Fortnightly Mailing

Nicholas Negroponte's open letter about India's $35 tablet device for education

Below is a long excerpt from an open letter by One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte following the announcement by India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal (above left) of plans to develop a $35 tablet device for education. (The picture to the right is a representation of the OLPC XO3, due (?) later this year.)

1. Focus on children 6 to 12 years old. They are your nation’s most precious natural resource. For primary school children, the tablet is not about computing or school, it is about hope. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.
2. Your tablet should be the death of rote learning, not the tool of it. A creative society is built not on memorizing facts, but by learning learning itself. Drill and practice is a mechanism of the industrial age, when repetition and uniformity were systemic. The digital age is one of personalization, collaboration and appropriation. OLPC’s approach to learning is called constructionism. We hope you adopt it too.
3. Tablets are indeed the future. OLPC announced its own eight months ago. However, caution is needed with regard to one aspect of tablets: learning is not media consumption. It is about making things. The iPad is a consumptive tool by design. OLPC urges that you not make this mistake.
4. Hardware is simple. Less obvious is ruggedness, sunlight readability and low power. We use solar power because our laptop is by far the lowest power laptop on the planet. But do not overlook human power – hand cranking and other things that kids can do at night or when it rains. Just solar would be a mistake. Rugged means water resistant and droppable from 10 feet onto a stone floor.
5. Software is harder. Linux is obvious, but whatever you do, do not make it a special purpose device with only a handful of functions. It must be a general purpose computer upon which the whole world can build software, invent applications and do programming. We know that when children program they come the closest to thinking about thinking. When they debug, they are learning about learning. This is key.
6. More than anything, of all the unsolicited advice I have to offer, the most important and most likely to be overlooked is good industrial design. Make an inexpensive tablet, not a cheap one. Make it desirable, lovable and fun to own. Take a page from Apple on this, maybe from OLPC too. Throw the best design teams in India behind it.

Jonathan Zittrain explains Ronald Bowes's work on the Facebook membership list

Here is a very clear explanation of how Ronald Bowes stripped out, aggregated, and republished a large number of Facebook users' already public data, along with some well-informed comments about whether or not it matters. In short:

• it was only to be expected;
• it probably does not matter all that much;
• caveat "emptor";
• if you change your privacy settings on the web, your previously public data may well be for ever out there beyond your control;
• this is good example of the generative nature of the Web.

September ALT Conference. Keynote and Invited Speakers.

The ALT conference "Into something rich and strange" - making sense of the sea-change is approaching fast. (I work for ALT half-time.) Today we published summaries of the sessions of our keynote speakers and invited speakers, whose pictures are shown above.  Keynote speakers will be Donald Clark, Barbara Wasson, and Sugata Mitra, with a welcome from Saul Tendler.  Invited speakers will be:

1. Hans-Peter Baumeister, Co-Director of the European School of Business's Research Institute at Reutlingen University, Germany;
2. Heather Fry, Director of Education and Participation, HEFCE;
3. Sudhir Giri, Head of Google Learning Labs;
4. Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford;
5. Frank McLoughlin, Principal, City and Islington College;
6. Aaron Porter, President, National Union of Students;
7. Josie Taylor, Director, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University;
8. David White, Senior Manager: Development, Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning, University of Oxford.

The conference will take place in Nottingham. You can book to attend (day-passes are available) until 19 August, and there is also a three page PDF with a summary of the conference timetable.

Machine translation reaching a tipping point? An example of the improvement in the quality of Google Translation.

I happened to be looking at a piece of rather vernacular one-finger-typed Spanish that I had translated into English with Google Translate in 2005 and 2007. There'd been no change in the translation between 2005 and 2007, and the results [A] were of partial value, with some entertaining gibberish.

Today's translation [B] is very much better, remarkably so, as you will see below. There is a translation of the same piece by a native speaker of Spanish is included at C.

Original Spanish

1. Una vez al año se hacia una reunion en algun balneario o algo por el estilo con yodas las familias.

2. Otro punto era que se insistia que la reunion era a (calzon quitao) quire decir que tenes que poner todas las cartas sobre la mesa (no esconder nada) muchas veces requeriamos la presencia de la señora para ver que opinion tenia ella.

3. Los cabezas de grupo al final de la reunion exponian todo lo que su grupo recomendaba y a veces unas verdades o criticas que dolian mucho y era esto que me parece que ayudo a muchos a ver la realidad.

