some concepts and brings them together, including:

information storage and retrieval (Journal) and the fact that collaboration is a “first order experience”

Constructionism:

“Constructionism” is a theory of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert. Papert first started developing the theory as a student of Piaget in the early 1960s. Over the course of more than 40 years of research and practice, Papert and his students found that children learn best when they are in the “active role of the designer and constructor” and that this happens best in a context where the child is “consciously engaged in constructing a public entity” — something “truly meaningful” for the learner. Further, the creation process and the end product must be shared with others in order for the full effects to take root.

I think this part is correct as far as it goes but it does leave out creating the meta-learning environment, which does require a lot of work by the teacher

Affordances:

I notice also that Walter uses the word affordances a couple of times and I think that is just the right word to use, because affordances means the opportunity is there but not the inevitability (eg. bad teaching can destroy the best intentions of those who designed the machine):

Sugar provides simple and readily available affordances for learners engaging in construction and sharing the process and end products with others ...

Sugar is at present unique in the way in which it provides affordances for collaboration for all applications ...

Scope:

... some are writing software to improve Sugar; some are porting Sugar to new platforms; some are developing new activities that run in Sugar; some are helping to debug Sugar and help with quality assurance; some are writing documentation for Sugar developers and for those who use Sugar in the field; some are developing new scenarios for learning with Sugar; some are using Sugar and reporting upon their experiences to the community; and some are providing help and support

What a great list of possibilities! So, there is some scope here for educators as well as python developers - ideas for new activities to run on Sugar and developing new scenarios for learning with Sugar.

One question though: With OLPCs only being distributed to the developing world and with limited options for educators in industrialised countries to obtain at least two OLPCs (at least two are necessary for collaborative activities), then how do interested educators acquire the basic material substrate to become actively involved in these activities and scenarios? There needs to be a way for educators in developed countries to obtain OLPCs. We are currently stuck in our wealthy countries doing thought experiments for the impoverished. (the Give one - Get one scheme was limited to the USA / Canada, had a limited time frame and from some reports the distribution was inefficient or worse)

Ivan Kristic's challenges

I also agree that Ivan Kristic's recent blog, sic-transit-gloria-laptopi, is a must read, warts and all, for its passion and the challenging way in which it airs some important questions, such as:

Can constructionism scale?

As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to "decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget", he's talking about theory.

Is there any evidence that "free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning?"

This insight:

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences. They're listed in order of exponentially increasing difficulty

This assertion:

A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.

This proposal:

I’m trying to convince Walter not to start a Sugar Foundation, but an Open Learning Foundation. For those who still care about learning in this whole clusterfuck of conflicting agendas, the charge should be to start that organization, since OLPC doesn’t want to be it. Having a company that is device-agnostic and focuses entirely on the learning ecosystem, from deployment to content to Sugar, is not only what I think is sorely needed to really take the one-to-one computer efforts to the next level, but also an approach that has a good chance of making the organization doing the work self-sustaining at some point

untangling constructionism

It can be important to know what words really mean and to use them correctly. I think the word "constructionism" is being thrown around carelessly at the moment. These trends should be avoided IMO:

• that constructionism is the best or only good learning theory
• that constructionism is just learning by doing and making
• that constructionism means much the same as freedom

OLPC wiki Constructionism page:

Constructionism is a philosophy of education in which children learn by doing and making. They explore and discover instead of being force fed information

Walter Bender:

The other thing is that I was very much influenced by Seymour Papert and his constructionist theories, which can be summarized in my mind very efficiently by two aphorism. One is that you learn through doing, so if you want more learning you want more doing. The second is that love is a better master than duty. You want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. The first is more addressed by the Sugar technology; the second is more addressed by the culture around freedom.
- xconomy interview

Benjamin Mako Hill:

"Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles" (although this article does overall separate constructionism from freedom, it does not attempt to explain the difference)
- laptop liberation

Some points in response:

Learning by doing and making is a big part of constructionism but not the whole thing. Some doing and making is fairly mundane and not much internal "construction" is taking place. Also "doing and making" is not a single magic bullet to learning. This might mean that the theory of constructionism needs to be supplemented with other theories. It also means that the sort of "doing and making" that tends to improve learning needs to be explicated. eg. turtle geometry might work because it is "body syntonic".

