teachermate: $50 handheld student computer

The teachermate is not going to replace the OLPC anytime soon, but I have to appreciate all attempts to forward the cause of educational technology.  The new gadget, by Innovations for Learning (a Chicago not-for-profit), was designed for children in early elementary school, who its creators hope will be “instantly attracted to its resemblance to a handheld game.   Gizmodo’s article on the teachermate summed up its hardware specs: “directional buttons, a few face buttons, a 2.5-inch LCD, USB sync, SD card storage, AC/USB charging, and a 3.5-hour battery life.”  The unit costs $50, but the educational software costs $20, coming to a grand total of $70 per pupil.

The teachermate educational software consists of reading and math programs, which, according to the teachermate website “have been painstakingly aligned to all of the leading reading and math programs.”  All of the instructions and other language in the programs are available in English and Spanish, and the teacher can determine what mix of languages each student needs.  Although this was probably designed for teaching English, it would probably also be fabulous for teaching Spanish to early elementary school students.  I’m concerned that only reading and math are covered; it just reminds me how badly NCLB has twisted our idea of what education is.

There is also a “classroom management program,” with which the teacher can access information about how much time each student (or the whole class) is spending on reading and math, how much Spanish support each student is using, etc.  They can also print out progress reports.  The new technology will be debuting in Chicago Public Schools soon.  (Yeah, Chicago!)

MMORPGs and Education

Andy Carvin over at learning.now recently wrote a post, “Should Video Games Replace Classroom Learning?”, about the possibilities serious gaming, in the form of MMORPGs, presents for education. He seems to think that while playing educational games has some potential for teaching students, the real educational value lies in the possibility of students creating educational games.

I think he, and many other good, intelligent people in the field of education for whom I have great respect, have been living under a rock when it comes to educational games. Yes, playing and creating MMORPGs have a great amount of potential as educational tools. But what about the things that educators are doing with off-the-shelf games right now?  For instance, some teachers currently use the PC game Civilization III to teach history.  In the strategy game, the player runs an empire, developing it in a number of areas: political, economic, cultural, military, etc.  Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins III wrote an article on this, noting that “one student commented, ‘What I learned is that you can’t separate economics from politics or geography. What natural resources I have or where I’m locate affects how I can negotiate with other civilizations.’”  They also noted that, because the game allows players to choose non-Western empires and create alternative histories to the reality of Euro-American colonialism.  In one test of the use of Civ III as an educational tool, “students, most of who came from mostly minority backgrounds, read below grade level, and struggled with social studies developed sophisticated skills for thinking about history through playing CivIII. They learned to ask their own questions about the historical process.”

Not only do playing and creating MMORPGS and single-player games have potential as educational tools, there are other kinds of games out there that may have even more potential.  Alternate reality games (ARGs) could make homework–or school–a much more interesting process.  For an example, look at SF0, or at some of the posts at the Avant Game blog, which is written by an ARG designer.  What makes games fun is the alternate world they create, and the “video game” technology is only important in that capacity.  Any way learning can be made into a complex, fascinating alternate world could do wonders for education.

OLPC

I know that the One Laptop Per Child project is old news, and that’s precisely why I think it’s finally time for me to weigh in on the subject. Hindsight is 20/20, and since OLPC is so completely different from anything that came before, it has been easy for people who care a lot about education to get caught up, either in the hype or in the backlash.

That said, OLPC is a truly revolutionary project. It isn’t just the quality for the price, either. The big computer companies are right: their OLPC knockoffs can compete on those grounds alone. But OLPC is also the greenest laptop in the world “by a factor of 10.” It features easily replaceable parts. (How many of your devices do?) It’s super-durable. The mesh networking system is positively brilliant.

OLPC also uses an open-source operating system. I know that the OS has been seen as a negative by government officials in some countries, who see it as sort of Microsoft knockoff, but open source allows for possible future user experimentation with the software, which is a plus.

A motivated person can learn more from a computer connected to the internet than from a lifetime of formal schooling. More importantly, people can learn the way that they naturally do: by exploring every path that interests them, as illustrated in this fabulous XKCD comic on the addictive potential of Wikipedia.

Honestly, if I were the US government, I’d buy a whole bunch of these and send them to Iraq and Afghanistan. The goodwill it could create (particularly in conjunction with a removal of troops) would be enormous. A connection to the world can make a 180 degree difference in a person’s life.

The biggest mistake that the OLPC project has made thus far is not to continue the Give-One-Get-One program. The units are selling on Ebay for around $400-500, when the give-one get one program charged $350 or so. Ebay sellers are making profit instead of poor children getting computers. An equally, if not more, harmful long-term consequence of their decision to end Give-One-Get-One is the amount of user innovation that could otherwise be integrated into future models/peripherals/upgrades. People in industrialized countries are more likely to have the money to put their creative ideas into action, meaning that large numbers of people could have created and tested new ideas on the OLPC with no R&D cost to the project. What if a DIYer somewhere in Texas or Vermont has an idea for the OLPC that could revolutionize education technology as we know it, but they feel morally amiss paying $500 to an Ebay scalper for one? To me, ignoring the open-source ingenuity of residents of industrialized nations is the biggest mistake of the project.

