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Can you say more about the autodidacts and the conflict with professional staff? I'm interested in specific areas that were problematic, and if you have any lea

Can you say more about the autodidacts and the conflict with professional staff? I'm interested in specific areas that were problematic, and if you have any learnings from mitigating it.

bryanwb 7y ago
Olpc leadership saw government education bodies and curriculum groups as potential road blocks best avoided. This is with some reason as it can take years to work through then. That said, they can't be advoided in my experience if you expect to have any impact. They also disregarded the concerns of every day teachers because they presumed every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop. It all stems from Seymour papert's original vision that inspired olpc. This theory is called constructionism and held that children can develop knowledge of the world through experiential learning. They can "construct" their own knowledge. Unfortunately, the role that a teacher might need to pay on this process was often underestimated. To counteract this, we engaged the most creative Nepali teachers (of which the re are a large number) to create educational activities that aligned with the nationial curriculum and addressed content areas where nationally Nepali kids were struggling.
- ivanmilles 7y ago
  >every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop So, if I understand you correctly, OLPC went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out? This is hyper-relevant to what I'm working on, so: did a proper theoretical constructionist framework fail you, or was underestimating the role of teachers the main problem? Did engaging Nepali teachers give any insights in the above?
  - nnq 7y ago
    > went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out I have no knowledge of OLPC, but it seems obvious to me: successfull autodidacts in societies where self-directed-learning is not commont (probably most societies...) tend to be internally motivated, so higher proportion of them are introverts, also higher proportions have at least little bit of aspergers-like traits etc. Extroverts on the other hand tend to learn most from human teachers they physically interact with! If you'd crunch the numbers and compare them with the personality traits of "influencers", you'll likely see they are opposite. So any chance that a positive view of the device will spread via word of mouth is low, aka any change of whatever the equivalent of "going viral" would be amongst African villages is low! By targeting the self-learners you're basically going anti-viral... you're doing anti-marketing! You'd need to try and hit the "micro-influencers", and probably only chance of that is by hitting teachers and some community leaders and local "celebrities". We techo-focused hyper-individualistic self-learners only thrive in societies after they've been properly wired up both socially and technically. Drop us in a borderline-medieval society and we're useless and have zero influence on the people around us. Heck, "geeks" started to thrive in medieval Europe after the church managed in a primitive way to network part of the world. Probably similar patterns happened in China and the Arab world too. Most underdeveloped societies today totally lack that kind of useful networking ...otherwise they likely wouldn't be underdeveloped in the first place!
    - tudelo 7y ago
      internal motivation == introvert == aspergers? got some stats on that?
      - nnq 7y ago
        no == there, not that strong of a claim, just "if [A], then more likely [B] than without prior [A]" ...if you have endless time (or a few PhD students you can task to research literature for free) and patience search for studies about "associations between [A] and [B]" dig and dig through things. I avoid making a stronger claims bc it would require too much work to research it, do it yourself if you want do (dis)confirm, I'm just "throwing a bone here", too lazy to think or research more about it :)...
        tudelo 7y ago
        Ahh, so you are making these claims because you think they are true. You presented them as some sort of fact by stating that this is obvious to you. I just don't really get why it was relevant to lay out that chain of relevance. I don't see the obvious connection between self motivated and introvert, but I guess it could be possible. The other connections just seem like random thoughts. I was trying to figure out why something so obvious to you doesn't explain itself when presented without evidence...
  - bryanwb 7y ago
    We had to show results in a short period of time and focus on the top priorities of the parents and teachers which boiled down to belong their kids not fail out of school in the early grades. You can focus on nurturing autodidacts but you will never have more than a handful of anecdotal successes in the short run at best. And you need more than anecdotes to keep educational projects alive. Further, educators run the school. If you want an educational project to be successful, You live and die by their support.
    - ivanmilles 7y ago
      Excellent. Appreciate the answers.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    as an observer from the sidelines (i was contributing to the OLPC development but never involved in any deployment) my guess is this: if there was a proper theoretical constructionist framework then it failed because of the resistance of the existing educational system. in other words, a constructionist model may work in a situation where kids are left to themselves, but it may not work if there is a competing educational system that doesn't allow the kids to take advantage of the opportunities the constructionist model provides. personally though i am skeptical that a pure constructionist approach will enable the children to achieve their maximum potential, and any successes of it are in comparison to a failing traditional model.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      There were many reasons the OLPC failed, but I don't think constructionist education was one of them, when it's succeeded in so many other places. EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281 >SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors. It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson. >[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5] Chaim Gingold wrote a section about Doreen Nelson's work in his dissertation on "Play Design": https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI
      - em-bee 7y ago
        what i meant was not that constructionist education was a failure in itself but that it was rejected by the established education system.
  - sp332 7y ago
    I don't have personal knowledge of the project, but it was very heavily constructionist (or they said it was - can't comment on the implementation) so if you look around it should be easy to find talks and papers about their approach. Lots of links from here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      There is a bi-annual conference about Constructionism: https://www.constructionismconf.org/ https://www.constructionismconf.org/ http://www.constructionism2018.fsf.vu.lt/ http://www.constructionism2018.fsf.vu.lt/ http://e-school.kmutt.ac.th/constructionism2016/ http://e-school.kmutt.ac.th/constructionism2016/ https://confdriver.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/constructionism2014/ https://confdriver.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/constructionism2014/ http://constructionism2012.etl.ppp.uoa.gr/ http://constructionism2012.etl.ppp.uoa.gr/ http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=6074&copyownerid=5461 http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=607...
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  In many ways, the OLPC project was like "Stone Soup": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup >Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup. The infamous crank, the $100 price, and the Sugar user interface, were among the indigestible stones. Seymour Papert's vision of constructionist education provided some of the most nutritious meat and potatoes that nourished the soup, as did Mary Lou Jepsen's display hardware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045877 >Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep). We were able to convince EA to relicense SimCity under GPL3 and contribute it to the project, because it was a quintessentially constructionist educational game. Without the OLPC project to rally around and rationalize the virtues of free educational software, it would have been impossible to convince EA to do that. Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2... Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans... Contract between EA and OLPC for open sourcing and distributing SimCity: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf
  - ivanmilles 7y ago
    Sliding offtopic, but do you have any more memories around this specific collaboration? I'm deeply familiar with the theory, but anecdotes on such an ambitious project would be useful to a text I'm working on. Thanks.

