OLPC Nepal Project overview

Randal Schwartz interviews Bryan Berry, of Open Learning Exchange Nepal, the NGO implementing the OLPC project in Nepal
http://twit.tv/floss66

I've transcribed a substantial portion of this interview below, rough notes only, without comment at this stage. Numbering is just for id purposes if people want to discuss particular points.

Skip to 12:45 minutes to avoid the chatter and google summer of code adverts at the start

1) Bryan Berry, CTO Open Learning Exchange, Nepal

2) Describes geography, weather, population

3) 6 million kids in Nepal need education – how can we do it? Education makes all the difference

4) Literacy about 45%, young people 80%

5) There are hardly any libraries, even in Kathmandu (the largest city in Nepal) – most peoples parents are illiterate or barely educated, there aren't any books at home

6) teaching method is that teacher speaks and the kids repeat – one teacher for 50 kids – teachers are doing their best but they have almost no resources

7) problem with rote learning
example of a kid knowing that 2+1 = 3 but not knowing what 1+2 equals ...

8) OLPC project provides opportunity of putting a lot more resources into the hands of kids and teachers

9) xo described, I skipped this bit

10) Open Source software critical to high quality education – education has to be very customised, to the kids, the teacher, the environment and the country – not something you can design in New York city and will fit another country

11) In the OS community we know that through the iterative process of other people looking at your code / work they can make it better – and that's true for education as well

Q) What kind of customization had to happen to the software for your particular project?

12) Problem of rendering Nepali properly – very little support across different applications

13) Had to conform to the Nepali national student curriculum – absolutely critical

14) 99% of teachers care about their kids, want them to learn and don't want their kids to fail their exams at the end of the year – if their kids fail they are set back a year – they have to make sure their kids don't fail that exam – it is a standards based curriculum

15) So we created a whole set of learning activities which conform to the national curriculum

16) transitions in what program to use to develop curriculum content and the reasons why (etoys --> flash --> HTML5 + javascript)

17) etoys
started off doing the curriculum in etoys / squeak – first 6 months
problems:

• performance
• very small community doing what we were doing
• squeak programmers are smart people who tend to move onto something else, eg. PhD

18) flash
flash is a great technology but run time is proprietary, unfortunately (considered using gnash but that created some stability and performance issues) – we release our code under the mit license

19) HTML5 + javascript
Way to go because there are a lot of community people who use those tools, there is a lot of momentum in that area - proprietary code is really baked into education but if you use javascript and HTML you almost can't keep your stuff proprietary – it creates a virtuous feedback cycle as in the AJAX community where releasing your source is good for the whole community

20) Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal
Nepali led organisation, led by Rabi Karmacharya; 30 people - full time some part time; non profit; team of developers; teachers working together with developers; teachers are creative, know how to engage the children

21) Once we showed the teachers learning activities then they welcomed it with open arms; Nepali government is very supportive

Q) How has this changed the classroom from the teacher speaks, student repeats?

22) The xo frees up the teacher to interact more individually with kids

23) Sugar UI has collaboration baked in

24) History of xo in Nepal
Started with 150 laptops to two poor schools in April 2008 just outside Kathmandu to 7th Graders and 2nd Graders (?). Worries about misuse did not eventuate, the kids treated their laptops like gold (they don't have possession of their own)

25) 1:1 ratio critical; take home (core principles)

26) Cultural difference with USA, Nepal kids want to become engineers and doctors, not pop stars and baseball players; they don't say maths sucks or maths is boring; they are excited about learning

27) Internet connection issues discussed (skipped this)

28) Email can only be done with web mail such as gmail. More needs to be done on the server side, hard to complete everything in such a complex project

29) We can always find someone to fix the hardware but training someone to master the linux command line is harder

30) The server has to be as simple as possible

31) If there is a problem with the xo there is a firmware tool called testall which can test all the hardware

Q) Do you have objective numbers on performance?

32) If we teach to the test then test results will improve. Walter Bender has said that the hard part about education is that you have to wait 20 years. However, assessment is important in terms of justifying the expense of what we are doing.

33) Expanding this year to 2500 laptops (cf. 150 laptops last year) to geographically dispersed settlements representing the breadth of life in Nepal

34) The huge challenge is to grow the support organisation to support the deployment

35) Running a grassroots volunteer organisation is very hard. You have to find the people who are really serious as distinct from those who are curious but temporary supporters – people who want to chat and visit but who are not prepared to do the hard grunt work

36) It is not like online FOSS which has an automatic barrier to entry which filters out those who are not really interested

37) Parents want books – digital books! They equate education with books

38) There is enthusiasm for FLOSS in Nepal – Nepal won best software freedom day 2 years in a row from FSF. But there is not much open source software being developed.

39) Those who could be developers have little free time. Kids here have to study hard and have extensive family commitments (far more so than we have in the west)

40) Main funding for the project came from the Danish Embassy

41) OLPCs were donated by Swift organisation, a Banking co-operative (European Banks)

42) Raising money for the laptops, although the largest cost, is the easiest part of the funding

43) The hardest part is building the support organisation and developing curriculum content

44) Kids keep the laptops at the end of the year

45) Wade Brainerd has developed a great typing tutor, called typing turtle

46) etoys is a fantastic environment but requires a high degree of dexterity with the touch pad, the drag and drop features – the teachers really struggled with that

47) A key thing we need to do is to tie lesson plans into working with programs like etoys and turtle art – teachers are busy if it's not part of the curriculum then its likely to not happen

48) Education is the central thing for poor countries to move out of poverty – but it takes a long time to build up

Q) What was the biggest hurdle or hurdles?

