Chris

Theoretical Foundation

The Give 1 Get 1 XO laptop designed by the MIT media lab and touted by Nicholas Negroponte. Lest we forget that part of the articulated goal of the OLPC program is to offer children a notably constructionist (not to be confused with constructivist) atmosphere for education. The core foundation of the constructionist theory is that children develop knowledge through experience and the developing of mental models around social objects. It is remarkably related to constructivism according to the Wikipedia article. I find this noteworthy because the laptop.org site articulates that the XO embodies constructionist theories (look under standing still section).

So is it fair for folks to say that the XO is not useful for education or to be disappointed in it? Is it perhaps true that naysayers have misunderstood the machine’s intent?

The machine has been tested in lots of different ways but I have yet to see anything other than anecdotal results. I watched a video linked to by Silvia Martinez in this post (which you should read).

Now remember, I speak Spanish and lived in Peru so I understand both the language and cultural context behind the video. I also understand the unique needs of a small town like Arahuay where kids come to stay the week since the school is so far from home.

Affordances

In dealing with new technologies, be it a fancy web 2.0 tool or a shiny new computer, the question has to be asked what the affordances are, that is to ask, what can you do with the new tool that you could not do before, or cannot do with something else. For example, a teacher assigns students to create a travel brochure for ancient Egypt, which they have been studying recently. The goal would be to ask students to highlight three tourist attractions from ancient Egypt. Is there really a benefit for students to complete this assignment (assignment criticism aside) using a computer (i.e. MS Publisher, a Wiki, Powerpoint/Keynote, a digital story) as opposed to just drawing it on paper? Is the use of the computer (given that limited scenario and goal) really going to offer a change?

Naturally, what seems to follow here is a suggestion that a shift in pedagogy needs to happen. Lots of folks offer lots of rhetoric about the skills and literacies needed for the next century. Ok, but given this assignment, is the benefit to students really there to do it via computer?

I’d say no.

I would fall into the category of people that would suggest a change in assignment. What if kids told the story of a kid about their own age who was traveling through Egypt. What if it were more creative and more about storytelling and less about just the facts of a spot. Now I can justify lots of things using buzzwords like higher-order thinking skills, storytelling and can justify the potential use of technology.

Flash back to the video I mentioned earlier. As opposed to just walking outside and looking at the plants and flowers around the school the kids are taking pictures of them. What’s the benefit there? Is it that they are learning to take pictures along with learning about the plants? How is this more beneficial than taking pictures with an older camera and having the pictures developed, assuming the cost difference is negligible?

I highlight this due to the lack of sharing ability with the outside world. Ok, so the kids can take pictures of flowers and share it with their neighborhood. Perhaps kids can share the pictures they’ve taken with their classmates. Is that beneficial? I wonder if it really is.

Now, if there was a built in way they could share those pictures with the outside world, well, now we’re talking! If Flickr export capabilities were built-in with an automatic tag that would make all pictures taken with an OLPC accessible, I’d posit immediate benefits due to the interaction with the greater world.

Same with video. Because there are no editing capabilities inherent within Sugar I find it hard to believe that the videos created will be of any real value. Perhaps a student might create something noteworthy, but I’d imagine that many,many more are created just for fun and are not of any real sharable value.

If there were built-in Youtube export (and of course even watching Youtube videos is awfully poor quality) perhaps the level of accountability and global interaction would spur kids on to greater heights of video production.

Maybe.

I’ve managed to get Flash, Skype, and even Doom installed on my XO. My plan is to do all of the things I’ve mentioned in this post and then post the results. I’ll make a video using my XO, and not just a proof-of-concept video. I’ll make something that I think is at least watchable. Maybe a day-in-the-life-of video or something, I’m not sure.

The point is this, in the edubloc we talk so much about openness and transparency in education. The XO is a fantastic opportunity for that to happen. Maybe in future builds it will get better and easier to use. I could spend an entire nother post talking about the high levels of cognitive load I’ve experienced and my daughter’s experienced trying to interact with the machine. It’s also noteworthy that kids need instruction on how to use it, and alongside the use, which sort of defeats the whole constructionist/constructivist ideal. Maybe kids are still creating their own mental models but I’d bet the models don’t differ too much from child to child.

