TechnikBasteln – Technology Tinkering

Thanks to sponsorship via the 6th NetIdee call of the Internet Foundation Austria (IPA) we at OLPC (Austria) were able to launch a new project in November 2011 - TechnikBasteln (which half-decently translates into Technology Tinkering):

“TechnikBasteln is an innovative and interdisciplinary project which is focused on children. They are accompanied by us in experiencing, learning about, and understanding information and communication technologies (ICT) in workshops. Among other topics, these workshops address how computers and mobile phones work, the structure of the Internet, and how to safely use these tools and technologies.”

Since November 2011 Tanja and me have spent a lot of time planning and preparing these workshops, researching about other projects and content related to what we want to achieve, contacting teachers, schools, and other organizations to let them know what we’re doing, etc.

Now this week we launched the second phase of our project as we held the first two workshops in primary schools here in Vienna. The first one was focused on some of the basic technologies of the Internet and the second one was all about the building blocks of modern computers. We had a great time in both classes, the children also seemed to like what we were doing, we got good feedback from the teachers, and while there is room for improvements overall the concepts we had developed over the past few months worked really well.

So even though the past few days were really busy and intense (and I’m now in dire need of a relaxing weekend!) I’m also very happy with the progress we’ve made with TechnikBasteln and am already very much looking forward to our next workshops.

Talking and Writing about OLPC / ICT4E

I haven't had much time to keep this blog updated but I thought I'd take a minute to briefly mention two places where I've (more or less) recently spoken and written about OLPC and ICT4E.

The first one is a video interview that I did with educ.ar when I attended Conectar Igualdad's workshop about monitoring and evaluation in Buenos Aires back in December 2010. I'd also strongly recommend you to watch the interviews with some of the other workshop participants available here

 

The Association for Learning Technology is one of the (if not the) largest body in Europe which works on the intersection of technology and education. I am therefore very happy that I had the opportunity to write up my thoughts about the OLPC projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru for the latest edition of their quarterly newsletter. It's of course hard to get into too many details within the constraints of 2500 words but I do hope for my contribution to have four effects:

1. Remind people that even though it  has in many cases dropped off their radar screens OLPC is still alive.
2. Point out the fact that Latin America is really the place to be right now when it comes to studying large-scale 1-to-1 computing in education projects.
3. Emphasize that Europe can learn a lot and has a lot to learn from the many projects taking place in Latin America these days.
4. Interest people in reading the extensive 5-part article series about OLPC in South America which I published on EduTechDebate last autumn;-)

Keynote on "One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it" [video]

I spent the past four days in Switzerland as the University of Teacher Education Central Switzerland in Goldau had invited me to give a keynote at their "One to One Computing in School" conference. The title of my talk was “One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it” and a recording of it is now available here, plus you can find the accompanying slides here. (Please do note that the keynote was given in German.)

Update (16.02.2011): I just got a copy of an article in the Neue Schwyzer Zeitung which talks about the conference as well as mentions my keynote. I’ve made it available for download here.

Parking App

One of the classes I took this semester was a seminar on Human Computer Interaction. It turned out to be a great and thoroughly enjoyable and interesting class. The goal for all the 3-person teams in the class was to develop a horizontal prototype of a mobile application which uses open data.

CNM Studios, the team consisting of Michael Smolle, Nemanja Dubravac and yours truly, developed the prototype of Parking App which (supposedly) provides information related to parking regulations, tariffs, garages, etc. for Austrian cities. At the end of the class we had to create a video presenting the project and I think ours turned out quite well:

I’d highly recommend you to check out this blog post which includes a longer description of our project as well as information and videos about the work by our fellow colleagues.

Cheating in Computer Science

Thanks to a tweet from XRDS (ACM's magazine for students) I came across a great article by William Hugh Murray. Despite its title it isn’t just about cheating in CS but rather contains a very interesting – and I feel accurate – description of the current status quo in much of the education system.

There’s a short teaser below, you can find the complete article on the Web site of Ubiquity (an ACM publication).

“I suggest that we have gotten the cart before the horse. We are less concerned with whether students learn the right thing than whether they learn in the way that we rely upon to measure how well they learn when compared to their peers. We do this without even having considered whether the measurement is even useful, much less necessary or even counter-productive. We do it without considering whether encouraging sin is a good way to teach morals. We do it for no better reason than tradition, habit, and inertia.”

