the Great Repression

One thing we have in this economic crisis is the internet. Hence, we can search for an economist who knows what they are talking about far more efficiently than in the past. My current search has led to niall ferguson who is entertaining and imaginative as well as knowledgeable

... There is something desperate about the way people on both sides of the Atlantic are clinging to their dog-eared copies of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Uneasily aware that their discipline almost entirely failed to anticipate the current crisis, economists seemed to be regressing to macroeconomic childhood, clutching the multiplier like an old teddy bear.

The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Average household sector debt has reached 141 per cent of disposable income in the United States and 177 per cent in the United Kingdom. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets forty, sixty or even a hundred times the size of their capital. Average U.S. investment bank leverage was above 25 to 1 at the end of 2008. Eurozone bank leverage was more than 30 to 1. British bank balance sheets are equal to a staggering 440 per cent of gross domestic product

The delusion that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt is at the heart of the Great Repression. Yet that is precisely what most governments currently propose to do.
Beyond the Age of Leverage: Alternative Cures for the Global Financial Crisis

His solution is to nationalise the banks and to convert American mortgages to lower-interest rates and longer maturities

Another speculative piece by niall ferguson is entertaining with a perhaps unlikely happy american ending:

That was the true significance of the Great Repression which began in August 2007 and reached its nadir in 2009. It was clearly not a Great Depression on the scale of the 1930s, when output in the US declined by as much as a third and unemployment reached 25 per cent. Nor was it merely a Big Recession. As output in the developed world continued to decline throughout 2009 – despite the best efforts of central banks and finance ministries – the tag “Great Repression” seemed more and more apt: although this was the worst economic crisis in 70 years, many people remained in deep denial about it...

If proof were needed that the US constitution still worked, here it was. If proof were needed that America had expunged its original sin of racial discrimination, here it was. And if proof were needed that Americans were pragmatists, not ideologues, here it was. It was not that Obama’s New New Deal – announced after the Labor Day purge of the Clintonites – produced an economic miracle. Nobody had expected it to do so. It was more that the federal takeover of the big banks and the conversion of all private mortgage debt into new 50-year Obamabonds signalled an impressive boldness on the part of the new president...

The “unipolar moment” was over, no question. But power is a relative concept, as the president pointed out in his last press conference of the year: “They warned us that America was doomed to decline. And we certainly all got poorer this year. But they forgot that if everyone else declined even further, then America would still be out in front. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

And, with a wink, President Barack Obama wished the world a happy new year.
An imaginary retrospective of 2009

our maths decline

A disturbing set of numbers

Nalini Joshi, President of the Australian Mathematics Society:

The international table of mathematics skills, the four-yearly Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, shows that our achievement scores in Year 8 mathematics have steadily declined since 1995. In the latest results in 2007, Britain and even the US, countries we used to beat, significantly outperformed Australian Year 8 students in mathematics. Unless we can stop the decline of well-trained mathematics teachers in our schools, this will continue.

The deepening tragedy of our education system is that this vicious cycle propagates itself. For years the numbers taking advanced or intermediate courses in Year 12 mathematics in Australian schools have steadily dwindled, and the students completing a major in mathematics at university has declined. As a proportion of total graduates, our universities now produce fewer than half as many graduates with qualifications in mathematics or statistics as other developed nations. The result is a decline in qualified maths teachers...

Students also face rising inequity in the current system. There are almost certainly differences in the public and private education systems. There has been a dramatic expansion in private mathematics coaching in Australia in recent years. Businesses offering tutoring or software for school students have proliferated across shopping centres over the past decade as parents have moved to supplement school education increasingly with private tuition in mathematics. The looming economic downturn means that a much smaller proportion of families will be able to afford this.

As a mathematician and a parent, I do not understand why Australians must tolerate an education system that is inferior to that in America or Britain. Nor do I understand why we should accept a growing disparity in access to mathematics education across our school system. All Australian children deserve qualified mathematics teachers. Yet in Australia, policy-makers have either ignored the problems or taken only fragmented steps and half-measures to address them.

Read the whole article for some half hearted measures that have been taken to improve maths education a little, eg. halving of HECS fees for University students enrolled in science and mathematics courses

Some thoughts:
At the beginning the author says:

Yet Australian school children are coming out of schools not knowing that doing a calculation with pencil and paper is the way to learn mathematics. While the federal Government is ploughing money into infrastructure, we are staring at the vista of shiny new classrooms and rows of laptops with no mathematics teachers.

I agree that maths education is declining in Australia to an alarming and depressing extent but don't agree that there is only one way to fix it. The Australian will always advocate for a back to basics or traditional "pencil and paper" approach. Maths education could also be improved with innovative and creative approaches using laptops. However, improvement in either way does require teachers who understand maths and we are failing many students in that regard.

I am also wondering if it suits our ruling class to keep most of the population both mathematical ignorant and mathophobic. We currently seem to have a swathe of policies to do with economics and the environment that if exposed to a mathematically literate population would possibly be the subject of mass derision.

"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense"
- John McCarthy: Progress and its Sustainability

economic downturn comparisons

Shows where we are at compared with the Great Depression

Click on image for larger view
Source: Graph of historic financial collapses

Galarrwuy Yunupingu

Tradition, Truth and Tomorrow

Today, nearly all my people live in shambling, broken-down places with poor houses, poor roads, bad schools, little or no health care, with whitefellas in a welfare industry who service us when they can, if they want. We are captives of welfare, which means we are wards of the state relying on handouts from public servants to get by, and therefore our lives are controlled by governments and public servants who can do what they want, when they feel like it. And people suffer from their neglect - just look at our communities and the lives too many of our people are forced to endure. Although the wealth of the Australian nation has been taken from our soil, our communities and homelands bear no resemblance to the great towns and metropolises of the modern Australian nation. The intervention and what it promises is important. I do not set it aside completely. But I tell my family now: no government, no politician, no journalist or TV man, no priest, no greenie, no well-meaning dreamer from the city is going to put your life right for you. I have committed my clan to the future and my family supports me, even as it struggles with everyday life. And I will continue this commitment.

Read the whole essay

Scratch challenges update

The way I have introduced scratch this year to students (years 10 and 11 in my case, but it might work with younger students as well) has been to:

• first ask them to complete the scratch cards provided at the Scratch MIT site
• then to complete the following challenges

SCRATCH CHALLENGES

1) Make 2 different balls move around on the stage
a) the first ball moves in straight lines but bounces randomly whenever it hits the edge
b) the second moves randomly, changing direction all the time

2a) One sprite chases another sprite around the stage. The first sprite moves in straight line but bounces off the edge randomly. The chasing sprite chases the first sprite but is moving slower.
b) Extension – if the chasing sprite catches the other sprite then it says something sensible and makes a suitable sound

3) Use the Letter shapes to write your first name on the page. Then introduce some special effects such as making the letters wobble and change their appearance.

4) Point, click and move
Make an object both point and glide towards the mouse position when you click on the stage
Hint: Motion > point towards
Hint: Sensing > mouse down?