49) You have to create a firewall between the local company (OLENepal) and the FOSS community. Early on some people saw it as their personal project and that was very detrimental – once money becomes involved – it was ugly – this is why we formed OLENepal as a separate organisation

50) Create local content first – before the flyers, before government meeting – develop local content in their own language

51) Linux supports Nepali, Microsoft doesn't

52) If Bryan had more money he would focus on building digital content (K-12) before laptops – once there was this content then everyone would buy laptops

rudd's broadband: could be good

Internode's Simon Hackett identifies the real broadband priorities in this order:

1. coverage
2. price
3. competition
4. innovation
5. speed

ie. speed as the last of five not the first

He recommends building the new fibre to the home network "outside in" fixing the blackspots first and installing where ADSL2+ is already present later

He also recommends retaining the existing copper in parallel to the new system so people have the option to retain the slower ADSL2+ if they want

There is a pdf and video on this page explaining his plan in more detail

At the start there are maps of Sydney and Adelaide showing many blackspots with unacceptably slow speeds

The fibre will be completely independent of Telstra's copper network. It's fair because every carrier will have equal access to the new network.

Of course it’s possible the government will find a way to get it wrong but if they stick with the Hackett plan then I’m in favour

the TARP song

What exactly is a "troubled asset"? One response is to laugh at this voodoo talk.

Peter Schiff takes on the voodoo doctors

I've been working on a primer about the economic crisis which I hope to publish here soon. In the meantime, I have found some good video clips on youtube.

This one (thanks to steve) shows Peter Schiff arguing two or three years ago that we were heading for a crisis. It's great the way he sticks to his guns while being rubbished and laughed at by 5 or 6 other "expert financial advisers" = voodoo doctors

Just a little corruption in Sweden

It turns out that the judge who passed the verdict in the Pirate Bay case is:

"... a signed up member of Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt ('the Swedish Copyright Association'), where he is joined by Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The judge also sits on the board of Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property), a group actively advocating for more stringent copyright laws."
http://www.thelocal.se/19028/20090423/

The judgment was rather extreme:

The four defendants in the case, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.56 million) in damages

One of the lawyers has called for a mistrial

Just a little corruption in Sweden, who would have imagined such a thing?

More at torrent freak

notes on cloud computing

QUESTIONS
What is cloud computing?
What are the differences between cloud computing, web2.0 and the internet?


EVOLUTION – TECHNICAL AND FINANCIAL

Prerequisite: Cheap broadband
Software as a service (SaaS): remotely accessing software from someone elses data centre using a web browser
Virtualisation: initially apps were difficult to deploy but then came virtualisation, the packaging of applications with everything else they need to run. Virtual apps can run anywhere (ie. in the cloud)
Financial model is PAYG, more economical than alternatives

This video explains the basic concepts:


THE NETWORK WILL EAT THE PC

... data management and computational processing is moving away from personal computing frameworks into a collaborative workspace that is managed in the network
- Cloud computing, Science2.0 and the Social Web

INEVITABLE TREND

It is an inevitable trend in computing, because of the need to reduce complexity and data-management/computation-management costs. It's clear that, in the near future, the backup storage and computation will continue to evolve into collaborative workspaces that you never have to administer
- Cloud computing, Science2.0 and the Social Web

HELPFUL METAPHORS AND EXPLANATION
from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q:

Dan Farber, Editor and Chief CNET News:

We currently have three platforms: the desktop, mobile devices and the cloud ... increasingly things will start to lean towards the cloud ... when there is enough bandwidth, reliability, security and so on then there will no longer be a notion of a cloud ...it will be just like serving up electricity, serving up data, applications and even writing those applications directly to the cloud

Tim O'Reilly, quoting from a Clay Shirky presentation:

Thomas Watson once famously said (allegedly) that there is no need for more than five computers in the world

We now know that he was wrong

He overstated the number by four!

Everything we think of as a computer today is just a device for connecting to this one big computer that we are all building

EXAMPLES
Google docs

Zoho: It includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications

SOME OF THE CONCEPTS DEFINED

Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand

Virtualisation
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources

Utility Computing
Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network). This system has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire hardware; instead, computational resources are essentially rented. Customers with very large computations or a sudden peak in demand can also avoid the delays that would result from physically acquiring and assembling a large number of computers
(traced back to a john mccarthy, 1961 quotation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing

Grid computing
The application of several computers to a single problem at the same time – usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

amazing bike video

This is why reddit is my home page. Breathtaking:

Swedes Demonstrate in Support of Pirate Bay

Following the prosecution of the Pirate Bay torrent site it will be interesting to see how the Pirate Party goes in the next European parliamentary elections (June 7th)

Swedes Demonstrate in Support of Pirate Bay

The Pirate Party organized demonstrations against the convictions at several cities across Sweden on Saturday. More than 1,000 people turned out in Stockholm to show support for The Pirate Bay defendents and the practice of file sharing ...

Since the Stockholm district court passed judgment on April 17th the Pirate Party confirmed on Saturday afternoon that its membership has swelled to 21,000.

The party's youth league is now, with its 10,000 members, larger than all of the parliamentary party youth organizations.

But the tigers come at night ... And they turn your dream to shame

Candidate #4321 Susan Boyle, nearly 48yo, currently unemployed but still looking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

The YouTube embedding has been disabled by request but make sure you check this one out if you haven't seen it yet.

I Dreamed a Dream
From Les Miserables
[Fantine is left alone, unemployed and destitute]

[FANTINE]
There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
- lyrics source

the singularity man

Here are some video interviews for a fascinating introduction to Ray Kurzweil's ideas about where the exponential growth of technology will lead. There are four shortish videos, just follow the sidebar after viewing the first one.