Good food for though, ey? :-)

EduTechDebate: OLPC in South America

As people following this blog or my tweets will know I spent my summer traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru to try and get a better understanding of how the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) projects in these countries are going.

Apart from documenting my experiences over on OLPC News, the OLPC (Austria) blog, Flickr, several OLPC and Sugar Labs related mailing lists, this blog, and plenty of tweets I also had an opportunity to share some of my thoughts during talks I gave in Montevideo, Lima, and Washington, D.C.. However the most important component of these documentation efforts awaited me after my return to Austria and have kept me quite busy over the past few weeks.

The result of these efforts is a series of five articles with a total of more than 15,000 words which was posted over on EduTechDebate.org, a discussion platform about ICT for education in developing countries which is sponsored by The World Bank’s infoDev and UNESCO:

OLPC in South America: An Overview of OLPC in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru

OLPC in Uruguay: Impressions of Plan Ceibal’s Primary School XO Laptop Saturation

OLPC in Paraguay: Will ParaguayEduca’s XO Laptop Deployment Success Scale?

OLPC in Peru: A Problematic Una Laptop Por Niño Program

OLPC in South America in Context of Deployments Around the World

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing these articles as it gave me a chance to reflect upon my experiences, go through all of my notes, look at the photos I had taken, etc.

In terms of what happened after the publication of the articles it was particularly interesting to see the reactions to my piece about Peru’s Una laptop por niño. My critical views of the project resulted in a significant pushback by Oscar Becerra (head of DIGETE - the Peruvian Ministry of Education's department which runs Una laptop por niño) who posted a numbered 19-part response to my article in the comments. Combined with two Peruvian media reports which mentioned my article, several discussions threads on Spanish mailing-lists, a Peruvian blogger translating the entire article to Spanish, an honorable (or maybe slightly less so;-) mention in Walter Bender’s Sugar Digest, and a total of 147 comments on the article itself it’s save to say that it created quite a stir and some good discussions.

Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Education Paradigms [video]

Back in July I blogged about a talk from Phil Zimbardo about "The Secret Powers of Time" which the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) had subsequently animated and turned into an absolutely spectacular video.

Now this week I had another RSA Animate video being mentioned by many of the people who I follow on Twitter. This time it's based on a talk by Sir Ken Robinson who many know from his famous TED talk on "schools kill creativity". The focus of this video is Changing Education Paradigms and again it's absolutely well worth watching, both for the content as well as the fantastic presentation.

Recording of my talk at escuelab [video]

On Wednesday evening I gave a talk in Lima's escuelab called "One Laptop per Child: Una perspectiva europea" (slides of the presentation). While the audience in the room - 4 people - was the smallest I ever spoke for we also had a handful of people watching the presentation via a video-stream. The talk itself wasn't that different from the one I gave in Montevideo at the end of July however the audience discussion that followed it was one of the best ones I've ever experienced. People who watched the stream submitted a handful of great questions via the chat and one person even called in to make some comments and ask something. In combination with having a teacher in the room who just received his OLPC XO laptop 2 weeks ago this made for excellent and very enjoyable audience participation. If you're interested (and speak Spanish) you can watch the whole 2h session in the embedded video below:

Learning to Change - Changing to Learn [video]

Can't remember who facebook'd or tweeted this video (it might have been Sascha Pallenberg) but I found it to be quite inspiring and well done:

My favorite quote is definitely:

"It's the death of education, it's the dawn of learning."

;-)

Jeff Jarvis @ TEDxNYed: This is bullshit

One of my favorite ways to spend spare time in the past 3 years has been to watch talks given at the annual TED conference. More recently TED has established a new format called TEDx which has enabled independent groups to organize TED-styled conferences all around the world. At one of these gatherings Jeff Jarvis gave a a great talk called “This is bullshit” and I’d thoroughly recommend watching it since it contains a lot of interesting thoughts and spot-on observations on both education and the news-media:

New Millenium Learners Conference 2010

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a tweet with an announcement that the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" would take place here in Vienna between February 22 and 24. I now spent the past 2 1/2 days at the conference which turned out to be really interesting and inspiring.

I won’t go into any further details here since I covered the conference in three quite extensive blog-posts over on olpcnews.com: day 1, day 2 and day 3.