Can you say more about the autodidacts and the conflict with professional staff? I'm interested in specific areas that were problematic, and if you have any learnings from mitigating it.

bryanwb 7y ago

Olpc leadership saw government education bodies and curriculum groups as potential road blocks best avoided. This is with some reason as it can take years to work through then. That said, they can't be advoided in my experience if you expect to have any impact. They also disregarded the concerns of every day teachers because they presumed every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop. It all stems from Seymour papert's original vision that inspired olpc. This theory is called constructionism and held that children can develop knowledge of the world through experiential learning. They can "construct" their own knowledge. Unfortunately, the role that a teacher might need to pay on this process was often underestimated. To counteract this, we engaged the most creative Nepali teachers (of which the re are a large number) to create educational activities that aligned with the nationial curriculum and addressed content areas where nationally Nepali kids were struggling.

ivanmilles 7y ago
>every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic laptop So, if I understand you correctly, OLPC went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out? This is hyper-relevant to what I'm working on, so: did a proper theoretical constructionist framework fail you, or was underestimating the role of teachers the main problem? Did engaging Nepali teachers give any insights in the above?
- nnq 7y ago
  > went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out I have no knowledge of OLPC, but it seems obvious to me: successfull autodidacts in societies where self-directed-learning is not commont (probably most societies...) tend to be internally motivated, so higher proportion of them are introverts, also higher proportions have at least little bit of aspergers-like traits etc. Extroverts on the other hand tend to learn most from human teachers they physically interact with! If you'd crunch the numbers and compare them with the personality traits of "influencers", you'll likely see they are opposite. So any chance that a positive view of the device will spread via word of mouth is low, aka any change of whatever the equivalent of "going viral" would be amongst African villages is low! By targeting the self-learners you're basically going anti-viral... you're doing anti-marketing! You'd need to try and hit the "micro-influencers", and probably only chance of that is by hitting teachers and some community leaders and local "celebrities". We techo-focused hyper-individualistic self-learners only thrive in societies after they've been properly wired up both socially and technically. Drop us in a borderline-medieval society and we're useless and have zero influence on the people around us. Heck, "geeks" started to thrive in medieval Europe after the church managed in a primitive way to network part of the world. Probably similar patterns happened in China and the Arab world too. Most underdeveloped societies today totally lack that kind of useful networking ...otherwise they likely wouldn't be underdeveloped in the first place!
  - tudelo 7y ago
    internal motivation == introvert == aspergers? got some stats on that?
    - nnq 7y ago
      no == there, not that strong of a claim, just "if [A], then more likely [B] than without prior [A]" ...if you have endless time (or a few PhD students you can task to research literature for free) and patience search for studies about "associations between [A] and [B]" dig and dig through things. I avoid making a stronger claims bc it would require too much work to research it, do it yourself if you want do (dis)confirm, I'm just "throwing a bone here", too lazy to think or research more about it :)...
      - tudelo 7y ago
        Ahh, so you are making these claims because you think they are true. You presented them as some sort of fact by stating that this is obvious to you. I just don't really get why it was relevant to lay out that chain of relevance. I don't see the obvious connection between self motivated and introvert, but I guess it could be possible. The other connections just seem like random thoughts. I was trying to figure out why something so obvious to you doesn't explain itself when presented without evidence...
- bryanwb 7y ago