One aspect of the video medium I like is that you pick up clues to the author's personality far more so than through the writing medium. His flippant comment about the current recession / depression reveals some intellectual detachment from important current issues. Nevertheless, without question he is very smart guy and the testimony from Stevie Wonder indicates a person of compassion, also.

Predicting the future is a very hard thing to do. The exponential growth of technology and nanotechnology is fascinating. Where will it lead us?

Rodney Brooks has some critical thoughts about Kurzweil's ideas in an Edge discussion about Biocomputation:

"A long time ago the brain was a hydrodynamic system. Then the brain became a steam engine. When I was a kid, the brain was a telephone switching network. Then it became a digital computer. And then the brain became a massively parallel digital computer. About two or three years ago I was giving a talk and someone got up in the audience and asked a question I'd been waiting for — he said, "but isn't the brain just like the World Wide Web?"

The brain is always — has always been — modeled after our most complex technology. We weren't right when we thought it was a steam engine. I suspect we're still not right in thinking of it in purely computational terms, because my gut feeling is there's going to be another way of talking about things which will subsume computation, but which will also subsume a lot of other physical stuff that happens"

netbooks in schools: unstoppable force versus immovable object

1:1 netbooks in schools, summary of my analysis so far

unstoppable force:
a device which can be used educationally which has become -

• cheaper
• lighter
• take home 24/7
• personal ownership
• robust
• world wide communication and collaboration
• cloud computing
  
• free software and hardware (the latter linked to communication plans)
• pressure on schools to be up to date, cutting edge (update 11th April)

immovable object:

• teachers as gatekeepers of standards
• historically packaged curriculum which eschews diversions
• resistance to unguided youthful exuberance
• technology is everything invented since you were born
• the disturbing aspect of young people being generally quicker learners of new technology than older people
  
• teachers overworked, don't have time
• incredibly diverse nature of teachers work
• available teacher time is small chunks not large chunks required for paradigm shift

Larry Cuban's critique of computers in school: a discussion we have to have

Computers only work well in schools when there is a high degree of access and teachers who are enthusiasts

At the moment in most schools computers are stuck in labs and students on the average obtain 35 minutes per week access, or something like that (figure from excellent Steve Hargadon interview of Larry Cuban, reference at bottom)

By my reading Larry Cuban is not a Luddite, far from it - he acknowledges that 10% of teachers do wonderful things with computers in schools - but a realist who is aware of and sympathetic to the enormous pressures on teachers. His description of pressure on high school teachers is spot on:

Although information technologies have transformed most corporate workplaces, our teacher's schedule and working conditions have changed very little. She teaches five classes a day, each 50 minutes long. Her five classes contain at least three different preparations. She has two classes of Introductory Algebra, two of Geometry, and one Calculus class. In those five classes, she sees 140 students a day. She has one period a day set aside for planning lessons, seeing students, marking papers, making phone calls to parents or vendors, previewing videos, securing a VCR or other equipment, and using the school's copy machines for producing student materials. Our math teacher, like most of her colleagues elsewhere is a very busy person who could use rollerblades as she tries to meet all of her obligations...

In addition to these daily tasks, our math teacher is expected to know the subject inside and out; she is expected to maintain order in their classrooms; she is expected to be both friendly and demanding of each and every student; finally, with higher academic standards and the mandate to take tests that can spell the difference between graduating high school or staying in school longer, she is held accountable for her students doing well on high-stakes tests. So teaching high school, besides knowing one's subject-matter thoroughly, requires the grit of a long-distance runner, the stamina of a boxer going 15-rounds, the temperament of a juggler, and the street-smarts of a three-card monte dealer...
- SO MUCH HIGH-TECH MONEY INVESTED, SO LITTLE USE: HOW COME?

Putting 10,000 netbook computers into primary schools in Northern Victoria (see here) will change the readiness of access issue but how is it going to transform teachers who are not currently computer enthusiasts into effective teachers of computer rich classrooms? It will provide far more opportunity but it's not going to happen overnight and in some or many cases it won't happen at all.

I've always been against this approach. I argue for computer saturation at schools but if and only if there is a computer enthusiast teacher on the job. There we have it. I want computer saturation in my classes because I have done the hard work of figuring out how to make it work. But I don't think it should happen in classrooms where teachers, often for legitimate reasons, have not done that work.

This 2006 audio interview by Steve Hargadon interview of Larry Cuban critically discusses a range of important issues. Go to this page and search for "Cuban" and download the mp3 or ogg version (46 minutes)

"And keep your eyes wide; The chance won't come again"

How can I reconcile the irony that the lyrics of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' seem just as relevant in 2009 as when they were first written in the 1960s?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Mary Lou Jepson: it is about the screen

Some extracts from Mary Lou Jepson's Pixel Qi [pronounciation : chee] Mission Statment:

In 2009 we are on the cusp of "cloud computing". 3G wireless services, WiFi and mesh networking are widely deployed. Ebook readers, digital photoframes, and richly-featured touch-screen phones abound. Mini-notebook computers – netbooks – are growing rapidly in adoption ...

Pixel Qi has a belief on the future of the computing - it's not about the CPU or the OS - It is about the screen ...

We see the future of the portable electronics as simply the display - with embedded electronics eventually right in the display glass itself. This is the future laptop, the future cell phone and the future PDA. Instead of focusing on higher speed (more MHz) and larger memory (more GBytes), we work toward new device designs by focusing on displays that we can read, as easily as paper - indoors and out - with battery life measured in days not hours ...