5) Make two animals have a forwards and backwards conversation
Hint: Use broadcast

6a) Play all the different drum sounds automatically
Hint: create a variable for the drum number
b) Extension – keep recycling through all the drum sounds automatically

7) Make Dan or Anjuli or Cassy dance to a beat, using all of their dance shapes

8) Make a sprite gradually grow in size and then shrink
Hint: make a size variable

9) Count down on a timer. A rocket takes off when you reach zero
Hint: Use the number icons in the letters folder

10) Add, multiply or subtract two variable numbers
Hint: Just to do addition only you will need 4 variables: firstNum, secondNum, answer (computer calculated) and myAnswer (human calculated)


In thinking about how to optimise, improve and extend this whole process I re-read some of my earlier posts about Scratch. This one is important in thinking about what the teacher ought to be doing beyond building skills:

playing with the kindergarten metaphor

imagine -> create -> play -> share -> reflect and then iterate again ...

Learning to share is harder than learning to ride a bicycle or write a computer program - but more important ...

Minsky quote: Logo has a great grammar but not much literature

It's important to explicitly promote reflection

I also expect that I will be using the excellent project ideas developed by a Mr. Michaud at Nebo Elementary School as a next step in a progression.

video: capitalism hits the fan

I’m posting this as a discussion piece about the current economic crisis. It probably has both factual and analytical errors as well as correct points. It is a good piece for thinking and discussion for someone like me who is not very strong on economic theory but sees the need to improve this given the current crisis.

Capitalism Hits the Fan, Video by Richard Wolff

His purpose is to explain the origins of the current economic crisis and to encourage people to take matters into their own hands, since those in charge don’t know what they are doing

What the crisis is not:

• It is not a financial crisis in the sense that it arises from the whole economic system
• It is not temporary, fleeting or short

In the Great Depression (1929-39), Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt introduced monetary and fiscal policies but they didn’t get us out of the Depression; World War 2 is what got us out

These long lasting economic crises are not just events that only happened long ago. In 1989, Japan’s economy encountered a severe downturn and has still not recovered, 18 years later. Japan is the second most important industrial country in the world.

The policies of Paulson (Treasury Secretary) and Bernanke (Federal Reserve Chairman) have been to stimulate the economy, to make money easier to obtain through lower interest rates, tax rebates and other measures

These policies were tried and failed in Japan and they will fail in the USA now. Already many stimulus policies have been tried and failed, only to be followed by a “bigger and better” stimulus policy.

Historical Framework of the Crisis, 1820-1970

Astonishing fact: In every decade of this 150 year period (1820-1970) the workers in the USA had a rising level of real wages. Even in the Great Depression decade (1930s) wages went down but prices went down even more. It is probably the only country in the world which can say that.

USA is a rich country, good quality land, supports productivity through immigration, improved technology and training etc. Workers were very productive and were rewarded with a rising standard of living.

Americans have internalized the experience of 150 years of expanding prosperity. This is sometimes called “American exceptionalism”, that there is something unique about America. The expectation is that “My children will live better than I do”. Americans have internalized the notion that they are copious consumers of goods. America invented advertising and became a society of consumption.

The Trauma of Flat Wages: 1970s – now

Starting in the 1970s, real wages stopped rising in the USA and have never resumed since. This is a fundamental change but the American people have not come to terms with it.

Why did real wages stop rising? (4 reasons):

1. Technology – the efficient and versatile computer has replaced existing work
2. Other industrialized countries (Japan, Europe) had comprehensively recovered from WW2 by 1970 and became efficient competitors to American capitalism. We no longer produce many televisions or automobiles in the USA. This led to a massive export of jobs.
3. Women went to work in much greater numbers, part time and full time jobs
4. Massive wave of Immigration, especially from Central and Latin America

So the new situation is more people looking for jobs (women, immigrants) but less jobs available (computer technology, export of jobs to abroad). This chronic unemployment is a recipe for real wages that don’t go up anymore.

How have American workers coped or adapted to the decline in real wages? ( 2 responses)

The first response is that the American working people did more work, put in more hours. The average hour worked by an American since 1970 has increased by 20%. By comparison the average hours worked in France, Germany and Italy have dropped by 20%

However, more work, more hours, for more people in each house (men and women) creates more costs as well as more dollars

The second response was that American working people went on the biggest borrowing binge ever in the history of the human race. At first they borrowed against the house (collateral - assets pledged by a borrower to secure a loan or other credit, and subject to seizure in the event of default). But the American people didn’t have enough collateral to borrow enough to keep their standard of living rising. Something else had to be invented to allow borrowing with no collateral at all.

So the credit card was created to allow banks to lend to the working people with no collateral at all. In economic terms this is called unsecured debt.

But no lender will lend to you without collateral unless there is something in it for them. The answer is the rate of interest. The average rate of Interest on a credit card today is 18% per year.

This borrowing solved a deep problem which arose from the history– how to maintain the impetus of the 150 years (up until 1970) now that real wages had stopped rising.

What has all of this led to:

• a working class which is exhausted by the amount of work it does
• a collapsing personal life created by too much work
• anxiety due to average level of debt exceeding average income

Our society has reached the limit. We cannot carry more debt and we cannot do more work. This is not a temporary problem. We have reached the limits of the kind of capitalism this society has become.

How did Business deal with the end of rising real wages?

The last 30 years have been SPECTACULAR for business, a period of rising labour productivity due to the introduction of computer technology. Workers were paid the same and yet they produced are more. So there were more profits arising from flat wages and rising productivity. This led to the greatest profit boom in the history of American capitalism.

This was an employers fantasy come true. I pay my workers the same and they work more and more for me. Wild euphoria. Unbelievable profits:

• Increased levels wages and bonuses for business, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in annual salaries.
• They bought out competitors, they had the money to do this – mergers and acquisitions
• Business banked their money so that Banks became more powerful, had more money
• Then they lent these profits to their employees – the profits that the flat wages of the workers had made possible were then lent to the employees who produced that profit

The working class were desperate to borrow

One example was General Motors who setup a bank named GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation). They lent money to workers to buy cars. This led to them making more money from the interest on their loans than selling cars. About ten years ago they became a general lender and went into the mortage business.

It is so profitable to push debt onto the American people that everybody does it.

Booms and Busts

They ended up lending to people who couldn’t pay it back. Boom and bust is built into this system. The only difference now is that it comes at the end of this long historical period where it has reached its outer limits.

This is now admitted by Greenspan to be “irrational exuberance”

Bubbles

Dot com internet bubble in the late 1990s-2000, then crash

The government was fearful and reacted by lowering interest rates. This led to more borrowing and the housing bubble, then another collapse

There is nothing left to bubble

Business now suffers from the anxiety and exhaustion (for different reasons) that was previously visited onto the working class. The economic landscape is littered with corpses.

Regulation won’t work

We won’t solve our problems with the monetary and fiscal policy that is currently being implemented.

What might be done instead of attempts to stimulate, attempts to bail out, government buying shares in the banks etc.?

Given the historical context these small halting steps do not add up to a solution. Some in Washington don’t think it will work either and so now some are suggesting regulation. But that won’t work either.

In the first 30 years after WW2 we lived in a regulated economy. Regulations cover what Banks are allowed to do, what Boards of Directors of Corporations are allowed to do, new institutions such as social security. These regulations arose from the desperation of the Great Depression. These regulations were in place from the 1930s to the mid 1970s.

Beginning with Reagan and continuing with Bush senior, Clinton and GW Bush we had an era of deregulation.

Some argue that if we reintroduce regulation now then that will fix our problems. Part of this is understandable, we did regulate our way out of the Great Depression. But another part of it is blind.