  We had to show results in a short period of time and focus on the top priorities of the parents and teachers which boiled down to belong their kids not fail out of school in the early grades. You can focus on nurturing autodidacts but you will never have more than a handful of anecdotal successes in the short run at best. And you need more than anecdotes to keep educational projects alive. Further, educators run the school. If you want an educational project to be successful, You live and die by their support.
  - ivanmilles 7y ago
    Excellent. Appreciate the answers.
- em-bee 7y ago
  as an observer from the sidelines (i was contributing to the OLPC development but never involved in any deployment) my guess is this: if there was a proper theoretical constructionist framework then it failed because of the resistance of the existing educational system. in other words, a constructionist model may work in a situation where kids are left to themselves, but it may not work if there is a competing educational system that doesn't allow the kids to take advantage of the opportunities the constructionist model provides. personally though i am skeptical that a pure constructionist approach will enable the children to achieve their maximum potential, and any successes of it are in comparison to a failing traditional model.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    There were many reasons the OLPC failed, but I don't think constructionist education was one of them, when it's succeeded in so many other places. EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281 >SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors. It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson. >[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5] Chaim Gingold wrote a section about Doreen Nelson's work in his dissertation on "Play Design": https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI
    - em-bee 7y ago
      what i meant was not that constructionist education was a failure in itself but that it was rejected by the established education system.
- sp332 7y ago
  I don't have personal knowledge of the project, but it was very heavily constructionist (or they said it was - can't comment on the implementation) so if you look around it should be easy to find talks and papers about their approach. Lots of links from here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    There is a bi-annual conference about Constructionism: https://www.constructionismconf.org/ https://www.constructionismconf.org/ http://www.constructionism2018.fsf.vu.lt/ http://www.constructionism2018.fsf.vu.lt/ http://e-school.kmutt.ac.th/constructionism2016/ http://e-school.kmutt.ac.th/constructionism2016/ https://confdriver.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/constructionism2014/ https://confdriver.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/constructionism2014/ http://constructionism2012.etl.ppp.uoa.gr/ http://constructionism2012.etl.ppp.uoa.gr/ http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=6074&copyownerid=5461 http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=607...
DonHopkins 7y ago
In many ways, the OLPC project was like "Stone Soup": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup >Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup. The infamous crank, the $100 price, and the Sugar user interface, were among the indigestible stones. Seymour Papert's vision of constructionist education provided some of the most nutritious meat and potatoes that nourished the soup, as did Mary Lou Jepsen's display hardware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045877 >Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep). We were able to convince EA to relicense SimCity under GPL3 and contribute it to the project, because it was a quintessentially constructionist educational game. Without the OLPC project to rally around and rationalize the virtues of free educational software, it would have been impossible to convince EA to do that. Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2... Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-transcript-constructionist-educational-open-source-simcity-by-don-3a9e010bf305 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans... Contract between EA and OLPC for open sourcing and distributing SimCity: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf
- ivanmilles 7y ago
  Sliding offtopic, but do you have any more memories around this specific collaboration? I'm deeply familiar with the theory, but anecdotes on such an ambitious project would be useful to a text I'm working on. Thanks.