Curious as to your thoughts…

Chris

Update: Added the picture of my my daughter’s XO running Skype out. Didn’t want to show my contacts…

Here is my comment, which I will expound on in a future post:

Hello.

I am doctoral student in Educational Psychology and Research (learning theory is at the core), a 6th grade teacher, and a parent to a 5 year-old.

Oh, and I got my XO on December 21. I’m pretty good with Linux, running Ubuntu on two machines at home, but no expert by a long shot.

I disagree with the notion that these machines provide a magically constructivist environment. If anything, the confusing environment makes it terribly difficult to navigate and is counter-intuitive. In fact, I would posit that the level of cognitive load experienced by users not familiar with the operating system will be very high initially. Would it be so high on Windows? No, because there is established schema.

Now, does that mean they are not useful? Certainly not. I speak Spanish and lived in Peru for a while so watching the interviews with kids in Arahuay has proven interesting. They are not doing anything with the laptops in terms of education that they could not do with less expensive equipment. For example, they take pictures of the few plants around their school. What is the affordance of this as compared with sketching the plant on construction paper? The technology is not necessarily a benefit.

Perhaps video is a bit of a benefit, but we’ve not seen any videos created in that environment, and the lack of editing makes only a certain quality of video available.

The Internet is a big deal, but a previous commenter mentioned that the kids read up on soccer and do research. I would imagine that kids are using web sites for research without checking for validity. I don’t know this first hand but access to a spotty internet connection does not a smart kid make.

I’m curious to see more of what comes out of these areas, and I’ll post more about this on my blog at www.crucialthought.com.

Chris

Here’s what it looks like now…

Useful, eh? Here’s how I did it..

I first heard about GeekTool some time ago from Lifehacker. I remember having tried to get it to work once before but failing. My issues, I was sure, so I attacked it again. Also credit Lifehacker for the script to embed Skype contacts you’ll see below..

Once Geektool was installed, I copied and pasted the shell command as per Lifehacker’s suggestions and it popped right up. I configured the script a bit for my liking and it was good to go!

I had also thought about a plain text todo list which I’ve heard from a few folks is a good idea. I had issues making it work with TextEdit, though, since it always tried to save as an .rtf file. Through a few twitter direct messages, I learned that you can force a plain text file by adding .txt to the file name.

It still didn’t work.

Turns out I had to set the encoding as shown below…this only worked for me once I created a file in Windows notepad.exe and copied it over. I couldn’t make this work solely on the Mac side.

Ok then, once I did this, I set the Geektool up to see the file. To monitor your machine’s console log, it defaults to seeing it like this…

I did this and it worked nicely when looking at my plain text todo list. The only trouble is when I changed the text file it didn’t change on the screen. That’s no good. I had to log off and log back on for GeekTool to recognize the change. That’s not cool.

I went searching and stumbled across this thread which lead me to this post. Eureka!

Once I right clicked, went to Open With, and used Firefox, I got the local URL for my todo list! I pasted that along with a curl command, set the refresh to 30 seconds and voila!

The command looks like this –> curl file:///Users/username/Desktop/todo.txt and it automatically refreshes at the interval selected.

So now I had my solution and a darned useful second monitor! I’ve still got plenty of screen real estate left to delegate to other stuff if needed, and will do that on an as-needed basis.

Here’s what my second monitor looks like now, click for a larger version with skitch’ed details.

As you can see, I’m leaving Colloquy open on the edublogosphere IRC channel (irc.edublogosphere.com and channel #edublogosphere) just in case anyone stops by.

Any other GeekTool’ers out there that can suggest a cool uptime command or anything else I can be doing with GeekTool to be even geekier? Did you set this up yourself? Shout out in the comments!

Have you seen episode 1 and subscribed to the feed? You oughtta…

www.teachjeffspanish.com

Don’t walk, run over to TeachJeffSpanish.com and check out the first episode!