Displays for computers need to be optimized to crisply display text, they need to be optimized for a reader just 30 centimeters from the screen; they need to allow for widespread variations in ambient lighting; they need to support lowering the overall power consumption of the entire device

The display is the most expensive component in a modern laptop, and the most power hungry, and it's uncomfortable to read when compared with paper. We aim to fix this ... The battery is the second most expensive component in the laptop or portable. We propose to massively lower the power consumption of the screen and thus also slash the cost of the battery and dramatically boost how long your machine can run on it before you have re-charge it

We will do all of this while making LCD screens lower cost, higher resolution, easier to read and sunlight readable. We've already shown the first step of this at One Laptop per Child by creating a display that is 5X the resolution, 1/3 the cost, 1/10th the power consumption ...

brief listing of arguments that support radical educational change due to technological innovation

Which is the best way to argue for the necessity for radical educational change based on underlying technological innovation?

1. The pencil analogy (Seymour Papert)
2. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points (Alan Kay)
3. Disruptive innovation and Creative Destruction (Clayton Christensen)
4. Four funerals and a wedding (Damian Conway)
5. How the printing press changed the world (historical analogy)
6. The medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan)
7. In all of history there are only 5 media for storing knowledge: DNA, Brains, Hardware, Books, Software (Philip Armour)
8. The Singularity (Raymond Kurzweil)
9. A new literacy (James Gee, Andy diSessa)

Change is happening anyway but we also need philosophers of change who can articulate some meaning in these changes. The arguments I like best are those to do with new and powerful ways in which knowledge can be represented. Here is a sample from alan kay, who combines a few of the above threads:

Another guess I made long ago—that does not yet have a body of evidence to support it—is that what is special about the computer is analogous to and an advance on what was special about writing and then printing. It's not about automating past forms that has the big impact, but as McLuhan pointed out, when you are able to change the nature of representation and argumentation, those who learn these new ways will wind up to be qualitatively different and better thinkers, and this will (usually) help advance our limited conceptions of civilization.
- http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_8.html#kay

I forgot to mention "21st Century skills"

10,000 netbook trial in victorian primary schools

There is a big netbook rollout underway in primary schools in Northern Victoria. The support wiki is netbook trial:

• 10,000 netbooks for 1:1 use in Year 5 and 6 classes (in Victoria Year 6 is the final year of Primary school)
  
• software is a mixture of proprietary (Microsoft, Adobe) and FLOSS (see list below)
• running Vista operating system (hard to figure since most netbooks are sold with XP)
  
• cost of each netbook is $550 - computer $480, bag $30, software $40 - this includes insurance
• costs are shared by the families, school and government; families end up paying a dollar a week, spread over 3 years
• Anywhere Anytime Learning has been involved in the consultation process. Their 21 steps to 1:1 success presentation is available from this page of the wiki.
  
• the netbooks are Acer Aspire One and Lenovo S9, detailed specifications here

Here is a list of the software on the machines:

Adobe Flash Player
Create and view animated content

Adobe Reader 8
Provides options for basic PDF viewing and comment-making

Adobe Shockwave Player
Displays web content that has been created by Adobe

Apple Quicktime
A multimedia framework capable of handling various formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music and interactive panoramic images

Audacity
Open source software for recording and editing sounds

Blender
Open source, cross-platform suite of tools for 3D creation

CD Burner XP
Application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs

Cute PDF Writer
Create PDF files from any printable document, save PDF forms using Acrobat Reader, make PDF booklets, impose, rearrange pages and more

Debut
A simple, easy-to-use video recorder program that lets you capture files directly

DEECD Fonts Victorian Cursive
Downloadable electronic font of Victorian Modern Cursive script to make handwriting exercises, posters, crosswords, flashcards and other classroom resources on your netbook

DVD Flick
A simple DVD authoring tool

Free Mind
A Mind Mapping application

Gamemaker
www.yoyogames.com
Make exciting computer games, without the need to write a single line of code

GIMP
Stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program and is a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs

Google Picasa 3
Helps you organise, edit and share your photos

Google Sketchup
Create, modify and share 3D models

Irfan View
An image viewer and convertor that opens and edit images, as well as multiple media formats

Jahshaka
An open source video editing and effects application

Java runtime environment
Run Java applications

Kahootz V2
Create, explore and invent in 3D (V3 upgrade available soon)

Microsoft Internet Explorer
Web browser

Microsoft Office 2007
Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Microsoft Office Media Content
Includes the Microsoft Clip Organiser and a library of clip art and other media files that users can insert into Office documents

Microsoft PhotoDraw 2.0
Graphic software

Microsoft PhotoStory 3
Create multimedia video presentations using still images

Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint
Provides users with many powerful new features that make it easier to synchronise audio, video, slides and images to create engaging and effective rich-media presentations

Microsoft Silverlight
Delivers high-quality, interactive video across the web and mobile devices.

Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium
Encyclopaedia software

Microsoft Windows Media Player
Store and play music, video and pictures

Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise
Operating system

MonkeyJam
Create stop-motion movies

MSW Logo
Logo is a computer programming language used for functional programming

NVU
Create web pages with a program that does not require previous web editing knowledge

Paint.NET
Image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows

Scratch
Create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music and art

Symantec Client Security (anti-virus)
Anti-virus software

Tuxmath
Educational maths tutor for children starring Tux, the Linux Penguin

Tuxtyping
Educational typing tutor game starring Tux, the Linux Penguin

VLC Player
VideoLAN Client is a portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats

censoring those who oppose censorship

Wikileaks offices in Germany were raided by police on March 24. This wikileaks editorial is a must read:
Western internet censorship: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

Extract:

Australia and Germany are the only liberal democracies proposing a mandatory internet censorship regime ...