Regulation is meant to control capitalists, Boards of Directors. But what happens is that the Boards of Directors are highly motivated to work against and to weaken and destroy regulations. Capitalists are the enemy of regulation and work continually to undermine them. It is bizarre policy to introduce regulation whilst leaving in place Boards of Directors of big corporations who you know will work hard to undermine them. Not only do they have the incentives to undo regulations but they also have the resources since they are the people who receive the profits.

The American working class supported Roosevelt’s regulation but they won’t do that again. If we leave the structure of enterprise unchanged then we won’t be addressing the real issue: the conflict between those who own and run enterprises and those who work in them.

Solutions

Regulation could work if the workers owned the business.

We need to extend democracy to the economic sphere, as well as the political sphere.

Many American workers have already implemented a form of this. Some Silicon Valley workers quit their jobs and work out of garages in a communal manner. In one way of thinking this could be called Marx’s idea of a communist enterprise.

In another way of speaking we could describe it as a "remarkably successful entrepreneurial initiative". People describing it this way are Republicans, who have never read Marx. Republicans in in Bermuda shorts in California are behaving like a communist enterprise

If we don’t take basic steps of this kind to deal with the crisis of capitalism then we will all be very sorry.

energy release calculation for the Victorian bushfires

David Packham estimated that the energy released in the recent Victorian bushfires was equivalent to 660 Hiroshima bombs. This surprised me and the figure also supports the argument for the need for fuel reduction.

I did my own calculations based on the Victorian fires and found that Packham seems to be roughly correct. I obtained the figure of 1290 Hiroshima bomb equivalents compared to Packham’s estimate of 660. I'm not saying that my figures are more accurate, there is some guess work involved, but my figure is in the same ballpark as that estimated by David Packham

Here are my calculations.

David Packham:

More than 330,000 hectares were destroyed in Victoria’s “hell on earth” bushfires and according to Mr Packham each hectare contained 30 tons of bushfire fuel — adding up to 9.9m tons. ”That equates to the energy release of 660 Hiroshima bombs” ...
- Victoria's bushfires compared to Hiroshima

Yield of Hiroshima Bomb: 1 Hiroshima Bomb is roughly 20 Kilotons TNT Equivalents of 1 Kiloton of TNT: 1 Kiloton TNT equals 1.15 x 10^6 Kilowatt-hours. KT means Kiloton.
- The fission product equivalent between nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons

The amount of energy in wood is a tricky one to calculate accurately. It can vary between fresh wood which has only 2000 Btu/pound of energy and the "high heat value" of 8660 Btu/lb, which is obtained only with perfectly dry wood (0% moisture content) and only in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. Given that the Victorian fires were fuelled mainly by partially or largely dried out dead fuel then it is fair to take an intermediate figure, let us say 5000 Btu/pound
- The Amount of Energy in Wood Fuel

1 Btu (thermochemical) = 0.00029287508333 kilowatt-hours
http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm

1 pound = 0.00045359237 ton (metric)
http://www.onlineconversion.com/weight_all.htm

By our estimate, wood burns to create 5000 Btu/pound. To convert to Kilowatt-hours / ton then multiply by 0.00029287508333 and divide by 0.00045359237

Hence wood burns to create roughly 3300 kilowatt-hours / ton (rounded). For 9 million tons burnt –> 9 * 10^6 * 3300 kilowatt-hours energy = VB (victorian bushfires)

1 Hiroshima bomb = 20 * 1.15 x 10^6 Kilowatt-hours = HB (Hiroshima bomb)

To calculate Hiroshima bomb equivalents divide VB by HB = 1290 Hiroshima bomb equivalents

David Packham's qualifications:

OAM, MAppSci, worked for 40 years in bushfire research with CSIRO, Monash University and the Australian Emergency Management Institute. He was responsible for fire weather services in the Bureau of Meteorology. His extensive research concentrated on the physics of bushfires, and he applied this research to practical issues including the development of aerial prescribed burning, non-evacuation of properties, modelling of fire behaviour, and forensics

australian bushfires analysis

When I dug into this issue the main thing that shocked me was that a group of people in Australia (the Stretton group, formed in 2003) has been actively warning and lobbying about this threat for years. More importantly, they have also presented strategies about how to prevent such destructive fires. This group has had some success in implementing their policies in Western Australia but have been largely ignored in Victoria, which is the worst bushfire region in the world.

Fuels build up year after year at an approximate rate of one tonne a hectare a year, up to a maximum of about 30 tonnes a hectare. If the fuels exceed about eight tonnes a hectare, disastrous fires can and will occur. Every objective analysis of the dynamics of fuel and fire concludes that unless the fuels are maintained at near the levels that our indigenous stewards of the land achieved, then we will have unhealthy and unsafe forests that from time to time will generate disasters such as the one that erupted on saturday.
- David Packham, Victoria bushfires stoked by green vote

After studying some of these documents I see it this way:

• we can’t control the weather - there will be very hot days, droughts etc., sooner or later
• we can’t stop fire from starting - lightning strikes, arsonists, faulty electrical equipment etc.
• we can’t or won’t stop people from living in the bush, it’s a free country.

All of the above is true and independent of the truth or falsehood of the global warming hypothesis.

The one big thing we can realistically control is fuel supply, by controlled burning in the non fire season. This won’t stop bushfires but will make them less intense and dangerous when they do occur. The Stretton group and some others, such as Phil Cheney and Roger Underwood have been arguing this for some years now.

Victoria has the worst climate and vegetation in the world for bushfires. Bushfires in Victoria are inevitable but by reducing fuel supply their devastation can be dramatically reduced.

Some of the relevant data from David Packham, in a 2002 (sic) submission is:

• the fire exclusion policy has resulted in the highest and most dangerous fuel loads for 47,000 years
• a running disaster fire intensity exceeds the maximum capability for fire fighting by between 4 and 80 times
• reducing the fuels to one-quarter will reduce the areas burnt to between one quarter and one sixteenth
• it will take 2 decades of effort to achieve healthy fuel levels ... There is however no alternative except major fire disasters at the rate of one or two per hundred years
• the lessons of 1926, 1939, 1944, 1965 and 2003 do not appear to have been learnt. Policies or comments that oppose this help to perpetuate a situation that leads to massive destruction of life, property and the environment

Many of our politicians and a section of the media (although not The Australian) present these disasters as unavoidable and focus mainly on the recounting of the tragedy. The Stretton group has convinced me that they are largely avoidable and the fault has been a real lack of political leadership.

Reference:
Victoria bushfires stoked by green vote by David Packham

Bush Fire Front by Roger Underwood, David Packham and Phil Cheney

Two myths have emerged about climate change and bushfire management and are beginning to circulate in the media and to be adopted as fact by some scientists:

1. Because of global warming, Australia will be increasingly subject to uncontrollable holocaust-like “megafires”.

2. Fuel reduction by prescribed burning must cease because it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus exacerbating global warming and the occurrence of megafires.

Both statements are incorrect.

Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management - 2002 submission by David Packham OAM

Lessons not yet learned by Max Rheese
Max Rheese, Executive Director of the Australian Environment Foundation --> preventative burning is the best solution

Submission to Victorian Bushfire Inquiry by Norman Endacott
fuel reduction burning - advantages listed

The Green Inferno by Phil Cheney
do we really want to minimise disaster fires?

