“It’s an education program, not a laptop program.”--Nicholas Negroponte
Therefore,
The OLPC XO is not a laptop
It's an Education Machine
(With thanks to René Magritte and Robin Williams)
(The other Robin Williams, author of The Mac is Not a Typewriter)
Conventional computer books give you some combination of step-by-step tutorial on the rudiments of how something works and detailed reference guide. This is not a conventional book, because the XO is not a conventional computer. In fact, it is a mental amplifier for education, whose purpose is to put an end to poverty and other ills. Among the ways it amplifies human minds are
There is another important way to amplify your abilities: learn how to learn whatever you want to or need to. This means, in part, how to discover ideas yourself, in part where to look up information, in part where and how to ask for help, and in part how to learn not only information, but skills.
Complementing this is the art of helping others to learn. I recommend that you pay attention to how others help you, and remember what works for you with different kinds of information, ideas, and skills such as reading, writing, parts of math, typing, music, art, public speaking, sports, languages, memory…The advanced course is to notice what helps others who learn differently from you.
You are trying to
These are entirely different kinds of achievement, and require entirely different methods of learning, and assisting in learning. For skills, only practice is effective, because they must become automatic, not requiring thought. For the skills that are not innate (like learning to speak a language, for young children) one must understand how to practice, and what to practice, or have a tutor or coach who knows.
The usual way to teach information and ideas is to tell the student everything about the subject that is in the curriculum standard and the textbook, and to ignore serious questions that students raise. This is not how adults learn, however (those that do, anyway), and not at all how infants learn (better than adults, usually). Learning outside schools may involve any combination of exploration, reading, tinkering with things, making things, getting hints or outright instruction from mentors, and above all, asking oneself constantly, "What do I most want to know, or need to know, right now? Or is it more important to apply what I know to some immediate problem?" Some things are fun to learn, some are useful to learn, and some are important, even vital to learn. Knowing which is which is not simple, but it is often important in itself.
Deciding what to do with what you learn is much harder, and even more important. In the nature of things, this is a question that inherently does not have a right answer. It depends both on what is needed, and what you are able to do. But we can give you hints about how to make that decision.
Why discovery?
Because.
That’s a sufficient explanation for those who have discovered enough of discovery to get going.
Archimedes leaping from the bath shouting “Eureka” is the canonical example.
“Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”‒Edna St. Vincent Millay
“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order to learn how to do it.”‒Pablo Picasso
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”
--Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Apropos of what we are going to be doing, Verner Vinge wrote well-imagined segments about discovering a computer in his science-fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep. Only in this case it is seriously alien aliens poking at a human child's computer of some time in the far distant future, having no idea of what it is or does. Pages 102–104 of the paperback, in Chapter 10, shortly after Peregrine Wickwrackscar and Scriber Jacqueramephan save Johanna from Flenser in Chapter 4. The discovery process resumes in Chapter 12, on pages 121–125, and again in Chapter 24, pages 280–281.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Pacioli.jpg
Or consider the portrait of Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci’s mathematics teacher, and the first to document double-entry bookkeeping, demonstrating Euclid with his patron, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
Yes. Double-entry bookkeeping, one of the great collaborative discoveries, worked out by the merchants of the Venetian Republic. Without it we would have no hope of keeping track of our enterprises, and in consequence would not be able to undertake them on the vast scale that we know today. In the Renaissance, when the greatest of the great made no distinction between pure math, applied math, physics, engineering, and art.
Or how to make a water purification system out of clay pots, sand, charcoal, and shards of iron, available pretty much anywhere in the world at minimal cost. (Reference)
Or any baby discovering his or her toes.
A rather different approach is expressed in this dialogue.
Hobbes: Did you read the manual?
Calvin: Do I look like a wimp?
There is room for many approaches to learning, for different kinds of information or skill. Discovery is not for everything. Unless you want to redo the last several thousand years of all of humankind's discoveries (and have the assortment of abilities needed to do all of it), you need hints on what and where to explore, even detailed instruction on some things. This is not so much a problem with devices that were designed to make sense to people.
Some of you may still be a little unclear, so I’ll explain a bit more, but you need to do some discovery of your own in order to really understand. We can explore together.
You see, collaborative discovery is the essence of the XO Sugar learning program. Many of the software activities on the XO are designed to support children working together, with, for example, multiple active cursors in a document, multiple paintbrushes on a canvas, multiple musical instruments to play together, group chat, and so on. The user interface is designed around the discovery of available services and friends, with the ability to invite anyone to share an Activity.
There are several reasons for this emphasis. One is that many in the education world, including OLPC members and educational software pioneers Alan Kay and Seymour Papert, consider collaborative discovery and making something yourself, alone or in a group, to be the most effective means of facilitating education. Another is that collaboration and discovery are the essence of many jobs. For example, science and technology, journalism, police investigations, politics (considered as “the art of the possible”, not just the means of winning elections), product design, quality assurance, and many more. Similarly for many volunteer activities and many games and sports. Perhaps most important, we have severe problems in this world, to say the least, and we need every bit of help we can get to find ways of dealing with them.
