[Its.an.education.project] Another set of thoughts

[Antoine van Gelder]

On 03 May 2008, at 03:38, Samuel Klein wrote:

>
> Thanks for sharing these essays.  I still hold out hope that this  
> book in its entirety will one day be available under a free license,  
> as Squeak By Example is!
>
> On the subject of large questions, Antoine asks:
>
> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Antoine van Gelder  
> <antoine at g7.org.za> wrote:
>
> ...and one question:
>
> What is the goal of a project if it's an education project ?
>
> There's some relation here to questions about how much research and  
> introspection is considered fundamental.


Absolutely.


I make the claim:

If a project is an education project then the only possible goal there  
can be is number of students educated. In this view of the world  
everything else becomes an intermediary objective needing to be  
overcome in order to reach that goal. Important, necessary, but not  
the goal.

Some minimum necessary conditions to meeting that goal:

1. Agreement, or at least respect, between project participants on  
what is the meaning of the word 'educated'.   (Yes, you can laugh at  
me and my unreasonable demands :-D)

2. Have some feedback mechanism for (most importantly)students and  
(importantly)parents&teachers and (least importantly)'stakeholders' to  
be able to gauge their own progress and, if necessary, correct course  
on their educational journeys.
I rank these because if one does not rank them then no one asks  
questions when the 'stakeholders' claim that it is most important that  
a feedback mechanism work for the 'stakeholders' and it does not  
matter if the feedback mechanism works for the students or not.

3. Be able to keep educating students now and in the future. It is not  
enough to educated some students this year but not be able to educate  
any more. This means that, at a minimum, folk working on the project  
full-time need a place to sleep, food to eat and the tools they need  
to make progress. So yes, you need some way of getting this whether  
that be from donations or bartering/selling stuff.
This _also_ means that you can't do anything that will place you in a  
risky position in the future even if it helps now!
So for e.g. if you depend on Microsoft Windows it's maybe working now  
but you have no control over the impact on your educational mission of  
future decisions made by a corporate machine which isn't accountable  
to anyone (accountability presupposes control and show me one company  
where the shareholders feel they can reliably control what will be  
profitable year after year please!)

4. Educational materials children, parents and teachers can use to  
learn. An educational material can be something as simple as Galileo's  
lute which Dr Kay describes in his beautiful essay all the way to  
something as complicated as:

   . an XO-1
   . with a bootstrap environment which the whole community can see  
the source of so we can be sure it is not doing any monkey business  
with our children now or in the future! (e.g. OpenFirmware, Linux,  
SqueakNOS)
   . running software which makes collaboration a first-class UI  
object in the OS (e.g. Sugar)
   . and an Internet connection (also see http://www.wizzydigital.org)
   . that can be used to create a learning space for our global  
village which is:
     - free (as in beer),
     - open (as in libre')
     - communal (as in it belongs to each person who is helping to  
nurture it!)


I think a lot of confusion and arguments can be cut short if all  
participants spend some time to ask themselves the question:

"Education is a huge project, where do I see myself fitting in ?  
Making laptops available, helping write software for children's  
laptops, mentoring schools and students to make use of technology in  
education, teaching children how to read and write, researching better  
tools to help write software for children's laptops, helping ensure  
that the necessary conditions for the big project of education don't  
get lost in the mix or tactics for meeting them don't come into  
conflict with each other, writing tutorials for helping children  
understand Sugar better, making math&science more fun and easier to  
understand, researching and making easy to communicating different  
approaches to education than the existing prussian/taylorist model,  
mentoring passionate teachers to become GREAT teachers, helping bake  
bread to feed everyone working on the project etc. etc."

Myself, my own interests are more research than practical (for now!)  
and has to do with what computers can do to help when children (of all  
ages!) have a lot of difficulty getting quality time with really good  
philosophy teachers and are also having to try and keep themselves  
happy and curious inside a prussian/taylorist style education system.

  - a


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