Manage Bush Better so Climate Change won't Matter by Roger Underwood
refutes Wilderness Society bushfire strategy

Examples of the Value of Prescribed Burning
- cites an example from West Australia where many prescribed burns got out of control owing to a cyclone moving faster than expected. It was far easier to contain these out of control fires once the fire ran into areas burnt under prescribed mild conditions in previous years

This burning issue of life and death by Miranda Devine
lists many green organisations that are opposed in practice to prescribed burning, while sometimes paying lip service to it

the fundamentals of number

I'm still in pursuit of the fundamentals about number. That's really two sets of fundamentals: the fundamentals of number itself and the fundamentals of how children learn number.

That would seem to me to be a prerequisite for:

1. good teaching
2. writing good maths software about number

Papert helped develop some good maths software about geometry (logo) and that deserves much praise but I'm starting to think that number might be harder. For instance the very smart Greeks did more with geometry than with number, according to this excellent history of Zero:

Now the ancient Greeks began their contributions to mathematics around the time that zero as an empty place indicator was coming into use in Babylonian mathematics. The Greeks however did not adopt a positional number system. It is worth thinking just how significant this fact is. How could the brilliant mathematical advances of the Greeks not see them adopt a number system with all the advantages that the Babylonian place-value system possessed? The real answer to this question is more subtle than the simple answer that we are about to give, but basically the Greek mathematical achievements were based on geometry. Although Euclid's Elements contains a book on number theory, it is based on geometry. In other words Greek mathematicians did not need to name their numbers since they worked with numbers as lengths of lines. Numbers which required to be named for records were used by merchants, not mathematicians, and hence no clever notation was needed.

Well, my quest for number fundamentals led me to review several books. I ended up looking at about seven books using google books and amazon as starting points. Here are the two books I ended up deciding to buy:

Children Doing Mathematics by Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant (1996), 268pp (amazon link)

They are psychologists who are interested in children's reasoning ... Keith Devlin recommends this book for its treatment of multiplication, which I mentioned in an earlier blog (Multiplication is not repeated addition). This book is entirely devoted to number, which is what I wanted

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics by Liping Ma (2000), 166pp (amazon link)

This book asserts and documents the claim that maths is better taught in China than in the USA because Chinese teachers have a more profound understanding of maths knowledge. One thing that appeals to me here is that it contains concrete examples of a good way and a not so good way of teaching various maths concepts

I see a need a need to promote books about the fundamentals of learning. This has just come up again in discussion arising out of the IAEP (Its an Education Project) list, see this blog by Red Hat and Sugar Developer Greg DeKoenigsberg, promoting a book which is not about fundamentals but seems to be more of a lazy transfer of Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive technology from the marketplace to learning. I left a comment on Greg's blog arguing that point

Summing up:

1. Read books
2. Study books about the fundamentals of knowledge and learning
3. Good learning software (eg. logo, etoys, scratch) requires a process such as this

numbers to die for

The Pythagorans wanted to believe that everything could be expressed in terms of whole numbers. I was wondering about that. For example, how could you prove that square root (2) could not be somehow expressed in terms of whole numbers?

Hippasus, one of the Pythagoreans, did prove that such an assumption did lead to a logical contradiction. This so upset his group that they killed him. This history gives the expression "irrational number" some real bite.

Here is the brilliant reasoning of Hippasus in the 5th Century BC, which cost him his life:

Start with a right angled isosceles triangle, assume all the numbers are whole:

• The ratio of the hypotenuse to an arm of an isosceles right triangle is a:b expressed in the smallest units possible.
• By the Pythagorean theorem: a² = 2b²
• 2b² must be even, since anything multiplied by 2 is even
• Hence a² is even and furthermore a must be even as the square of an odd number is odd.
• Since a:b is in its lowest terms (first assumption above), then b must be odd (otherwise the ratio could be further simplified by dividing by 2)
• Since a is even, let a = 2y
• Then a² = 4y² = 2b²
• b² = 2y² so b² must be even, therefore b is even
• However we asserted b must be odd. Here is the contradiction.

The story goes that Hippasus made this discovery while out at sea, and was subsequently thrown overboard by his fellow Pythagoreans “…for having produced an element in the universe which denied the…doctrine that all phenomena in the universe can be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios.”

I've taken this mainly from wikipedia where there is much more detail about irrational number but have added a few extra bits of explanation to the reasoning.

Multiplication is not repeated addition

A series of articles by Keith Devlin (Devlin's Angle) has made me realise again that my understanding of number, in this case multiplication, is fairly superficial:

It Ain't No Repeated Addition

It's Still Not Repeated Addition

Multiplication and Those Pesky British Spellings

Devlin is a good mathematician. However, he keeps on repeating that he is not a K-12 teacher and so can't offer advice as to how to teach at that level. But he does offer lots of advice about what shouldn't be taught. So in that sense he is a tease and a provocateur.

One of his recommended readings, from the third article, is more helpful for practitioners:
How do we teach children to be numerate? (pdf, 23pp) by Mike Askew and Margaret Brown

page 10:

Calculations can be identified with several different types of interpretations and contextual problems. For example 4 x 5 can be linked to:

• repeated sets (eg. 4 boxes each with 5 hats)
• multiplicative comparison (scale factor) (eg. 4 hats and 5 times as many scarves)
• rectangular arrays (eg. 4 rows of 5 hats)
• cartesian product (eg. the number of different possibilities of wearing a hat and a scarf from 4 hats and 5 scarves)

Similarly division calculations can be taught in two ways. For example, 20 / 5 can be associated with:

• measurement / grouping (quotition) (eg. 20 apples put into bags of 5, how many bags get filled?)
• sharing (partitioning) (eg. 20 apples put into 5 bags, how many apples in each bag?)

Of these possible interpretations, research has shown that multiplication as repeated addition and division as sharing appear to be widely understood by primary aged children. However, as the examples above show, understanding the meaning of multiplication is more complex (Nunes and Bryant, 1996) and difficulties with fully understanding multiplication and division persist into secondary school (Hart, 1981)

There is evidence that such early ideas - multiplication as repeated addition and division as sharing - have an enduring effect and can limit children's later understanding of these operations. For example, understanding multiplication only as repeated addition may lead to misconceptions as "multiplication make bigger" and "division makes smaller" (Hart 1981, Greer 1988) ....

Language is important here as different expressions will greatly influence children's solution methods. For example, interpreting 52 x 3 as "52 times 3" or "52 lots of 3" may lead to a less efficient calculation method then reading the symbols as "52 multiplied by 3" or "3 fifty-twos"

References:
Hart K (1981). Hierarchies in mathematics education. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 12, 205-218.
Nunes T and Bryant P. Children Doing Mathematics (google books, amazon)

thoughts about OLPC cutbacks

Some thoughts about the OLPC project cutting back on 50% of their staff (refocusing on our mission)

When this happens the prophets of doom, such as wayan vota (olpc just got gutted) and arstechnia (OLPC downsizes ...) publish quickly and with a tendency to sensationalise and catastrophise. We are all familiar with this style of journalism.

This really is a 40 year story going back to when alan kay first envisaged the dynabook. We need to take a long term view. It is also a good time to revisit Walter Bender’s 23 questions which is another insightful way of viewing the big picture

The Surface Mission is to bring education to the children of the Developing world using the XO as a vehicle. This is a serious and realistic although a very hard to achieve goal.

The XO-1 has been a partial success. However, it did not achieve its initial (problematic) goal of selling to the Developing world governments in millions. Clearly, the stakeholders are not satisfied and cutbacks have now occurred. Also the 2008 give one, get one was a relative flop, with only 7% of the sales of the G1G1 in 2007 (source). But Negroponte keeps pushing forward. The dual screen XO-2 (article) may achieve the scaling that was hoped for but did not eventuate with XO-1.