I am told that there are Muggles in this world (Thank you, J. K. Rowling) who don’t get it and can’t get it, but that is neither here nor there, since this project will be invisible to Muggles. I doubt that there really are any genuine 100% copper-bottom Muggles in the world, completely impervious to the joys of discovery, but I suppose that we must actually discover whether that is so.
Discovery is what researchers, investigators, artists, and explorers do for a living. They tell us that getting paid for what they would do for fun sure beats working.
Children are the greatest discoverers by nature. Every single one of them has to discover an entire world anew. Fantastically, they are actually equipped by nature to do this up to a certain point, and society can greatly extend that point in many different ways. But humanity is not unique in this. Bees may be constitutionally incapable of discovering and communicating much more than the location and quality of food sources and nesting sites, but discovery is one of the great selectors in biological evolution. It is the great selector in human cultural evolution, whether it is discovering lands, species (think of chocolate or potatoes), new economic and political possibilities, or new ways to make music. Or new forms of discovery itself.
But children can be trained not to make or even attempt to make discoveries. Many (certainly not all) schools go to great lengths to teach children that they are only allowed to learn what the teacher is teaching in the way it is taught. Many children learn from school that there is only one Right Answer to each permitted and approved question, and that they don’t have it. There are even more pernicious ideas about, such as the notion that one person or a small, self-selected group has All The Answers and should be in charge of all education. In real life, nobody even has all the questions, and the most important questions don’t even have Right Answers.
Is this real?
How do you know?
Is this true?
Why should you trust me?
What do we need to do?
The threat of death can also be an important part of childhood education. We don’t like to do that in the more prosperous countries any more, but it is an important part of daily life among those around the world who, as the saying goes, can’t afford to live. Or the song.
If livin' was a thing that money could buy,
Well, then, the rich would live and the poor would die.
Oh, all my trials, Lord, soon be over.
Well, we have discovered a few things about that.
Now, in case you hadn’t noticed yet, I must explain that I’m discovering how to do this as I go along. Discovery is the only way to demonstrate both the process of discovery and its importance. By which I mean, among other things, how much fun it is. But nobody writes for people to learn that way. You aren't supposed to, you know. You are supposed to tell students what you want them to learn. Some people have even had the idea that the essence of education is
When I want to hear your opinion, I'll tell it to you.
Also, writing for discovery is hard. It isn't enough to know the subject. You have to understand how other people think, and how other people learn. Mostly, we don't understand that, so we have to try something, and fail, and try again, and listen to the students tell us that we are teaching them wrong, and try again. But discovering how children (and adults) really learn is more fun for me than I can tell you. I hope it shows.
One of the most important facts about learning is the importance of immediate feedback, preferably within a half second, for strengthening learning and recall. We're going to give you lots of opportunity for feedback. You are going to press, and poke, and point, and click, and several other things. Even when nothing happens, that is feedback to get you to focus on the things that do have a visible effect.
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, author of What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) wrote about a different kind of feedback he got at the moment when he was first sure about one of his major discoveries in physics. He marveled at the feelings of that moment, when he was the only person in the world who knew what he knew, before he called anybody on the phone or sent any letters or started to write the paper to get his result verified and published. Our children can get some of the same feeling from being the first in class to know something. Every child can be the first in the class to know something, quite frequently.
The legend of Archimedes leaping from the bath (in a public bathhouse) and running naked through the streets of Syracuse in Sicily shouting, “Ευρηκα!” (I have found it!) probably isn’t historically true, but it nevertheless expresses this feeling perfectly. Archimedes had been asked by the King of Syracuse to determine the purity of the metal in a crown he had had made, without, of course, damaging the crown. The question was how much gold and copper were in the alloy, because the King had provided the gold, and wanted to be sure that the goldsmith had not stolen any of it. Copper and gold have different densities, so knowing the weight and volume of the crown would allow Archimedes to compute the percentage of the metals. Weighing was easy, but at that time nobody knew of a way to measure volume for objects of any complex shape.
According to the tale, as written down centuries later, Archimedes was just getting into a full tub at the public bathhouse, and noticed the water spilling over the top. He suddenly realized that the volume of water spilled was the volume of the part of his body in the tub, and that he could measure the overflow. With this method, he could find the volume of the crown. Excitement!
When the Romans conquered Syracuse, their general Marcus Claudius Marcellus gave orders to the soldiers that Archimedes was to be taken prisoner alive, but (again according to legend) when a soldier approached him, he was busy with a mathematical problem, drawing figures in the sand on the beach, and told the soldier, "Don't disturb my circles!" So the soldier killed him.
This sort of single-minded engrossment in discovery is rarely so hazardous these days, at least in some countries, but I well remember being engrossed in reading a book while my mother was shouting my name, and hearing nothing, so I can be quite sure that many other children down the ages have been spanked severely, or worse, had their books taken away for wanting too much to learn and to discover more things to learn.
If you are still vague about the importance of discovery and collaboration, please follow along for awhile to get the feel of it. These are not topics that you can understand purely by thinking about them, without having the experience yourself.
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