We’re going to offer a few different things that I think will be fun for a lot of folks to be able to learn Spanish along with us! We’ll offer a word of the day post directed to Jeff as well as a weekly episode of Scavenger Hunt for Spanish. This idea was totally done by my students, with only minimal coaching on some of the more technical details. I handed three students (actually, three girls) my MacBook Pro (yup, my personal computer), a Panasonic GS-300 3CCD camera and a tripod and they went to town. The young lady that did the editing had not really ever more than played with iMovie and I think she did a jam up job.

I’ve got the iTunes link working, so feel free to subscribe to the episodes! Also feel free to leave a comment on the episode 1 post (comments are seriously moderated, as you might imagine) to tell my students how you like it!

I actually really could use the comments, because without an act of Congress, I’ll lose these students in January and have to either ditch the project or start over with new students. Then, I’d get new students at the beginning of April. I need these same ones for consistency, but let’s see how you like the project.

So if you like it, blog it, would you? This is all student-made work here, and these are sixth graders. Help me show my school these kids are as great as I keep saying! If you do blog it, please use blog tag teachjeffspanish.

Our goal is to create a blog and vodcast to help folks around the world learn Spanish. That’s a tall order, and one that’s been done before in a myriad of methods. Some of the most amazing ones are TryMango and LiveMocha.

We want to do something a bit different, with a bit of 6th grade flair. We in our class often watch short clips of the Jeff Corwin Experience (from DE Streaming) as he explores Central and South America and tries to use his limited Spanish. We then break apart what he says and correct it.

A few days ago we came up with the idea of publically trying to help him. And so, www.teachjeffspanish.com was born!

We decided on teaching Jeff because we felt like it would be so much fun for people to come and learn along with us without feeling like we were teaching “them” necessarily. This just felt like such a fun way to teach Spanish with a focus on Jeff, who seems like the type of guy who would love this kind of thing. And to answer a question in the comments, this would absolutely be appropriate for anyone, anywhere who wanted to learn Spanish or maybe brush up the Spanish learned in high school, etc.

For what it’s worth, this is an all-kid idea and I’ve just implemented what they wanted, and guided them along the way. Cool, eh?

Here is what we’re thinking…

1. A daily blog post, posted and edited by kids, with a new word of the day. We’ve already developed a category structure in which to place the words, and it looks good. There would be one post per day, one word per day. We’re working on ideas such as pronunciation, etc.

2. A weekly vodcast with student hosts (permission slip pending). This is where we’re stuck. We want something amazingly fun and quirky that will help you learn/improve your Spanish in a practical way, but without it being cheesy or corny. For as silly as it was, Guinea Pig TV was so much fun!I wish it was still around.

That’s what we want, something viral, something fun, something that will catch some notice because of the quality. I’ve got a kid who knows iMovie so I’m going to let *her* use my personal MacBook Pro to cut the video.

We just need a great idea. Can someone contact Marco Torres for me?!

Any feedback is welcome, and remember, my kids are watching this like a hawk, so talk to them!!

I’ve been also wondering why they found this project to be so darn hard. You see, the kids were so looking forward to doing this project, in part based on the hype of competing against so many other schools, and in part because it is so technological. Some of them maintained that motivation throughout the duration of the project and others seemed to lose it. Once the novelty wore off and the story was still waiting inside the heart, kids found it difficult to coerce it out. Here are my reasons why I think this project was easier for some than others:

On a side note, please remember my students are young, typically 11 and 12 years old.

1. For some kids, it’s really tough to see what’s in their heart. Be it that they are young and perhaps they have not developed the schema to look inside the heart and articulate the emotions swirling around. Maybe it is because they are subject to such an onslaught of folks telling them how they feel that they do not understand how they actually feel or whether the feeling is genuine. For some, it may be that feeling and emotions are simply too painful and are simply avoided.