Constructionism and software freedom are not the same thing. Both proprietary and open source software development are exercises in constructionism, the difference is that the latter is open to everyone with the required skill level. Software freedom is an essential part of the constructionist learning environment for software developers. But different types of constructionist learning can occur without software freedom. eg. Building things with commercial LEGO. Not everyone is a software developer and although it is highly desirable that many third world children become software developers this is not the only possible constructionist pathway open to them.

Constructionism and open ended discovery learning are not the same thing; the latter has given the former a bad name - because it usually doesn't work.

Proprietary software can be constructionist eg. MicroWorlds is Seymour Papert's sponsored version of Logo

Constructionism is one good learning theory. It is not the only good learning theory. There is no unified "correct" learning theory and it is a mistake to claim one.

Reference:
Papert's Ideas: Mainly from Mindstorms

OLPC controversies

For those who want to keep up with current thinking about the OLPC divisions:

OLPC Controversies
Edward Cherlin has created a new wiki page with sections for the major arguments currently happening over OLPC strategy and tactics, included links to blog posts, mailing list threads, and interviews with Nicholas Negroponte

its an education project
Walter Bender has setup a mailing list for discussion about the educational mission (I've joined)

OLPC shakeout: the battle for Sugar

One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force ...

Walter Bender clarifies his reasons for leaving OLPC:

What’s next for OLPC? I would rather OLPC answer for themselves. Nicholas has made it clear, at least to me, that OLPC needs to be strategically agnostic about learning—that it can’t be prescriptive about learning. So that’s his opinion and that’s where he’s taking OLPC, and that’s not what I want to do, so I left.

X: When you say “agnostic about learning,” what I take that to mean is that there’s a feeling that the XO Laptop should run Windows, and not just Linux and Sugar.

WB: I think it’s pretty obvious and was obvious from the very beginning that it’s a lot easier to cater to people’s comfort than to be disruptive. Nicholas had that wonderful quote in BusinessWeek about a month ago—that OLPC is going to stop acting like a terrorist and start emulating Microsoft. If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers. And that’s a marketing strategy, and one that I think has been adopted by many laptop manufacturers. Personally, I think that the customer is not always right, and that a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them. But that is a minority opinion, so I left to do my own thing.

Excellent interview. Read the whole thing. This bit is great:

X: Let’s back up. You’ve said many times, and so has Nicholas Negroponte, that OLPC is a learning project, not a laptop project. So can you talk about the basic pedagogical principles that are important to you, and how Sugar embodies those?

WB: When we started to do this, I tried to build the solution based on three very simple principles about what makes us human. Because I knew this had to be something that worked everywhere, with every child. The first of the three things is that everyone is a teacher and a learner. Second, humans by their nature are social beings. Third, humans by their nature are expressive. I decided those would be the pillars of how we design the user experience for the laptop. The other thing is that I was very much influenced by Seymour Papert and his constructionist theories, which can be summarized in my mind very efficiently by two aphorism. One is that you learn through doing, so if you want more learning you want more doing. The second is that love is a better master than duty. You want people to engage in things that are authentic to them, things that they love. The first is more addressed by the Sugar technology; the second is more addressed by the culture around freedom.

Issues (I'm not a developer, the following are some of the fracture lines I can work out from quickly reading some entries on the laptop.org lists):

• Sugar development is under resourced despite requests internally to improve this situation
• To port Sugar to Windows is not a trivial undertaking
• Many believe that Sugar / Windows dual boot system will not ship, that MS will not allow it
• Allegations of lack of transparency or consultation from Negroponte in decision making (see Ivan Kristic's This too shall pass ...)
• OLPC software development will fork between a proprietary pathway and an open source (GPL) pathway
  

Ivan Kristic:

Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way” is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success. The organization decided to move anyway, and extended me a written offer to take over as Chief Software Architect. Nicholas rescinded the offer unilaterally several weeks later, for reasons he refused to explain to anyone. So yes, there was no architect, but that’s because Nicholas didn’t want one. If he believes that’s the cause of Sugar’s problems, he has no one but himself to blame
- This too shall pass

I wrote an earlier blog about the community user interface aspect of Sugar.