Although originally marketed, in all countries, as a way of combating child pornography, the blacklists obtained by Wikileaks show that the systems have already been corrupted into censoring other content, including political content.

For instance, the secret blacklist for Thailand censors thousands of sites per year deemed to be critical of the Thai Monarchy, from academic books and YouTube to the Economist magazine and Wikileaks itself.

Similarly, the blacklist for Australia contains an anti-abortion site, fringe religions, a dentist clinic, gay sites, gambling sites, islamist sites, euthanasia activist sites, an astrologer's blog, misclassified material, and, like Thailand, Wikileaks itself. Even the Australian government's "Minister for censorship", Senator Stephen Conroy, has admitted that fully half of the sites on the secret list are unrelated to child pornography.

ARM architecture is coming to netbooks

Because of their low price and power saving features (which extends the battery life) ARM is the dominant chip (32 bit) architecture in mobile phones, mp3 players, PDAs, handheld gaming units, calculators, computer peripherals (hard drives, routers) and ebook readers such as Kindle (ARM_architecture) The ARM chip has now evolved into being incorporated into netbooks.

Watch this video to obtain an initial look and feel of the ARM netbooks that will soon be on the market:

• ARM demos slim, low-power netbook prototypes
• |
• ZDNet UK videos

Some of the features:

• ultra thin, light and low cost $199 - $250
• No fan or heat sink required – this enables new design features
• 8 hours battery life
• movies on high resolution screen

Summary: Microsoft threatened by ARM / Linux

Currently Windows runs on 90% of the netbooks and Linux on 10%. The possible threats to MS netbook market dominance include the Google Android OS and low power ARM processors

The software / hardware currently behind the above mentioned 90% of netbooks is Windows XP Home Basic and the x86-based Atom processors-Intel's smallest and lowest-power microprocessors

So far Microsoft is staying with their x86 architecture due to their historical inertia, which now works against them

ARM-based netbooks running Linux (or Google Android) will be on the market soon for prices as low as [US]$199

OLPC may use ARM chips in the XO-2. But there is a problematic irony here, for Negroponte. If Windows does not develop an OS that runs effectively with ARM then the XO-2 would not be able to offer dual boot linux / windows (source)

Apple may be another winner arising from ARM architecture

Look on these netbooks as a larger iPod touch with a hinged keyboard. At twice the length and width they would still fit into a large pocket. With a 7" screen the resolution would be 960 x 640 - four times the screen space of the iPod touch....

While the biggest netbook companies, Acer and Asus, can build ARM netbooks, they would have to be based on Linux or Android, as the only version of Windows that works on ARM is Windows Mobile. Indeed, Asus has already started work on an Android system

Predicted Losers: Microsoft, Intel (at least in the short term), AMD

Predicted Winners: Apple, RIM, Nokia, Asus, Acer, Linux or Android

Thanks to Joel for alerting me to the new evolution of ARM

censorship has arrived

When Senator Nick Xenophon (Independent, who made his name a few years ago with a no-pokies campaign in South Australia) announced last month not to support Conroy's mandatory filter then I thought that was the end of the matter. With the Liberals and Greens against Conroy's proposal, then with Xenophon also in opposition, it did not have the numbers to become law.

Hence, it's especially disturbing to discover that we already have censorship of non hard core porn sites in Australia.

ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) has just threatened an ISP with an $11,000 a day fine if they did not remove a link to an anti-abortion web site.

Furthermore, pages to Wikileaks, which describe the Danish internet censorship list and the Wikileaks press release about this have been blacklisted by ACMA. As Wikileaks comments:

The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.
- Australia secretly censors Wikileaks press release and Danish Internet censorship list, 16 Mar 2009

Wikileaks has demonstrated through the publication of the censorship lists in Denmark, Thailand and Finland that:

1. these lists leak
2. invariably these lists are expanded from pornography to other material, including political material. For example, the Thai list contains sites banned for criticising the Royal Family.

In more news:

Reporters Without Borders, in a report on enemies of internet freedom last week, added Australia to its 'watch list' of countries that might be imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information. The main issue cited was the Australian government's proposed internet censorship scheme
- Australia's internet censor bares its gums

As I wrote earlier:

I see this as part of a more general pattern where the "caring parties" advocate policies which end up destroying our freedom and initiative - net nannies, risk aversion, artificial inclusion, welfare dependency, cultural relativism (the freedom of other cultures to suppress women, practice honour killings, genital mutilation etc.), the State as big brother who will keep an eye on you under the guise of protecting you. The caring collectivist parties like the Australian Labour Party are far more likely to support these sorts of policies than the parties that are more ideologically aligned with the notion of individual liberty.
- Do you really want to be free?

pi day

It was pi day yesterday. March 14 is the day because if you write the date 3/14 then you have the first 3 digits of pi.

Some light hearted information about pi from wikipedia:

The value of π has been computed to more than a trillion (10^12) digits (source).

The Guinness-recognized record for remembered digits of π is 67,890 digits, held by Lu Chao, a 24-year-old graduate student from China. It took him 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite to the 67,890th decimal place of π without an error.

There are many ways to memorize π, including the use of "piems", which are poems that represent π in a way such that the length of each word (in letters) represents a digit. Here is an example of a piem, originally devised by Sir James Jeans: How I need (or: want) a drink, alcoholic in nature (or: of course), after the heavy lectures (or: chapters) involving quantum mechanics.

capitalism 101

A thumbnail sketch of my understanding of the capitalist system.