Sugar, the new OS, has been a partial success. It is diverse, free (FLOSS) educational software with unique built in (when sugarized) collaboration features. But some / many aspects of Sugar are buggy and / or unfinished. There is still a lot of work to do.

All of this does spin off in multiple directions – Walter’s question categories are Computer Science, Engineering, Education, Economics and Social Sciences. There was some discussion about his 23 questions at OLPC_news (comments). It would be good to see more.

Different people bring different skills and expertise to the Project. Everyone who has been involved with it has been broadened and deepened in some way. No regrets. I'm not aware of anyone who has been involved who wishes that they hadn't been.

There may or may not be ultimate success. But there is ongoing partial success as the consciousness of every participant, adult or child, of the social possibilities of disruptive technology is increased.

One aspect is that the Projects are in more or less constant turmoil. I see this as inevitable.

We have cutting edge, complicated, disruptive technology – hardware and software.

We have a difficult, hard to answer social question: How best to help the impoverished children of the Developing world?

We have conflict between FLOSS and Proprietary pathways. Can FLOSS alone deliver the goods?

We have division between expert and non expert enthusiasts in different areas. Some fields demand democracy and transparency, eg. FLOSS. But even FLOSS has benevolent dictators as a concession to expertise. But in some other areas democracy is frankly a waste of time. For example, there is little point in Mary Lou Jepson consulting with non experts about the latest in screen technology. This can be extrapolated, more or less, to many other parts of the Development process.

We have conflict over the best methods to educate children. Constructionism is not well understood and is not the only path.

How much should local issues influence global development? (refer to the Bryan Berry thread on Its An Education Project)

How do hardware experts, software experts and educators work together effectively to produce a better product?

There is limited money and people to carry out this project. Even though a Keynsian approach – spend money on public works to increase employment - in economic crisis would suggest generous funding for this project. Sounds like a good idea but I doubt that it will happen.

We have entrenched, powerful interests who are threatened by these developments (Intel, Microsoft, educational bureaucracies, existing NGOs)

How could there not be continual turmoil?

At any rate, the XO / Sugar Labs projects continue to be excellent objects to think with and to act through. In the words of David Farning:

"I would like to offer a _heart_felt_ thanks to everyone at One Laptop Per Child who has made Sugar and the XO the products that they are today.

You still are at the forefront of a revolution in learning such as the world has not seen since the invention of the printing press.

But, this revolution, as with all revolutions, is hard to plan; there are no maps, there is no rule book, there is no gray bearded sage to guide your way"

The xo and sugar labs will continue to transform the world for the better. By just how much remains to be seen.

Numbers

Should Children Learn Math by Starting with Counting? by Keith Devlin

Thanks to Rob (blog) for putting me onto the Devlin's Angle essays. Still reading. He is well researched, discusses fundamental issues of maths pedagogy and is making me think.

This particular essay made me think about Number and how it is taught in Schools. To tell the truth I had to go back and review my own foundational understanding of number. The way that it is taught in our Schools is like a drip feed but for most students and teachers the "big picture" is never put together. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that is seldom completed.

Hence my need for an overview even though this terminology is not definitive, eg. see Wolfram for a more systematic approach:

natural number (also called counting number) can mean either an element of the set {1, 2, 3, ...} (the positive integers) or an element of the set {0, 1, 2, 3, ...} (the non-negative integers)

whole numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3 ...

integers ... -2, -1, 0, 1, 2 ...

algebraic numbers: integers, roots of positive numbers, fractions

rational numbers: 42, -23/129 (integers, fractions)

irrational numbers: pi, sqrt (2) infinite decimals

real numbers are the numbers that can be written in decimal notation, including those that require an infinite decimal expansion ... OR points on a infinitely long number line

imaginary numbers (unreal): i, 4th root(-9)

complex numbers (mixture of real and unreal): 2 + 3i


At any rate, Devlin points out that in the USSR due to the influence of Vygotsky and his followers, such as Davydov, that the curriculum from the beginning focuses on real numbers, it does not begin with natural numbers, as we do in Australia (or in Devlin's case the USA). He gives a broad overview of that curriculum in his article.

Here is a quote from Devlin which provides a rationale for the validity of this approach:

Humans have not only a natural ability to abstract discrete counting numbers from our everyday experience (sizes of collections of discrete objects) but also have a natural sense of continuous quantities such as length and volume (area seems less natural), and abstraction in that domain leads to positive real numbers.

In other words, from a cognitive viewpoint (as opposed to a mathematical one), the natural numbers are neither more fundamental nor more natural than the real numbers. They both arise directly from our experiences in the everyday world. Moreover, they appear to arise in parallel, out of different cognitive processes, used for different purposes, with neither dependent on the other. In fact, what little evidence there is from present-day brain research suggests that from a neurophysiological viewpoint, the real numbers - our sense of continuous number - is more basic than the natural numbers, which appear to build upon the continuous number sense by way of our language capacity

Fascinating. We need to explore fundamental knowledge deeply. This is probably the most important part of improving education.

Chinese teachers better at foundational maths than US teachers

Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning.)
by Liping Ma

google books URL

amazon books URL

This looks fantastic. I read the Contents page, Forward and Introduction from the google books URL

From the Forward by Lee Schulman:

Chinese teachers are far more likely to have developed "profound understanding of fundamental mathematics." To say that they "know more" or "understand more" is to make a deeply theoretical claim. They actually may have studied far less mathematics, but what they know they know more profoundly, more flexibly, more adaptively"

foundational knowledge: one and three quarters divided by a half

** Make up a good story or model to represent that problem **

From the Introduction by Liping Ma, reporting from the USA:

I was particularly stuck by the answers to this question. Very few teachers gave a correct response. Most, more than 100 preservice, new and experienced teachers, made up a story that represented one and three quarters multiplied by a half, or, one and three quarters divided by two. Many other teachers were not able to make up a story

Mary Laycock

Some maths resources by Mary Laycock, recommended by alan kay

"mathematicians turned great math teachers (such as Mary Laycocke) who have spent decades learning how to get young children to learn "real math" "

http://www.activityresources.com/store/catalog/
The hands on manipulatives and other resources look great:

• Fraction Tiles,
• Weaving your way from arithmetic to mathematics,
• Graphiti,
• Puzzling your way into Algebra

http://openlibrary.org/a/OL3631937A
Books by Mary Laycock with intriguing titles such as Skateboard Practice, Tapestry of Mathematics, Straw Polyhedra, Correlation of Activity-Centred Science and Mathematics

I wish some of these old books could be digitised and put into the public domain, they might get a new lease of life that way.

I looked up one of them, Skateboard Practice, in google books search and found other books that refer to them, they are obviously great resources
eg.
http://books.google.com/books?id=rHYmAAAACAAJ&source=gbs_ViewAPI
cites another book that uses Skateboard Practice as a resource
http://books.google.com/books?id=jDXAj-ym6xYC&pg=PA54&vq=%22Skateboard+Practice%22&source=gbs_book_citations_r&cad=0_2
cites some of the activities from this book and how this teacher used them

It would be good if young(er) educational software developers took some time out to check out these works by an old master

the drama and humour of numbers

The Story of 1 (60 minutes)

I just saw this excellent TV show about the history of numbers (ABC review) and, for joy, it's available on the internet too :-)

Some Australian aboriginal tribes did not have a number system, just one and many. Arithmetic evolved in cities which had more complexity which required calculations. The first writing was with numbers.

