[IAEP] changes in outlook with Sugar (was Re: Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW)

[Alan Kay]

Well, "The ARPA Dream" of the 60s as articulated by Licklider, ... that "The destiny of computing is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans pervasively networked worldwide" was too big for any one group, but Lick funded about 17 of these in the 60s to try various goals derived from this dream, and with the aid of some of these grad students who went on to Xerox PARC, this research community was able to do the critical inventions required. Virtually all of these researchers 30 years later speak of the pleasure of being involved with this community much more than singling out the particular places (such as MIT, CMU, or PARC, etc.). This is how really big "Grand Challenges" get done. 

As I mentioned at the end of the email, some very important parts of the puzzle can be advanced by spending a lot of money in the right way. There are 9-10 months in a school year (30 to 40 weeks given vacations, and 5 hours a week or a little less for mainstream subjects) so "a year of math" in school terms is about 150 to 200 hours of "instruction". Take the larger number and think about 5 mainstream courses per year, and this gives about 1000 hours per year (usually quite a bit less). So K-12 would be about 13,000 hours of live instruction. Suppose we brute forced all of it (at $1 million dollars per hour), then K-12 done this way would be about $13 billion dollars. This sounds like a lot, but Iraq is costing about $10B per month(!), a Trillion dollars of the bank bail out is about 8 times this, 3 B2 bombers would cover it.

And, if you were to amortize this over the world's children, then the cost per child would not be large. For example, there are about 60 million US children in school. So one year's worth of all grades for all children would cost about $220 per child. And this material would be used for many more than one year, and for many more than just US children.

(Someone can help by checking my approximate arithmetic)

The point here is that even the brute force approach to augmenting or even completely filling in for teachers is much more of a societal priority issue than a cost issue (as indeed are children's computers like the XO).

However, because no good deed goes unpunished, we can imagine real disasters here if "large unconstrained interests" were to control this (similar stupidities and tyrannies that we've seen in schooling and school books).

What I've been advocating to potential funders is that there are many parts to this problem, just as there were for inventing personal computing and pervasive networks. And some of the parts can be advanced quite a bit right now by spending money in the right way. ARPA was happy to furnish single researchers with a huge mainframe in the 60s for experiments in user interface, graphics, etc., because Moore's Law was thought to be something that would happen, and thus it was worth spending millions to "live in the future ahead of time". This was a critical part of the way the ARPA community thought and acted.

So we don't have to pony up $13B up front here, but $20M-$50M would start up a community of researchers who are all interested in working parts of this problem, and as I suggested in the last email, one thing that should be done is to brute force at least one half year of one comprehensive course and just do all things necessary to make the experience work. This produces an artifact that will help smarter approaches aim at high enough level targets. An analogy here is that a great book can be used by good teachers to really enrich a good school experience, and a great book can be used by learners who are not in a good schooling experience to nonetheless help them internalize much stronger outlooks and ideas despite an impoverished environment.

There are very good arguments that learning to read and write fluently is not just taking on a communications skill (which might imaginably be replaced by some other communications technology) but that "becoming a fluent reader and writer" changes and enriches one's thinking styles and powers in qualitatively different and important ways. I subscribe to these arguments (and the studies which back them up).

So, the notion of trying to make an environment for helping children learn to read and write -- a "book" that can help its readers learn to "read" and "write" it -- has an enormous appeal, especially given how much really worthwhile stuff is to be found on the web (almost hidden by the pop culture trash, but there).

One whole route that was worked out almost 50 years ago was by O.K. Moore at Yale in the late 50s and early 60s -- it was called the "talking typewriter" (which was a hidden grad student) -- has many of the initial seeds for thinking about how to do this, and has quite a few studies giving quite a bit of date about how children behave in the environment that Moore set up. "Writing to Read", done by one of Moore's disciples and sponsored by IBM many years ago, was more real, but also omitted some of the key principles that Moore had discovered. This program, among other things, needed a small personal machine like the XO to create the "autotelic environment" which Moore felt was so important.

Several open questions make it difficult to be completely confident with a sponsor. One is that just how well this approach works over a number of years (if real fluency is the goal) is quite unknown. And, there is also the issue -- also unknown -- about whether a great curriculum that *could* do the job would actually be followed long enough by learners. This is analogous to having a great method for learning a musical instrument with online assist (and there are some pretty good ones out there). But one of the biggest problems is "Sire, there is no Royal Road to Geometry" (as Euclid said to Pharoah). That is, in the end, you just have to "do a lot of doing" to learn most things, especially the harder ones that were rare inventions of humankind. This is not popular these days -- unless it is a social token which must be learned to be part of a pop culture - alas, it is hard to find any deep content in these subjects.

Bottom line, it's difficult and it's doable.

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>; K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2009 7:52:17 AM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] changes in outlook with Sugar (was Re: Comments on David  Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW)

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Alan Kay<alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We can see this with the XO and OLPC also. Much is made about "getting

Hi Alan,

your answer is very humbling, and talks about solving a huge problem.
One that OLPC, Sugar and related projects are just one part of a wider
solution.

In practical terms, however, it is hard to hear that "the problem is
too big for us". I would hope for a vision of what part Sugar and OLPC
can play here, as part of the bigger thing.

You said:

> So my "vision" here is let's try to find supertalents in this area wherever
> in the world and try to fund them.

Let's assume you managed to recruit some of those (humble)
supertalents. They are rowing hard, and have their own ideas of what
to do next, but would also like to hear your opinion on mid and long
term goals and visions on the track we are working on.

Have you seen recent versions of Sugar and/or the OLPC laptop + software?

cheers,



martin
-- 
martin.langhoff at gmail.com
martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
- ask interesting questions
- don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff



      
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