Capitalism is a dynamic system, a profit driven system, a wealthy system and a flexible system

Up to a point. But beyond that point all of those attributes turn into their opposites. It becomes a moribund system where profits fail, wealth disappears and flexibility becomes pointless. My guess is that the current Keynesian measures (stimulus packages) to solve the current crisis will not work.

Capitalism is a dynamic system

It continually creates new types of jobs and destroys old types of jobs. The productive forces are continually developed.

Barry Jones wrote Sleepers, Wake! in 1982, tracking the massive changes in employment from agriculture to industry to Services to Post service (Education / Leisure) from 1780 to 1980

More recently, Clayton Christensen has written and spoken about disruptive technologies such as computer startups that sometimes begin in garages and then become highly successful: Apple, Microsoft, Google are well known examples.

These changes push the workforce in the general direction of more skills and more education, as mind numbing, labour intensive work is augmented by technology which becomes increasingly smart.

Capitalism is a profit driven system

If a commodity can’t be sold at a profit in the market place then eventually it won’t be made.

New technology, (which can be expensive), is introduced by capitalists into workplaces to increase productivity. This new technology creates new jobs and destroys old jobs but in growth conditions can lead to an overall increase in employment.

New technology can lead to increased output and, with economies of scale, cheaper products. The cost of plant (fixed costs or one off costs of tooling up) has gone up but production costs per unit have gone down (technology enhanced productivity). With sufficient volume of sales this can and has created cheaper products. However, only big capitalists (monopolies) can maintain this brutal regime. Due to competition between capitalists the overall tendency is for the rate of profit to fall. Hence the smaller under capitalized companies tend to fail and be eaten up by monopolies, who have larger reserves of capital.

When capitalism is going well then increased productivity leads to cheaper goods which leads to more demand which leads to more employment. If this is happening in a whole country then GNP or GDP per worker increases and standard of living goes up.

This has been the general trend in the long boom since the end of WW2, although it has been interspersed with downturns or recessions (1973-4 oil cartel, 1981-2 (contractionary monetary policy to control inflation), 1992 and 2000-02 tech bubble)

Capitalism is a wealthy system

Due to the rapid development of the means of production over the past centuries capitalism can sustain a high standard of living for nearly all members of industrialised society. Even people on welfare can have swimming pools (plastic), foxtel for entertainment, recreational drugs and the like. There is a more or less endless range of distractions which induce many people to not pay detailed attention to political and economic developments.

Capitalism is a flexible system

For most of the time (recessions excluded) capitalism is flexible enough to make adjustments (without excessive government regulation) to keep most people satisfied and to keep unemployment within "acceptable" limits for most of the time. Since the overall trend for 60 years has been growth and recessions have been of relatively short durations (1-2 years) in most industrialized countries (exception: Japan) then the overall impression is gained that capitalism works or at least works better than socialism (the main historical alternative), which is regarded as discredited.

These flexible adjustment mechanisms at the level of the workplace include natural attrition (not replacing workers who leave), part time / full time work choices, retraining, overtime, casual employment and flexible timing in the introduction of new technologies.

At the government level they include migration policy, school leaving age policy, retirement age policy (elaborate Superannuation schemes; at what age are people eligible for the pension), fiscal policy and monetary policy ...


For most of the time capitalism seems to work. Many economists speak highly of the ability of the market to automatically regulate the complexities of this dynamic system. Recessions are inconvenient but perhaps worth tolerating, in the absence of anything demonstrated to be superior, if the overall trend is growth. It's remarkable that some people have lived their whole lives (eg. since 1945) in the belief that our system is economically stable (within acceptable limits) only to discover now that perhaps it is not. It may take a while before that belief evaporates. My evaluation is that our current rulers don't have a clue.

Now we have a major downturn and there is no end in sight. Growth has slowed dramatically in most countries and now unemployment is beginning to soar. The reassurances from those who brought us to this point, that it will all be over in a year or so sound hollow. We need to look deeper at the causes of the current crisis.

(based on Unemployment and Revolution, Part 2)

just another $750 billion

On page 2 of a New York Times article about Obama reaching out to elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan:

Turning to domestic affairs, Mr. Obama indicated that the end was not in sight when it came to the economic crisis and suggested that he expected it could take another $750 billion to address the problem of weak and failing financial institutions beyond the $700 billion already approved.

I think they should have put that on page one of another article perhaps with the title: "Don't Panic"

From page 1 of the same article:

“I don’t think that people should be fearful about our future,” he said. “I don’t think that people should suddenly mistrust all of our financial institutions.” ... He struck a reassuring tone about the economy, saying he had no trouble sleeping at night.

I don't believe him

unemployment 101

• Australian unemployment 4.8% (January 2009) - source
• American unemployment 8.1% (25 year high, February 2009) - source

Capitalism is based on buying and selling commodities in the marketplace. Labour power is just another commodity to be bought and sold by capitalists. Labour power is essential for the production of other commodities.

A commodity is simply something that can be bought or sold.

If commodities can’t be sold (such as houses or cars at the moment) then capitalists will stop making them and stop or slow down buying the materials used to make them. If labour power cannot be used then capitalists will lay off (sack) workers or not employ new workers. Labour power is subject to supply and demand since it is just another commodity.

There is never full employment or guaranteed work under capitalism because labour power is just another commodity. Just as there is no guarantee that someone will buy a car from General Motors today there is also no guarantee that some capitalist will employ a particular worker. That is how a market economy works. If there was zero unemployment then workers could bargain for higher wages up to the point where the profits of the capitalist would become minimized. So, it is important for capitalism to always have some unemployment or a reserve army of labour to keep wages in check.

