[IAEP] 90% fluency Re: Granny Cloud

[Alan Kay]

Here are two other processes to consider that are more scalable.

I grew up in a little town of Hadley Massachusetts, which only had about 120 
children in the high school but had always had a full band, orchestra and 
chorus. They accomplished this by getting every child to be highly fluent in 
music making from first grade onwards. They did this by augmenting the classroom 
teachers -- all of which in the US in the 40s had to be able to play the piano a 
little bit as part of their training -- with one highly trained musician in K-8 
and several others in 9-12. We saw the high ability teacher twice a week, and I 
realized later that her main job was essentially quality control and tweaking 
the overall scheme that many of the classroom teachers might not be able to do.

This worked extremely well, and is an example of 90% of the children (more here) 
getting "really fluent" in something that is usually thought to mostly depend on 
talent. (Talent is a factor at the very high and low ends to be sure.)

The idea of using a "roving expert" has been used successfully elsewhere and in 
other fields. For example, for many years the really wonderful 5th grade science 
program in all of the Pasadena schools (Project Seed, which was set up by two 
CalTech scientists), was run this way.

This is more scalable than trying to scale up classroom teachers. It requires a 
really good curriculum, and lots of organization, etc.

A much bigger example is to consider the role of writing, and especially the 
printing press, in learning, and most especially with the revolution in thought 
that burst forth in the 17th century in Europe. Among other good sources is 
Elisabeth Eisenstein's magisterial "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change".

One way to look at this revolution, is that the printing press allowed the 
non-scalable great minds and teachers of the past and present to have some of 
themselves enormously replicated and scaled. This allowed more ordinary people 
plus these books to become "great teachers", and for some learners, the books 
alone were enough.

One of the ways to think about great teachers who are successful with most of 
their students is that they can find what the different kinds of students need 
in the way of process, method, application and encouragement to become fluent. A 
particular great book might not work for all, but libraries of them help, 
because they create an "Exploratorium" of different approaches to ideas, some of 
which will be more likely to match up with what the learners bring to the table. 
Some of these can even be motivational and inspiring.

Quite a bit of the school effort in the Northeastern US in the 19th century (and 
elsewhere in the world) was not just to help children learn to read, but to 
learn to read well enough and in a particular way to be able to learn ideas from 
reading. It is very difficult to get good information on just how well this was 
done. The book "Literacy in the United States" by Carl Kaestle is a pretty good 
survey that will give some insights. This process was greatly aided by there not 
being any competitor for reading and writing for all communication over distance 
and time, so many people were reading and writing many times each day, even if 
only for mundane reasons.

The social motivation that a great teacher can provide to those who require 
social reasons for doing things is more diffuse here. A reading and writing and 
conversing society that has ideas in the air can motivate highly, but is hard to 
build up.

Now it is worth trying to imagine how personal computers plus a world wide 
network can be like printed books and libraries. And more: how what is extra and 
special about computers could be used to make an active user interface that is 
"better than no teacher and better than a bad teacher" and that can do "some of 
the things a good teacher can do". We still will have some of the motivations 
problems, but we should be able to imagine such a UI being able to do 1 on 1 
interactions (known to be good for most learners), choose styles of interaction 
and curriculum likely to be good for their particular users (ditto), provide a 
"playground and lab" in which things can be learned by making them, and that the 
UI would be something more like a guide and mentor (rather than a drill 
sergeant). 


One of the simplest questions that should be investigated is "what if we took 
popular children's books and set ourselves the task of making an interface that 
would be successful in teaching 90% of children how to read them?" We could 
imagine how some of this would go on the XO, and there are many parts that would 
have to be done and tested to help our current imaginations. But what if 
"dynamic books" could handle much of the stages of early literacy?

What if "dynamic books" could help many children learn many other things that 
formerly required knowledgeable adults to help them with? And what if the 
children this works for could become peer teachers for some of the other 
children?

If this can be done, then it will be highly scalable via technology already in 
place. One big question is "how well does it have to be done to really make a 
difference globally?"