Real Educational Reform

Sometimes it seems that, aside from freeschool advocates and privatization nuts, no one really wants to make significant changes to the way that the education system is run in this country. Politicians may give lip service to improving education, but when is the last time you saw a politician suggest a specific policy that would support structural change in the educational system?  Bill Clinton’s “computer in every classroom” sounded good, but even if teachers were given training in them (which they weren’t), and even if three computers had been enough for the class I had in high school that had thirty-five kids in it and not enough desks (I sat on a table in the back next to the silent computers), without a push for curricular change, changes in tools can do very little.

I went to a good public school; we had relatively high test scores, few fights, and the books almost always maxed out at 5-10 years old.  But we still learned most of our subjects through the “sage on the stage” method.  My middle school still only had windows in the science classrooms, and only there because of fire codes.  (When a bunch of ‘tweens from different tribes know that an environment is causing them mental harm, people ought to listen.  Middle schoolers in caves…bad idea.)  Our disciplinary system was still so screwed up that I got lunch detention because I lost my copy of The Two Towers (with my name written in it) and didn’t check in the lost and found for it within the specified amount of time.  No, I’m not making that up.  If you want to ensure that twelve year olds grow up to have anxiety disorders, create a disciplinary system where they’re never certain whether they’ve done something wrong.  If you want them to hate learning, let people who may or may not know anything about the subjects they are teaching educate them by handing down information like God handing Moses the Ten Commandments.

How do we stop teaching material as subjects, separated from each other by arbitrary divisions, and start teaching it as meaningful ways of interacting with and understanding the world?  Geometry wasn’t invented as a method of torture in the Inquisition; it was invented so people could use it.  What if we taught classes in things like industrial design, where students could learn by doing and simultaneously become informed about an important and fascinating field in the world economy.  They could get credit (and even be graded) based on the individual concepts from math and art that they learned, rather than on  making them learn standardized, isolated subjects.  They could choose whether to get that geometry credit from they need from the industrial design class, from the class on 3D computer animation, or from Architecture I. (I’m making these examples up…I hated math class, and I’m guessing that these subjects would be useful in learning it if they were appropriately geared towards beginners, but I actually don’t know.  They’re just hypotheticals.)  I have always read obsessively.  When I was about 10, I used to take a backpack to the library, load up with 30 or so books, and come back within 3-7 days, having read all of them through.  I loved learning.  But I hated school.  It was boring and stupid (until college, when suddenly my grades shot up).  If our teaching methods can make a 10-year old who naturally spent all summer with her nose in a book hate school, we are doing something VERY wrong.  Something no small changes can fix.

If you have any ideas for ways we could improve teaching methods, put them in the comments!

Sir Ken Livingston On Whether Schools Kill Creativity

How could we cost-effectively solve these problems for every child?

The Problem of Digital Equity

When Bill Clinton told Americans he would put computers in every classroom to combat the digital divide, it sounded like a good idea.  The internet was driving the “New Economy,” and every child in the US would have the tools they needed to enter the 21st century workforce.  Right?
Not exactly.  When I graduated my nice exurban public high school, in 2002, we had three computers in every classroom, which no one ever used.  We also had two computer labs, which we only used when my alcoholic senior English teacher, on her own initiative, decided that we should not graduate high school without knowing how to give a PowerPoint presentation.  It saddens me to think how little was probably done with the technology in underserved schools.
Recently, though, there have been improvements.  My younger sister is a junior at the same high school I attended, and there seems to be much more technological education and technologically savvy educators than before.  Unfortunately, most of the software programs used in schools are proprietary; teachers and administrators who are wary of technology tend to trust these programs more.  Such policies create an inherent bias towards the child who can go home and complete her art project in Photoshop Elements (for example), but penalizes the child without the extra money for such a specialized piece of software.  Lucie deLaBruere over at Infinite Thinking Machine has written a fascinating article on the use of Web 2.0 and open source software as instructional software that levels the playing field.  While it is true that often children lack computer access at home, there is often free access from a local library or community center, and if the child were using GIMP instead of Photoshop Elements for the project, s/he could easily put more effort into it after school.  The last thing that we as a society want to do is put obstacles in the way of children spending as much time as possible on learning.

Why do Finns do so well in school?

According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s because as their children develop into adults, they’re allowed to…you know…develop. They don’t have to start school until the age of seven and they don’t have to worry about getting into and paying for a top school. And while the article makes some good points about the issues that might make the US different (such as linguistic heterogeneity and huge disparities in school funding between districts), the reality is that one of the biggest differences between the US and Finland is the wealth gap in the US. Finland has a social safety net preventing many of its citizens from sliding into the kind of systemic poverty plaguing America. Since recent studies have shown that poverty can actually stunt brain development, this could be one of the most meaningful differences between the countries.

A new blog?

I am deeply fascinated by the world of educational technology: its successes, its failures, its democratizing influences, and its alienating ones.  This blog is named after a piece of educational technology that forms such a central part of the plot of Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age.  I can’t say too much about it without being a plot spoiler, so I’ll simply say that humans cannot be replaced by technology; education is the transmission of knowledge between people, for which technology is simply a medium.  That said, access to the internet has certainly expanded my ability to learn about the world, and I’m positively fascinated with the possibilities that the OLPC program holds for people in lower-income countries to have similar experiences.  Even in wealthy countries like the US, the education system needs to change drastically.  Everyone knows this, but people seem to fear the possibility of change.  I think we can do better.  I think we have to.