In Australia, we have had chronically high unemployment for many years now (since 1974). As a teacher in disadvantaged schools I have seen the effects of generational unemployment (parents don’t have jobs and kids don’t aspire to have a job) and concentrated unemployment (in some housing trust areas no one in the street works). People can survive on welfare these days but some of them don’t value education or aspire to employment. Generational welfare dependency can be very ugly

The capitalist system can still function “normally” while unemployment remains within limits (say, below 5%).

At the moment we have a recession (defined as two quarters of zero or negative growth) where buying and selling at the marketplace grinds to a halt. The means of production are still there, in those industries which are sacking workers. In the abstract it is still possible to make products and distribute them to people who want them but since they can’t be bought or sold, since we live in a market economy, then that will not happen.

Historically, other social systems have not had unemployment, they have not had the concept of unemployment. There may be all sorts of other problems with these social systems but unemployment is not one of them. Hunter-gatherer Aboriginal society in Australia, before whites arrived, did not have any unemployment. Slave society and feudal society did not have unemployment. There was no unemployment in the socialist Soviet Union during the 1930s Great Depression. In many science fiction future scenarios there is no concept of unemployment.

update 8th March: There is no unemployment in the Free Software industry whose products power the internet (LAMP).

Unemployment is part and parcel of the market economy, an essential feature. But obviously, these are not normal times, unemployment is rapidly increasing. This requires further explanation. Why has the normal arrangement of relatively low unemployment broken down?

(based on Unemployment and Revolution, Part 1)

kay and van dam discuss engelbart's ideas

Program for the Future (video, about 80 minutes) where Alan Kay and Andy van Dam discuss Doug Engelbart's ideas in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the mother of all demos

(I picked this up from mark miller's site: Tales of inventing the future)

This video is very good, hard hitting analysis about how great visions can be spoiled, that we could have done better. Everyone knows that Engelbart invented the mouse but his broader vision has been largely forgotten. Engelbart is present and is treated with great respect and affection by both speakers.

Some of the ideas mentioned here, briefly. Try to make time to view the whole thing for some high level, stimulating discussion. I'd like to transcribe some sections but am too pushed for time at the moment.

The need to remain focused on the high level goals: augmentation of human intellect (Engelbart) and human-computer symbiosis (Licklider)

It's difficult to capture and summarise group wisdom, more needs to be done. Google searches are crude.

Putting training wheels on bikes diminishes the efficiency of a bike. Computer systems are like that today, keeping users at a baby level (at 32 minutes)

We are wedged today in the way computers are designed both conceptually and technically. We might as well burn the whole thing and start again.

Pop culture is to be incurious about the past and the future

A big problem with the web is that the browser removed WYSIWIG functionality. Hardly anyone complained.

CEGSA 2009

I've submitted a workshop and a presentation for the CEGSA (Computers in Education Group of South Australia) Conference, 7th & 8th July 2009:

Scratch Workshop (Hands on workshop 90 minutes)
Scratch is good software for this learning cycle: imagine -> create -> play -> share -> reflect. You will learn or extend your Scratch know-how with the opportunity for discussion about how to use it effectively with students. The workshop also includes use of the Scratch Sensor Board

Netbooks and Schools (Presentation 45 minutes)
The rise of the netbook provides schools with the opportunity to unchain computers from labs and put them into the hands of students and their families 24/7. Come along to discuss the prospects and problems of this vision

youtube university

Richard Buckland has published videos (55 of them!) of his introductory course to Computer Science at the University of NSW on youtube

I have just watched his first lecture and it is great - lots of humour, ability to connect to and reassure students and obviously very expert in his subject. The video at the end about the consequences of plagiarism is brilliant (essential albeit grim topic to cover in the first lecture). Here is a Computer Science Department with the ability to make their subject entertaining as well as rigorous.

I googled for Richard's CV and found this inside:

Carrick Teaching Award $25,000 2007 and a citation in 2006:

For inspirational teaching in computer science that rekindles students' childhood love of learning and communicates the joy of creative and rigorous thinking

The scope of the course is described:

This course consists of three strands: programming, systems, and general computer-science literacy.

The programming strand is further divided into two parts. For the first half of the course we cover small scale programming, in the second half we look at how to effectively use teams to produce more substantial software.

In the systems strand we will look at how computers work. Concentrating on microprocessors, memory, and machine code.

In the literacy strand we will look at topics drawn from: computing history, algorithms, WWW programming, ethics and law, cryptography and security, and other topics of general interest.

The strands will be covered in an intermingled fashion.

There is more. From a recent Age article: Uni computer lecturer makes YouTube his classroom:

This year, Buckland is inviting high school students with a strong interest in computing and mathematics to study an advanced first-year university level computing course for free.

https://wiki.cse.unsw.edu.au/info/HighSchoolComputing

With the lectures now published online, the students will be able to do most of their work from home. They will only come to the university one evening a week for a two and a half hour lab and tutorial, where they can ask questions and socialise.

long multiplication

  123
x 645

(Liping Ma example)

or,

 
  26
x 31

(M. J. McDermott example, see video below)

In her book, Liping Ma demonstrates that some teachers use a procedural method (long multiplication is like a recipe that you follow to obtain the correct answer) and some teachers use conceptual methods (explain how the procedure works by explaining how place value is obtained) in teaching long multiplication.

Liping Ma interviews the teachers involved. What emerges clearly is that nearly all the teachers who use procedural (recipe) methods don't actually understand the role of place value in long multiplication!