3000 BC: The Egyptians conceived of 1 million. Also they invented the cubit, a unit of measurement, required for the buildings they constructed

Pythagoras invented odd and even numbers, things such as magic triangles (1, 2, 3, 4) and explored the relationship between music and the size of containers (the music of the spheres). But his dogmatic idealism about number led to tragedy. One of his disciples discovered irrational numbers and was drowned.

The Romans murdered Archimedes and then imposed their crummy numerals onto the world. They were so useless for doing calculations that the abacus was used instead.

Our decimal system and most notably the number zero wasn't thought of until 500 AD by someone in India. From there it was passed onto the Arabic Muslim world. Then the decimal system was brought to Europe by Fibonacci.

There ensued a struggle between the Roman numerals and the decimals system which lasted for hundreds of years. Eventually the decimal system won out because of the need for capitalism to calculate compound interest accurately.

Finally, Liebnitz invented the binary system but we had to wait another 200 years for the computer

This video is very enlightening and funny being narrated by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. The simulated battles between our modern sprightly numbers and clunky Roman numerals are fabulous.

Kevin07? More like Internet911

Minister Conroy on: Promoting a civil and confident society online 22 December, 2008

505 comments, 10 comments per page, 51 pages

This is or was the government blog.

My plan was to read the comments until I reached a comment that supported Conroy. There are some great comments in there. I reached page 10 and every single comment was against Conroy.

• 100 comments against Conroy
• 0 comments supporting Conroy

The people have spoken. This attempt by the government to appear tuned in to the blogosphere has turned into a public relations fiasco.

(btw the title of this post is from one of the blogger sigs)

Carl Wieman: optimizing learning

Optimizing Science Education and the Myth of a Necessary 'Super Teacher' by Carl Wieman (an educator who also happens to have won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001 for creating a new ultracold state of matter, the so-called Bose-Einstein condensate)

This is written from the perspective of University students and teachers. Nevertheless, it is also a very interesting commentary about learning theory and the role of technology in education in general.

I've been saying for some time that there is no unified learning theory and that good teachers cherry pick from a variety of approaches. Wieman's approach plays nicely with my views.

His debunking of Myth 1 is valuable:

Myth I. Optimum teaching and learning styles are specific to each individual teacher and student

He argues that good teaching can be learnt and that the concept of individual idiosyncratic student learning is sometimes overdone

His learning model is built on four principles, which I paraphrase / rehash as follows:

1. Current state - we build on what we already know
2. Effort - extended, focused effort it required for deep learning
   
3. Motivation - we learn more when motivated and we are more motivated when we know why it is of value
4. Memory - there are limits to our short term memory and instructional design needs to take account of that

These similarities in how we learn dwarf any alleged differences in learning styles. Individual differences and gaps in knowledge can be systematically categorised and built into the instructional design framework. I'm familiar with this from using the interactive Learning in Science approach (Osborne / Freyberg), which systematically explores children's existing views of various scientific phenomena.

Timely well targeted feedback which directly addresses ones reasoning and says what is right and wrong about it is very valuable. (As part of the optimization approach he subsequently argues that if teachers had marking assistants then this feedback would be more timely and could even make larger class sizes realistic)

I would argue that the principles which comprise Wieman's model are all necessary but not exhaustive. For example, the Idit Harel approach to teaching fractions (Instructional Software Design Project) incorporates all of Wieman's principles, either explicitly or implicitly, but has far more constructionist emphasis

Myth 2. Educational technology is a crutch for poor teachers but unnecessary for good ones

Wieman identifies the value of computer simulations that provide suitable challenges and timely, effective feedback and evaluation of student strengths and weaknesses. He points out that an expert instructor is still essential because computer programs are currently at the point of identifying student thinking and not yet so good at providing regular effective feedback

This fits in with Alan Kay's observation that computer based mentoring systems still have some way to go (... the dynabook is not here yet)

Once again, Wieman's approach is a good one but I think the Idit Harel study cited above is more adventurous in its use of computers

There is more to the Wieman article. His focus is about how to optimize university instruction to increase effectiveness and productivity. His critique of current practices in Universities is most enlightening. The whole article is well argued, well written, worth reading in full and much of it is applicable in other (non university) settings.

Teach for Australia, revisited

I wrote a blog about Teach for Australia in February 2008 and it is still attracting comments, so I'm revisiting it here.

In a recent comment, franith has referred to the last three paragraphs of this article in The Australian, dated November 28, 2008:

"The commonwealth has already committed to funding a $500 million national partnership to improve teacher quality, and Ms Gillard announced on Wednesday night a scheme to attract the best university graduates into teaching.

Ms Gillard called on businesses to support the program, based on the successful Teach for America scheme, which will recruit top graduates to work in disadvantaged schools before they start their careers in areas such as law, accounting or management consulting.

A joint venture between Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute and Macquarie University is expected to launch Teach for Australia next year"

This sounds more substantial than other ALP government initiatives since IMO teacher quality is the central issue - will have to keep an eye on Julia Gillard, she may be evolving into a real educational reformer

The "Teach for Australia" proposal is based on, but, is also different from the "Teach for America" scheme. One important difference is that TF Australia pairs experienced mentors ("Fellows") with new recruits ("Associates"), which, I believe, TF America does not

What Gillard announced was support for a 'Teach for America' type scheme in disadvantaged Australian schools. Then The Australian newspaper added on a separate paragraph about an expectation regarding the Pearson / Macquarie University 'Teach for Australia' scheme, intended for remote indigenous school, in the most disadvantaged areas of Australia. ie. Gillard did not announce a 'Teach for Australia' scheme, which is a significantly bigger commitment to what she did announce. This may well be a newspaper beat up

I should try to contact Macquarie University in the new year to find out more about this

Here are some other related blogs I have written on this topic (most recent first):

staffing high needs schools

learning evolves pyramid

wendy kopp's book

teaching to the test

teacher training

it sounds like a miracle

curriculum reform will not improve education without quality teachers

teach for australia

mckinsey: run schools as you would run a successful business

Bryan Berry's Nepal XO notes

Notes from Nepal’s OLPC Deployments

Bryan Berry raises some important points and conjectures. It is best to read his original, (I left a comment there)

1) Manual dexterity block point

"While the teachers learned how to use the XO very quickly, I miscalculated how difficult certain actions would be for them. Specifically, it took them a while to learn “dragging and dropping” with the touchpad. Many of the best activities on the XO require serious dexterity with the touchpad such as TurtleArt, Etoys, and Scratch. For this reason we couldn’t cover these activities during training. I recommend starting teacher training with activities that do not require a lot of dexterity with the touchpad"

2) What the curriculum demands

In OLPC-land we like to talk about lofty concepts such as constructionism, co-learning, collaboration, etc. Meanwhile, teachers at Bashuki and Vishwamitra have more pressing concerns. The Nepali system does not practice social promotion. Children have to pass year-end examinations to move on to the next grade. Nepali teachers are interested in constructionism, co-learning, and collaboration as long as they don’t hinder their students progress through the educational system. Our teachers are quite happy with the E-Paath suite of educational activities that OLE Nepal developed in accordance with the national curriculum. The real attraction of OLPC for teachers is that in class they can task students with a problem on the XO and then spend much of the period working with students that need help

3) Top Requests from Teachers and Kids

• Easier way to play music and video
• A better E-Book reader
• A lot more activities for learning English
• All the Nepali textbooks in digital format
• A comprehensive digital library with lots of Nepali-language reading materials
• A Typing Tutor program for learning English and Nepali
• Interactive learning activities that match the Nepali curriculum
• A car racing game (the kids)

and other very interesting points in his article as well:

• amazing enthusiasm from teachers
• ability of XO to diagnose if any particular hardware component has failed (“test-all” command in the XO’s OpenFirmware)
• it is feasible to train teachers how to fix hardware problems but more difficult to teach them how to fix software problems in the linux kernel or within Sugar
• The XS (school server) has improved under the leadership of XS architect Martin Langhoff
• XO project in Nepal expanding to 15-20 schools in 5-6 districts in April 2009

universal communications

I've started a new wiki, universal communication. Tony Forster, who understands the engineering side better than me is helping too.