As you can see over there I used ustream.tv quite extensively to broadcast and record the various sessions and I hope to be able to blog about my experience with it in the not-too-distant future.

Blogging about Karma

Admittedly I haven’t done too great a job in keeping the blog updated with my impressions from my time here in Nepal. Looking back at the archives the entries have been mostly limited to links to my Flickr album.

(Though I am somewhat proud that I’m at least taking the time to go through all the photos as soon as I get home from taking them to compile best of selections. There’s still several thousand photos from my previous trips in China/Mongolia/Russia and USA/Canada which I haven’t even looked at!)

Anyway, one of the topics which I haven’t really talked about here is the work I’ve been doing as part of my volunteering gig at OLE Nepal. The project I’ve been spending most of my time on is Karma (Web site / entry on wiki.sugarlabs.org) which was supported by Google as part of their Summer of Code program.

In a nutshell the goal of the Karma project is to provide an easy-to-use framework for interactive learning activities based on HTML 5 and Javascript. I’ve been mostly working on several issues related to the user interface and I’ve documented some of my work over on the Karma blog:

• Chakra Progress
• Karma Lesson Navigation
• Karma Pages

Since this is the first time that I’m really working with HTML, CSS and Javascript things take a little longer to get done but I’m really learning a lot and having a great time doing it. Plus being able to collaborate with two awesome fellows, Bryan and Felipe, makes the project all that more more enjoyable, even those weekly IRC meetings at 8AM on Tuesdays;-)

Thoughts on Educational Content Management

I posted some thoughts on Educational Content Management, which is one of the areas which I’m working on right now, over on the OLE Nepal blog:

One of the tasks that I’ll be working on during my brief stint here in Nepal is researching and (hopefully) implementing a way to organize all the different media objects produced by OLE Nepal as basis for their E-Paath learning activities. Currently we are talking about several thousand images, sounds, texts and videos but it’s not hard to imagine their repository containing hundred thousand or more artefacts in the not-too-distant future. Apart from the specific OLE Nepal use-case I also believe that even larger content repositories have to be a core consideration for both the larger OLPC and SugarLabs efforts.

You can find the complete blog entry here.

Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on creativity

I’m spending this Saturday evening catching up on reading and watching lots of online videos. Among other things I decided to re-watch (for what must be the 5th or 6th time) Ken Robinson’s talk about creativity and education at TED 2006. It’s definitely among my all-time favorite TED talks and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in education:

80+1 Panel Discussion on New Approaches to Education

On Monday I’ll be heading to Linz to participate in a panel discussion on New Approaches to Education which is part of the 80+1 project. Here’s what the Web site has to say about the event:

Expert panel discussion and open forum on the subject of new approaches to education; panelists include Christoph Derndorfer, one of the first members of OLPC Austria, freelance writer Armin Himmelrath and, via Skype from China, Calvin Chin, CEO of Qifang.

The discussion will take place on the Hauptplatz (main square) at 7PM and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

In related news I was interviewed by radio Ö1 yesterday because they’re doing a daily (well Monday through Thursday that is) 5min piece on subjects related to 80+1. The piece on OLPC with yours truly will probably air on Monday or Tuesday at 4:55PM. If you happen to hear it please let me know what you thought of it.

Walter Bender's 23 Questions

Last week Walter Bender, President of OLPC Software and Content until he resigned in April and now leading the Sugar Labs project, posted an entry called "A page from the Hilbert playbook" on his personal blog. In reference to David Hilbert's famous 23 problems in mathematics he came up with his own set of questions related to computer science, engineering, education, economics and social sciences.

For me these questions and thoughts are one of the most inspiring pieces of writing I've seen in quite some time. I'm almost tempted to print them out and stick them on my door as a constant reminder of some of the interesting challenges ahead when it comes to these fields.

Given that Walter's thoughts were the last part of a talk given at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and he had written up the first half in a two-part article on olpcnews I was also very happy when he allowed us to re-publish his latest text. Somehow it feels like a foundation had been laid upon which we can now build ideas and actual projects pertaining to all these issues. There's definitely a lot to think about and no chance to be bored in the years ahead!