My current evaluation: The developers value Sugar highly as a new UI and that many of them believe that its ongoing development is not secure if left up to Negroponte's leadership. Sugar is the main current manifestation of the desirable disruptive pathway that Bender is talking about (what are the others?). Nicholas started a revolution that has bred new revolutionaries who will continue the revolution.

tragically, I was right

A little while after I first heard about the "one laptop per child project" I wrote this cynical comment (March 2006):

Reality check: The philanthropist Negroponte is paving the way for the bigger philanthropist Gates to make some more money

I then rethought and became an ardent supporter. But tragically it turns out that my initial gut reaction was correct.

For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result, Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a "dual-boot" option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar.

One current hang-up is whether the necessary hardware would add $7 to $12 to an XO's cost, taking the project even further away from its eventual goal of producing the machines for less than $100. Eventually, Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it.
- source

So, the OLPC will become the vehicle for expanding Microsoft's market share in the Third World. And don't forget Intel's undermining role in all of this too. Step by step, the childlike drama of bringing the OLPC to the poor has turned into an ugly reality play of monopoly capitalism's ceaseless greed for profit.

No. I don't think that is what the supporters of OLPC were hoping for.

Am I one of those open source fundamentalists that Negroponte talks about here:

"There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."

No, I'm not. But at times like this I would kiss the ground that Richard Stallman walks on.

I'm not saying this is the end of the world or the end of my support for the OLPC. Actually, I'm not sure so the logo is still up there for the time being while I think about it. I like Tom Hoffman's positive approach - Mary Lou Jepson does the hardware and Walter Bender does the software.

I just wish I had been wrong in my initial estimate.

update (24th April):
clarification from Negroponte: "perfection is the enemy of good"

Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed. I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices. Our mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the world. Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure Open Source. I believe the best educational tool is constructionism and the best software development method is Open Source. In some cases those are best achieved like the Trojan Horse, versus direct confrontation or isolating ourselves with perfection. Remember the expression: perfection is the enemy of good.

I may be able to live with this, through my gritted purist teeth - good that it is now out in the open - one of those issues that puts the head and the heart in conflict

Tom Hoffman's blog has good commentary on sugar, spread out over a few months - do a search using keyword "sugar" (results)

OLPC: what is going on?

From the public statements of Ivan Kristic and Walter Bender it is clear that the OLPC project, which promised so much, is going through acute problems.

Ivan Kristic quit OLPC in March due to an internal restructure. The details are not fully explained in his blog but there is enough there to be worrying:

"Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project."
- http://radian.org/notebook/maintaining-clarity

Today I discovered that Walter Bender has also quit, issuing this polite explanation:

After more than two years without a break at One Laptop per Child, I have decided to take some time to reflect on how I can best contribute going forward to the goal of giving children around the world opportunities for a quality learning experience. The OLPC Association is making headway getting laptops into the hands of children and it is encouraging to see that other non-profit and for-profit organizations are following suit. My personal interest is in helping build a community of developers, educators, and learners dedicated to advancing the quality of free and open source software for learning and the sharing of pedagogical approaches in this community by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement.

While my goal is to create a complementary effort to broaden the reach of the software and pedagogy--a free and open framework in support of "learning learning", I hope to continue working with the great team at OLPC as well as the various groups that have formed around the world in support of one-laptop-per-child deployments.

Thank you for all of your support over the past two years and for all the feedback and encouragement you have given me.
- Where is Walter?

So why is it that Walter can't help "build a community of developers, educators, and learners dedicated to advancing the quality of free and open source software for learning and the sharing of pedagogical approaches in this community by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement" from within the OLPC organisation?

I don't see much point in speculating. But the OLPC does rely enormously on winning the hearts and minds of its supporters. Unless the top leadership are more open about what is happening inside then that support will surely erode? Supporters need to know what it is they are supporting.

study marvin minsky's work

It was a huge moment for me to receive a comment from marvin minsky on my blog recently

Maybe others would like to join me in studying his work?