This goal is doable with considerable effort (it's in the same ballpark as it 
took to invent personal computing and networks back in the 70s - 10 years with 
hundreds of researchers), and is an important grand challenge for both computing 
and the US (and the world) over the next decade.

Like the printing press was in the 15th century, and for some of the same 
reasons, what I describe above is likely to be a gap filler if done well enough.

Best wishes,

Alan




________________________________
From: Yamandu Ploskonka <yamaplos at gmail.com>
To: Zachary Charles Clifton <Zachary.Clifton at Colorado.EDU>
Cc: IAEP SugarLabs <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
Sent: Tue, November 2, 2010 7:09:10 PM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] 90% fluency Re: Granny Cloud

VERY interesting, Zachary.

"it turned out that an unusual teacher was the culprit", thus something 
that cannot be scaled...

On really good teachers, and on how maybe that is not something 
transferable, 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=all

"Lemov and Ball focus on different problems, yet in another way they are 
compatriots in the same vanguard, arguing that great teachers are not 
born but made. (The Obama administration has also signaled its hopes by 
doubling the budget for teacher training in the 2011 budget to $235 
million.) A more typical education expert is Jonah Rockoff, an economist 
at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers 
whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks 
skeptically upon teacher training. He has an understandable reason: 
While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student 
test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can 
think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student 
achievement. "

On 11/02/2010 09:05 PM, Zachary Charles Clifton wrote:
> I believe that Alan has used examples like "90%" before that one can read to 
>gain additional insight to his view. A quick search will provide some resources. 
>Here is one I found:
>
> http://secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp
>
> Hopefully that helps shed some light.
>
> Zachary C. Clifton
>
> On Nov 2, 2010, at 5:31 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
>
>    
>> interesting...  What about nature / nurture?
>>
>> are we talking about 90% of those who actually "can", or 90% of all?
>>
>> in any case, we hit very different individual learning slopes...
>>
>> To follow up with the kind of example you use, today's Wall Street Journal has 
>>an article on how even highly educated people in Holland don't want to wear 
>>helmets when riding bikes.  So, they are "fluent" in bicycle riding but somehow 
>>are not reasonable about it.  The skill is there, but a concept on how your 
>>behavior hurts others (if you get injured, someone else has to share in paying 
>>for it) is clearly missing - ethics...
>>
>> anyway, famously, fluent in /what/?
>>
>> On 11/02/2010 06:21 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
>>      
>>> Yamandu Ploskonka wrote:
>>>
>>>        
>>>> thank you, yep, you right.
>>>>
>>>> On 11/02/2010 04:40 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>>>>
>>>>          
>>>>> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Yamandu Ploskonka<yamaplos at gmail.com>    
>>>>wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>            
>>>>>> request to understand better what Alan meant by 90% fluency...
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>              
>>>>> Fluency in 90% of the population, not "90% fluency".
>>>>>
>>>>> You could want to ask what definition of 'fluency' is being used and
>>>>> whether there is a reasonable test for that.
>>>>>
>>>>>            
>>> Here is my own definition: you are fluent when mechanism doesn't fight
>>> higher level goals for your attention.
>>>
>>> When riding a bicycle, for example, if the only thing in your mind is
>>> that you want to go to the end of this block and turn left then you are
>>> a fluent rider. If, in addition to that, you are also worried about
>>> whether to turn the handle bar left or right in order not to fall, or
>>> perhaps lean over a bit instead and whether you might be pedalling too
>>> slowly then you are not fluent.
>>>
>>> The problem with a lack of fluency is obvious when, even though you are
>>> pleased with yourself for not having fallen, you suddenly realize that
>>> you have already passed the street where you wanted to turn left. In the
>>> same way, people who are not a fluent readers will find themselves very
>>> tired after two pages and have no idea of what the text said.
>>>
>>> -- Jecel
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>> _______________________________________________
>> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
>> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>>      
>
>    
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20101103/6c1fe891/attachment-0001.html>