My thoughts on technology and education

I found an interesting video on YouTube called "School goes digital with UMPCs" about a school in Scottland which uses UMPCs (ultra-mobile PCs, see the Wikipedia entry for more information). My favourite comment can be found at 4 min 29 sec where it's said that "...the benefits are clearly outweighing the costs..."

Ever since I took an interest in the One-Laptop-Per-Child project back when it was first introduced and even more so since OLPC Austria was formed I've spent quite some time reading up (and thinking) about the effects of (computer) technology on education. Especially in settings such as that school in Scottland the planned implementation of the OLPC project where students spent most of their time working with their computers.

From what I know at this point there's still no real and generally accepted conclusion (as in the result of independent research, not some TV reporter saying something) on what effects, let alone benefits, introducing computers into the classroom has on students and teachers. As always there're are indications for this and that, people claiming one thing or another thing and the media reporting all of it without really looking into matters. The single best article I've found about this topic so far appeared in the Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung (link, unfortunately it's only available in German). Its main comment ("US study shows that the use of electronic media does not improve student performance") is based on the first-year findings of a study conducted by the Texas Center for Educational Research ("The overarching purpose of the study is to scientifically investigate the effectiveness of technology immersion in increasing middle school students’ achievement in core academic subjects as measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS)"). Reading through the TCER's "Findings from the Second Year" report (pdf, 1.25MB, 158 pages) is probably the best thing anyone interested in this field can do. Here is a (fairly long, but it wouldn't make sense to shorten it, after all this blog isn't a media outlet that has to deal with 30-sec or 150 words limits;-) quote from the Executive Summary (pages 7 to 14 of that pdf) that seem to be a good indication of the current findings (emphasize added by yours truely):

Summary of First- and Second-Year Findings

Our first-year report—Evaluation of the Texas Technology Immersion Pilot: First-Year Results (Shapley et al., 2006a)—revealed positive effects of technology immersion on schools, teachers, and students. Findings for the second year relative to these same variables are generally consistent with first-year results. Steadfast outcomes across two evaluation years and two student cohorts show that immersing a middle school in technology produces schools with stronger principal leadership for technology, greater teacher collaboration and collective support for technology innovation, and stronger parent and community support for technology. Additionally, teachers in immersion schools are more technically proficient and use technology more often for their own professional productivity, their students use technology more often in core-subject classrooms, and teachers adopt more integration-oriented and learner-centered ideologies. Students in immersion schools are more technically proficient, use technology more often for learning, interact more often with their peers in small-group activities, and have fewer disciplinary problems than control-group students.

Also consistent with first-year results, we found no significant effect of technology immersion in the second year on student self-directed learning, and we found a significantly negative immersion effect on student attendance. Moreover, the availability of technology across two years provided no significant increase in the intellectual challenge of immersion teachers’ core-subject lessons.

First-year findings on academic achievement revealed no statistically significant immersion effects on TAKS reading or mathematics scores for Cohort 1, sixth graders. Similarly, second-year results for Cohort 1 students (as seventh graders) showed no significant effects of immersion on TAKS reading, mathematics, or writing achievement. Likewise, achievement results for Cohort 2 students (sixth graders involved in the project for one year) revealed no significant effect of immersion on TAKS reading achievement. However, for TAKS mathematics, students in immersion schools who began the year with higher math pretest scores had significantly higher mathematics achievement than their control-group counterparts. The math achievement gap favoring immersion students over control widened as students’ pretest scores increased. Although TAKS score differences between immersion and control schools usually did not differ by statistically significant margins, second-year achievement trends, in contrast to first-year results, generally favored technology immersion schools.

What does this tell us?

I'm still not quite sure to be honest and adding my thoughts below is of course a mockery of my own complaints about everyone adding their (mostly uneducated) opinion to the discussion. So, here's another uneducated guess:

The way I understand it using computers has the potential to bring (many) benefits to students, teachers and education overall. This however is a "can" and not a "will" type of situation. I believe that just introducing computers to a school will have no real positive effect. Only if all the aspects (one could actually go as far as calling them requirements) such as implementation, teacher training, learning materials, learning methods, etc. are sufficiently executed and available will we see "statistically relevant" improvements on young people's education (or "benefits outweighing costs" as others might put it). Otherwise the only benefit students will have is easier access to porn, as demonstrated by this story about an OLPC trial in Nigeria.

I'll definitely be talking more about this topic over the coming days, weeks, months...