2. For some, it may be that circumstances are just so difficult that they are not willing to articulate them. I respect this. Quite simply, I have learned through talking kids through this project that there are some of them dealing with very adult issues and some of them are not handling it very well. Some are forced into maturity by the sheer gravity of the circumstance. This can make a project like mine even harder, because they ride the fine line of deciding whether to tell the whole story about what life is really like, or continue to hide it, sit down and remain quiet like we like so much.

3. Some kids are so wrapped up in a search for identity and are finding it in subculture. It’s interesting to watch kids from the beginning of the year to the end and how they can tend to change. The year they spend in our school (which is an amazing school, by the way) can be a defining one that has the tendency to catapault a kid on a certain course in terms of identity. The way they dress can radically change in a matter of weeks depending on the group of friends in close proximity. I would posit this not to be unique to our school, and is possibly a universal truth. I imagine the search for identity and the finding of identity in the context of subculture doesn’t stop when they leave us, either. This unawareness of self, however, can be detrimental to a personal project such as this because we can become clouded by the thoughts and emotions of others and unaware to analyze our own hearts through a clean lens. It is possible that we become unable to determine what is true and what is good because we are so impacted by those around us and what we allow to enter our ears and eyes. We identify ourselves in the context of something desirable, and if inauthentic,  we are unable to see our true selves. If the self is hidden, any story created out of the center of the being will be nothing more than off center.

4. The technology can be frustrating. Despite the novelty effect of using this type of equipment, the kids do tend to get frustrated. Since we’ve taught them so well that any time they get frustrated they are to raise a hand and holler out our names, they do so frequently. Needless to say, this got irritating. Some kids have a seeming inability or unwillingness to work through a problem or logically consider a solution. These kids are totally teacher-dependant. It is possible that we have created this monster, but I’m unwilling to categorically state that. This is partly why I tend to disagree with radical constructivist learning and can tend to lean much more towards guided discovery. Kids need hand-holding, and that’s a natural part of the learning process. Often, they just needed me to prod them to seek first a solution themselves applying basic logic, and at times they needed a guiding word or two. More often than not, with just a smidge of help, they conquered their own problems through the process, and that makes the learning sweeter. I suppose I could have just gone over and done it for them, but…

These are just a few of my thoughts having watched kids create over one hundred stories over the past few weeks.

The winners from my school will be announced towards the end of this week, and the announcement will happen here. Stay tuned!

1. Story Rd. picture from umjanedoan’s flickr stream.

2. Heart picture from geishaboy500′s flickr stream.

What I’d like to do is create a web-based IRC spot, whereas folks can drop by and chat all they like and not have to register for anything. No registration, no password, no privacy concerns, just chat. Just backchannel.

I am thinking IRC because it is an already-established network and I would merely provide a gateway. This way we can prevent all the trouble of IRC clients and frustration. Imagine if at the blogger’s cafe folks could just hit up edublogosphere.com and start chatting.

I like it because there’s no need to be someone’s contact, no need to download Skype, no need to hook up to twitter. It’s just easy, accessible, and requires no effort.

It doesn’t even require a download. Now, for those who want, they could use an IRC client just as easily, and perhaps more easily. See, flexibility.

So that’s my thinking thus far, now comes the implementation. I found ONE that I like, that’s clean enough for my taste. We’ll see if I can manage to get it installed. This is where I am stretching my knowledge, so I’ll have to learn this one on the way through it.

I’ll keep you posted!

Here is a snapshot from the wiki, which lists all the participants.

My original goal was 10 schools, so we’re up six!

I am terrified, to be frank. I’ve never dealt with something like this, so it will be a real good thing if we make it through unscathed.

One note, sign-up ends on September 21, 2007 for Round 1. There will be a Round 2 beginning in February or March, when some of our outside-the-US friends get back from “summer” break.

I’ve got another blog post coming soon about whether the variety of locations really makes this type of a project more beneficial to student learning. At prima facie I’m tempted to already call this a success based on the geographic variety, but that can be fleeting. I’ll get into more detail on that later.

Rest assured, however, the project is in my opinion pedagogically sound and will be well served by such non-US centric participation.

Know someone who would be a good fit for the project? Read the original post and tell them to sign up!