First up, should you place a zero after the 78, making it 780 in this example?

 
  26       or,       26
x 31              x  31
  26                 26
 78                 780
 806                806

Either way is acceptable provided the teacher can explain what is happening. If you don't place a zero after the 78, then the teacher needs to understand and explain that we are dealing with 78 tens or 78 lots of ten. If you do place a zero after the 78 then the teacher needs to understand and explain that in the second step we are multiplying 26 x 30, rather than 26 x 3

Explanations can vary but the teacher needs to understand what they are doing

Here is what procedural explanation teachers do and think (from Liping Ma's interviews):

They talk about place value as just a label of different columns, they don't explain the significance of that label. When they talk about the "tens column" and the "hundreds column" they use these terms as labels, not as values that require explanation.

They treat the gap after the 78 as just a placeholder which can be filled by other symbols apart from zero, such as an asterick or even something more memorable like a picture of an apple or animal

Some of them think that to add a zero after the 78 is actually incorrect

If students make a mistake, such as putting the 8 in the 78 in the units column, then they correct the error by restating the rule ("the 8 belongs in the tens column") or by using a placeholder in the units column. They do not explain why the 8 belongs in the tens column.

Here is what conceptual explanation teachers do:

They explain what place value actually means, ie. the 3 in 31 means 30

Sometimes they separate the problem into subproblems:
26 x 31
= 26 x 30 + 26 x 1
etc.

More knowledgable conceptual teachers explain this in terms of the distributive rule, which they may have taught to students earlier:
26 x 31
= 26 x(30 +1)
= 26 x 30 + 26 x 1
etc.

Some of them will deliberately put an error on the board and then engage the class in discussion about where is the error and how to correct it

Notice how M. J. McDermott fudges the place value explanation in the following video in the course of pronouncing the "correct" way of teaching long multiplication. She doesn't explain why the 8 in 78 goes in the tens column. Then after a moments hesitation she places a zero after the 8, with the words, "Sometimes we put a zero here", but does not explain why.



Liping Ma demonstrates through her interviews that the important issue is whether or not the teacher understands and can explain the maths. She also finds that many American teachers do not and that the Chinese teachers in her sample have superior understanding.

Reference:
Liping Ma, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics (1999)

village telco: david rowe

I've added David Rowe's blog: Beer, Coffee and a little DSP, to my blog roll.

David does awesome work along the lines of bringing free telephony to the developing world. His website is VILLAGE TELCO provides more detail: an initiative to assemble/develop the cheapest, easiest to setup, easiest to manage, scalable, Open Source, standards-based, wireless local do-it-yourself telephone company toolkit in the world)

The whole concept of universal communication is one that I'm trying to learn more about

Different approaches to educational reform

Standards approach, Expert teacher approach and Fundamental restructure.

Standards approach. If we measure student output then government can demand that teachers improve those results. The thinking here is that by keeping teachers accountable then education will improve. It is hard for teachers to resist the seemingly very reasonable demand that they be accountable even if the way in which it is being measured is dubious. Standards tests measure who is good at standards tests. It is not clear beyond that what they do measure even although it is possible / probable that they do measure something else. It is this doubt and difficulty of refuting the claim that standards tests might measure something important that makes this approach appealing to those who want some "hard data" and clear benchmarks but who don't want to think too much about deeper educational issues.

Expert teacher approach. eg. John Hattie's analysis. An analysis of the education system reveals that teacher quality is the factor that is possible to change that would make the biggest difference. According to Hattie teacher quality accounts for 30% of learning improvement. This is not the biggest factor (what students bring to the table accounts for 50% of learning) but it is the biggest factor that is possible to change without major social upheaval. Teacher work can be analysed and the factors that distinguish expert teacher from experienced teacher can be identified and learnt. Wider questions to do with the nature of the system and the role of the individual are put to one side in the interests of getting on with the job of improving education.

Fundamental restructure. Periodically, great thinkers come forward with ideas about how to change education in more fundamental ways. For example, Jerome Bruner has written extensively about this and even introduced a radical curriculum reform called Man: A Course of Study in the USA in the 1970s. Several thinkers - for example Seymour Papert, Alan Kay and Andy diSessa (I'm currently reading his book, 'Changing Minds') - have put forward really interesting ideas about how to transform education using computers. Of course there are others and people argue about how significant they are. One important thing here is simply to identify that this group exists and cannot be ignored.

This is just a perspective or framing on different types of educational change, which could be rudely categorised as dumb reform, realistic reform and deep questioning. It's easy to lose sight of the big picture.

Commanding Heights

I've been watching Commanding Heights, a PBS historical account of Hayek's struggle to be heard (vis a vis Keynes) and his ultimate success in old age (suggested by mark miller). Part one covers a lot of history in broad and bold sweep. I like the historical approach.

My current hypothesis is that the human race doesn't understand economics. We understand what doesn't work, even though not even that is clear:

• Capitalism without Unions (too hard on the workers, they revolt)
• Soviet style command economy (too hard to adapt to real demand, leads to stagnation)
• Regulated capitalism (same sort of problem as the Soviet style command economy)
• De regulated capitalism (has led to the current mess)
  

But we don't understand what does work. The suggestion, from the video (part one), that Hayek, Thatcher and Reagan had all or most of the answers seems unlikely to me. It's more likely that they were or are the latest flavour of the month, year or decade. After a while we'll discover that Hayek doesn't work either.

It's fairly easy to see now that our leaders don't know what they are talking about. It also seems obvious that they never knew what they were talking about.