Some things take a while to figure out. Papert and Minsky worked closely together at the MIT Media lab but Papert wrote about education of children and Minsky wrote about Artifical Intelligence, how to make machines think. Where did it meet? This is explained by Papert in his Afterword to Mindstorms:

For several years now Marvin Minsky and I have been working on a general theory of intelligence (called "The Society Theory of Mind") which has emerged from a strategy of thinking simultaneously about how children do and how computers might think ... the point of departure that separates us from most other members (of the AI community) is (that) ... seeing ideas from computer science not only as instruments of explanation of how learning and thinking in fact do work, but also as instruments of change that might alter, and possibly improve, the way people learn and think ... Marvin Minsky was the most important person in my intellectual life during the growth of the ideas in this book. It was from him that I first learned that computation could be more than a theoretical science and a practical art: It can also be the material from which to fashion a powerful and personal vision of the world" (pp. 208-210)

Society of Mind(1987) is a fascinating and brilliantly written book. Each page of the book presents a new idea, which piece by piece build to create a big picture of how parts of the mind might work. I read this book a long time ago but many of the ideas in it still seem fresh and relevant, eg. (why maths and science are hard)

Minsky's new book, The Emotion Machine, is available on line in draft form if you want to check it out before buying

Also check out these recent writings in support of the OLPC project

A lot of the research into the mind these days focuses on connectionism and neuroscience. With the noise and interest generated from those areas it is easy to get the impression that things have moved on and Minsky's ideas are out of date. However, it was recently pointed out to me that Minsky's ideas are very relevant to the notion of messy mind. It would be a huge mistake to not take a hard look at his latest contributions.

If you search this blog with the keyword 'minsky' you'll find several other relevant articles too.

Wayan Vota's melodrama

Read the comments on this melodramatic post by perpetual OLPC critic, Wayan Vota: this is the end my friend: Negroponte says XP on XO in 60 days

I thought the comments by delphi and Jordan were good, also ThePete and TankerKevo (search for their names if short of time)

The FOSS movement seems to consist of at least two sorts of people. Those who would impose FOSS on everyone (lock in) and those who actually believe in democracy and freedom including the right of Microsoft to compete and not be locked out of the OLPC.

The former group are dangerous. They want to replace a bad thing (monopoly capitalism) with a worse thing (Communist Party Soviet Union style compulsion).

Wayan Vota has always said that the OLPC is a hardware project and not an educational project. He hates Negroponte. Now he is saying that because Microsoft might put Windows on the OLPC it is the end of the road of the OLPC as an educational project - even though he has always denied that it was an educational project in the first place.

At any rate his melodrama is technocentric - that the OS decides everything. It doesn't.

As a few commentators on the thread point out:

• there are real problems with Sugar
• all the constructionist software runs fine under Windows

OLPC implementation in Australia: some blocking points

I haven't been blogging much about the OLPC lately.

My perception is that the education system in Australia is so conformist that there doesn't appear to be a single school, Principal or Department in the whole country that is prepared to give the OLPC a chance. If I found such a niche I would apply to teach there. Failing that I'm not quite ready to leave my country of birth, (yet).

OLPC ought to be given a chance in remote aboriginal communities. This could work.

Part of the problem here is that plans to fix things are centred around standardised testing, based on the need to measure improvement. See teaching to the test. This is at odds with the constructionist learning theory promoted by the OLPC group.

Another issue working against the OLPC is fear of the internet (porn, pedophiles and online bullying). Sadly, many educators, particularly administrators, do not support the notion of a real personal computer in the hands of children, any children. They see the risks outweighing the benefits. This fear is visceral.

There is also a profound lack of understanding of what could be achieved educationally with personal computers distributed to young children. This parallels the lack of understanding of what can be achieved with a programming language microworld such as logo - and the decline of the use of logo in schools in the past 15 years.

Summing up: standards, fear of a true PC and epistemological miasma. These issues taken together add up currently to a "no go" sign in implementing OLPC based education in certain areas of Australia, such as remote indigenous communities, where it could be invaluable.