It is for documenting research about bringing communications technology and electricity to the developing world. At this stage it is mainly for notes about understanding concepts / terminology, resources and thinking aloud

It might be useful for:

• those thinking about how OLPC fits into a bigger picture of third world development
• more generally the connection between poverty, electricity generation and communications technology
• understanding the situation on the ground for those planning to visit and / or work in developing world (eg. Oceania, Nepal, Afghanistan, many African countries, etc.)
• understanding successful models about how it has been done, eg. PFNet in the Pacific
  

poverty and OLPC affordability

Apart from Australia and DR Congo (included as benchmarks) the following are most of countries to which the OLPC has already been deployed in significant numbers or to which there are reported plans for significant deployments in the near future. The figures are in Purchasing Power Parity PPP$ (adjusted income per person) of selected countries. The data is from the Gapminder site [1]

COUNTRY	PPP$
USA	31,133
Australia	24,219
Uruguay	8,653
Mexico	7,762
Columbia	5,877
Peru	4,670
Papua New Guinea	1869
Ghana	1515
Mongolia	1285
Mali	1084
Nepal	1052
Rwanda	983
Ethiopia	824
Afghanistan	740
Haiti	709
DR Congo (poorest)	230

Here are some figures of the numbers of XOs deployed to some of these countries [2] [3]:

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF XOs
Uruguay	130,000
Peru	70,000
Mexico	50,000
Birmingham, USA	10,000

Colombia is reported to be about to buy 20,000 and Ghana is reported to be about to buy 10,000.

In addition, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, Mongolia, Afghanistan have approx 5,000 XOs each provided by the Give1-Get1 program.

So far, the governments which have purchased large quantities (not just pilots and not recipients of the G1G1 – Give one, Get one - scheme) of XO’s are Uruguay, Peru and Mexico.

These Latin American countries are not the poorest in the world. Many African countries are the poorest along with some Asian countries. These countries are roughly 5-10x poorer than those which have actually purchased the OLPC

Each OLPC or XO costs about $180 per person. The Total Cost of Ownership is higher and has been estimated at about $450 over a five year period (disputed figure)

Apart from OLPC, other possible information technologies come to mind for poor countries, which are being used for education:

OMPT (one media player per teacher) - One portable media player with speakers and power source costs as little as $50. This small cost can change a classroom of 40 or 50 individual lives

Mobile phones - for example, see the MobileED project

Telecenters - "I found computers in all the centers, but bicycles, books, cell phones, community radio stations, and video tapes were also used to obtain and share information" (olpc-news article by Robert Kozma)

Internet Kiosks - A day in the life of a village kiosk operator in India

I am not suggesting that the OLPC is not a great technology for the poor children of the world. They need personal computers for maximum benefit. But due to the economic bottom line for some countries at the moment it is too much to expect that they will get there without assistance. Also we need to consider transition technologies like the above to bridge the gap.

Another related issue is the best method(s) of electricity generation for poor countries. This is held over for another article.

Reference / Footnotes:

[1] Gapminder provides some great visual representations of dry statistic

[2] OLPC Community News attachment, July 6, 2008 shows a graph of deployments at that time

[3] OLPC:News provides regular information about deployments

engelbart: co-evolution of humans with machines

It's hard or impossible to imagine a world without all the things that Doug Engelbart demonstrated at his 1968 mother of all demos ("... a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing" 40th Anniversary)

But with respect to his vision it does seem clear that we have become far too techno-centric in the way we conceptualise the computer - as a bunch of more or less independent applications to get various jobs done, rather than as an integrated vehicle to augment our co-evolution.

By 1959 he had enough standing to get approval for pursuing his own research. He spent the next two years formulating a conceptual framework for a new discipline that became the guiding force for his 1962 seminal work, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," ...

Concepts such as augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure, co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices, and bootstrapping evolved directly from this work, as did the following twenty years of applied co-evolution. Motivating that framework were, and still are the assumptions that complexity and urgency are increasing exponentially and that the combination of these two will soon challenge our organizations ...

A myriad of technical and non-technical elements came into play, such as tools, media, language, customs, knowledge, skills, procedures, and so on. He perceived that these elements had co-evolved slowly over centuries, but that with the explosive emergence of digital technology, the technical elements would shoot way ahead of the non-technical and cause a trend toward automating rather than to augmenting peoples' activities
- A Lifetime Pursuit by Christina Engelbart

I'm from the government, I'm here to listen to you

Senator Conroy (The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy), the filter guy, has created a blog!

Although the stated purpose of the blog is to listen to our

"thoughts and ideas about the digital economy ... We aim to release the Future directions paper early next year"

... nevertheless, most of the comments I have read (there are hundreds) are articulate, well reasoned protests against Conroy's plan for a mandatory ISP level internet filter.

So be it. If this is meant to be an exercise to demonstrate that our government is going to listen to us then let's hope they take the hint.

Bruner

alan kay:

"Jerome Bruner ... wrote the best book on education that has ever been written, Towards a Theory of Instruction"
- Squeakers video at 2 min 30 seconds, included in this mark miller blog

I followed this up and found a great page (jerome bruner and the process of education) which summarises Bruner's thinking. I notice how Bruner takes concepts from both sides of the conventional curriculum wars and welds them together, for instance, he thinks that both structure and intuition are important. I summarise his approach as briefly as possible as incorporating structure, readiness, intuition, motivation.

I see this as the way forward - building a pyramid made up bits from both sides of the curriculum wars. eg. don't just focus on motivation but meld it with structure and readiness where readiness is "some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development" (Bruner)

Bruner was a key figure in the development of the "cognitive revolution" but later became critical. His thinking became increasingly influenced by writers like Lev Vygotsky and he began to be critical of the intrapersonal focus he had taken, and the lack of attention paid to social and political context

I've just ordered two books by Bruner:
The Process of Education (1960)
Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966)

Could it be that ideas that are 40-50 years old have more relevance to education reform than many of the educational ideas floating around today?

Could it be that ideas from the pioneers of computing (McCarthy, Engelbart, Papert, Kay) have more relevance than many of the computing ideas floating around today?

Probably.

Inform 7

I've been playing with inform 7. It is very interesting and I think I'll be using it in 2009. I'd also like to show it to some English teachers and get their reaction.
http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7/Inform%207.html

"Inform is a design system for interactive fiction ... In place of traditional computer programming, the design is built by writing natural English-language sentences"

To make sense of it I had to read Chapter 2 of the Help. My initial unguided effort of "The cat sat on the mat" produced an image of broken cogs and a problem analysis. The Help explains that you have to create a world first by teaching the program where and what everything is using assertion statements in the present tense:

The cat is an animal.
The bathroom is a room.
The mat is in the bathroom.