A. 2005 and 23/5/2007 translations by Google

1A. Once a year towards a meeting in some bath or something of the sort with yodas the families.

2A. Another point was that insistia that the meeting was a (trousers quitao) quire to say that tenes that to put all letters on the table (not to hide anything) often requeriamos the presence of the lady to see that opinion tapeworm she.

3A. The heads of group at the end of the meeting exponian everything what its group recommended and truths sometimes or you criticize that they dolian much and was this that seems that I help many to see the reality.

B. 28/7/2010 translation by Google

1B. Once a year to a reunion at some spa or something like that with yodas families.

2B. Another point was that he insisted that the meeting was to (take off your breeches) quire that you have to put all the cards on the table (not hiding anything) often required the presence of the lady to see that opinion had it.

3B. The group heads at the end of the meeting setting out all that his group recommended and sometimes some truths or criticisms that hurt a lot and it was this which I think helped many to see reality.

C. Human translation

1C. Once a year there was a meeting at a swimming spot or place of that kind, with all the families.

2C. Another point was the insistence that the meeting should be “with underpants removed” which means that you have to put all your cards on the table and hide nothing, and often we required the presence of the wife to sound out her views.

3C. At the end of the meeting the leaders of the group reported on all their group recommendations and sometimes there emerged some truths or criticisms which were very painful, and this is what I think helped many to come to terms with reality.

Assessing the Effects of ICT in Education - an OECD report

Assessing the Effects of ICT in Education - Indicators, Criteria and Benchmarks for International Comparisons is a 200 page report from the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. It is available for free download from the OECD Online Bookshop.

Abstract:

"Despite the fact that education systems have been heavily investing in technology since the early 1980s, international indicators on technology uptake and use in education are missing. This book aims to provide a basis for the design of frameworks, the identification of indicators and existing data sources, as well as gaps in areas needing further research. The contributions stem from an international expert meeting in April 2009 organised by the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning, in co-operation with OECD (CERI), on benchmarking technology use and effects in education. The contributions clearly demonstrate the need to develop a consensus around approaches, indicators and methodologies. The book is organised around four blocks: contexts of ICT impact assessment in education, state-of-the-art ICT impact assessment, conceptual frameworks and case studies."

Putting CIPD straight

Earlier this month CIPD - a large membership organisation with a royal charter - published a shoddy report about spending on education and training quangos.

The report was shoddy because:

• several of the organisations identified - including LSN and NIACE - were not quangos at all;
• the figures cited were inaccurate;
• the author of the report seemed neither to have understood the work of the organisations in question, nor to have checked his facts.

CIPD subsequently withdrew the report, but not before The Daily Telegraph had blithely repeated the report's assertions.

Here are links to justifiably angry rebuttals from LSIS [100 kB PDF], NIACE, and LSN. Excerpts:

NIACE - "NIACE's reputation, built up over eighty nine years, rests on its independence. Unlike trade or professional associations, NIACE does not defend a single sectional interest and unlike a quango, it can and does campaign against government policy on occasion (for example by drawing attention to the loss of 30 per cent of publicly-funded places for adult learning between 2004 - 2008). This advocacy work is not funded from the public purse but through other charitable funds - which are also used to fund independent research, such as the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning that reported last year."

LSIS - "It is unfortunate that an organisation such as the CIPD that purports to support professional development can be both so inaccurate and dismissive of this activity. It’s a pity too that they can be so unprofessional as to not check their facts or find out how an organisation really works or what it does before rushing into print. I’m sure many of their existing members will be very disappointed in what is clearly a lack of professional competence."

LSN - "LSN is not a quango.  It is a private, independent charity which seeks to improve learning and skills in this country.  Contrary to the CIPD’s report, LSN is not in receipt of grant funding, nor have any of its recent acquisitions been funded by the taxpayer."

Teaching and learning tool to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices

I covered App Inventor for Android in Fortnightly Mailing last August soon after Hal Abelson, on secondment from MIT to Google, announced it.

App Inventor:

"is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices."

App Inventor is now publicly available as a "beta", and anyone can now request an App Inventor account. App Inventor is primarily designed to support teaching and learning computer science, in the tradition of the Logo programming language, which started life over 40 years ago.