"The cat sat on the mat" still doesn't work but I'm getting there.

Some analysis at the psychology of planning interest group:
http://www.ppig.org/newsletters/2008-10.html#inform

Here is a quick start, from Brian Slesinsky:
http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/fun_with_inform7.html

alan kay: after 40 years the dynabook is not here yet

video Personal Computing: Historic Beginnings

I have transcribed a section of Alan Kay's recent presentation marking "40 years anniversary of the dynabook" because I see it as an important contribution to ongoing discussions about the significance and prospects for the XO, or OLPC

Alan Kay visited Seymour Papert in 1968

49 minutes: Slide that involves Alan Kay

About 40 years ago I went to visit Seymour Papert... because I had started to visit people who could be users of a desktop computer ... and Seymour was working with children ... Seymour was a mathematician who had worked with Piaget ... (talks about Seymour's tragic accident from which he has not recovered) ...

Kay's interpretation of Seymour's work: Children are egocentric in a charming way ...they do everything relative to them ... so if they were a co-ordinate system they would be an inertial co-ordinate system ... and an inertial co-ordinate system is the differential geometry of Gauss ... and if you keep track of this in the right way you get the differential geometry of vectors ... and a child is one of those vectors... and so is the turtle ... and he thought, boy(!), this is so close to the way children think already I wonder what would happen if we put some formalism on it and treat it as mathematics

So ask a little kid to draw a circle with their body and ask them what they are doing ... they say they are going a little and then turning a little, over and over

In logo: repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]

Tell the turtle to do that ... and by golly you get a circle and you can put in different values to get circles of different sizes ... and so we have a differential equation here which is infinitely simpler than (traditional) differential geometry and which can be understood by a young child

This completely blew my mind! Once you've got something which is incredibly powerful that a child can learn you've no longer got an adult tool ... you've actually got something like a printing press that is one of the great 500 year inventions in human history

If children can learn these powerful ideas then you have a chance to not just increment on what is already known ... they will actually help over several generations to invent something new

So, that combined with just seeing this flat panel display with all these wise words of McLuhans in my mind (mentioned earlier in talk) on the plane back to Utah after meeting Seymour I drew this little cartoon with kids out in the grass ...

... because if you are going to make a personal computer for kids don't put it on a desk ... that isn't them ... so I immediately took the fun idea of a flat screen computer and made it paramount ... you had to make a computer that was in every way made for a child, that they could take away from adults and learn by themselves ... it would have to have wireless, a stylus, a touch screen, a keyboard (because even perfect character recognition is not fast enough to do bulk typing), removable memory ... and so all of those things coalesced ....

(describes how he made the model from a cardboard box)



Alan Kay's definition of portability ... that you can carry something else as well as the portable device ... arrived at the figure of two pounds (which is roughly 1kg)

(some information about head mounted display and a wrist detector by Negroponte left out here)

If you think about this as a service idea then what are the actual services ... (stuff snipped) ...

"IT'S NOT THE TECHNOLOGY, STUPID"

You really have to have some idea of the end users ... leads into new slide



DYNABOOK PLAN

It's a service idea with serious goals about education, especially self education

Kept (?) standards: Fluency in powerful ideas for > 90% of children

powerful ideas and how to learn them ...

CONTENT

... and with the aid of computing media


Human mentors

MENTORING

Computer mentors

[[Alan refers to these, here and later, as "four ideas", which I understand to be:

1. What are powerful ideas?
2. How can they be learned with the aid of computing media?
3. Can this work with human mentors?
4. Can it work with computing mentors?]]

I was interested in whether we could make computer mentors because my confidence in adults was very low back then ... and still is. The biggest bottleneck to education reform is the adults that are in the system

In the Third World it is the lack of adults ... But in our world it's almost the lack of adults ... almost no elementary school teachers understand anything about maths and science ... in a way things might be almost better if they weren't there because the children would not be getting misinformation about it

It has to be setup to succeed for 90% of the children, not just the 10% who are naturally good at it

The problem with technologists doing it is that we are all setup by nature to be good at it ... all of us here learnt to program within a weeek ... I'll bet you anything ... it's not that hard if you almost know what it is ... but if you don't almost know what it is, it can be really daunting

This is why computing people generally design terrible computing user interfaces ... they're not only willing to cope with something bad, they are pleased to ... because it's a little challenge for them ....
(this section finished at 1 hr 1 min)

At 1hr 15min the moderator asks:

"Why was the dynabook never built in spite of all these people trying to make it happen?"

Alan recapitulates the four ideas outlined above ... then ...

Working on the first two with our 90% success threshold ... led to 25 years of failure ... we were paying for this research ourselves ... nobody would fund the children's research because we did these long projects ... we didn't believe in most forms of testing that are reported in the education literature ... so we wanted to convince ourselves that the children were getting fluent and that 90% of them were getting fluent ... by those sorts of criteria it was one failure after another .... but after each failure we would learn something

And about 10 years ago one of the systems that we did started teaching many more children with adult help in a much stronger way (I think he means etoys) ... so I think after 40 years the first two ideas and a little bit of what sort of human mentoring you need have been solved ...

BUT, when Nicholas started up the OLPC project my heart sank, even as I supported it ... because if it's tough to get good mentors in the USA then it's really tough out in the Third World ... no user interace today can find out who its user is, what its user knows, what it can do ... it can't find out what level of reading the user can do and help find out the next level of reading

There is common sense in the world concept ... so we make a world populated with objects ... but they didn't interfere with the user strongly

That isn't enough ... pure discovery learning took us 100,000 years to get to science ... so you need learning that is facilitated ... and if you can't make thousands of good teachers in a year then you have to have an interactive user interface to save yourself

This dream of having a UI to facilitate is as old as AI ... it is AI ... if we had this we could make up for no teachers and bad teachers (but we still need good teachers) ... so when the OLPC project started I thought OMG, we are lacking the one piece of the technology ... if we could just ship that machine with a program that could teach children to read in their native language ... that would be the killer app and we wouldn't have to worry about anything else for a number of years ... but that technology doesn't exist ... it is that gap which has to be bridged in order to fulfil the educational goals that the dynabook has ... you have to have a way to get around the adults in the system that make educational reform difficult

OLPC: give one, get one, australia

Last time around this was only available in the USA and Canada, from memory

This time you can give one get one in a whole host of countries (44+ in this article) and this now includes Australia, through the OLPC-australia organisation

Contact information

Give 1, Get 1 explained
"Purchase two XO laptops. Give one to a needy child in remote Australia or the Pacific. The other is yours to give to a child in your life"

Purchase form

With the fall in the Australian dollar the cost would be something like AUD$700 ($468.95USD), according to this OLPCnews article

update 7th December:
They are charging $399 for a laptop, with the profits going towards OLPC-AU projects

update 8th December:
Wayan Vota has corrected the above information, the total cost for one is $468.95

I did an order simulation on the olpc-au site and the extra charges are:
GST $20
Shipping and Handling $40
Transaction Fee $10

I also notice that it is not a Give one, Get one scheme because if you order two the price just doubles to a whopping $927.90

OLPC-australia people (Geoffrey Anson, Dr. Barry Vercoe, Dr. Vadim Gerasimov, Rangan Srikhanta)

OLPC-australia history