Hi Chunka
It's basically "hunting and gathering" vs. "agriculture". Or "parisitism" vs "symbiosis". These are built into human nervous systems by genetics, but it is still surprising given that we've had agriculture for more than 10,000 years, and one would think it would be more generally noticed and understood.
Here is an example from today that is like the impulse and vision that propelled the 12 year effort that invented personal computing and the Internet.
The idea reaches back to the 60s and 70s, but an above threshold invention was not accomplished.
Children need to be helped to learn important things, such as reading and writing, mathematics and science and engineering. The helpers need to understand the subject matter, and also how to help the learning process with individual learners. Studies have shown that for many learners, just lowering the learner-to-helper ratio makes an enormous difference.
For the US, it has been calculated that it is not possible to create enough knowledgeable K-8 teachers for math and science over the next 25 years, even for the 30:1 student teacher ratios we have today. It has been estimated that this problem is much worse in the developing world.
Vision: It is a destiny for interactive computers to become sensitive expert learning helpers for many important parts of human knowledge which children need to learn.
This is an extension of what the printing press has meant for learning. There aren't enough Socrates' and other great teachers to go around, but important parts of their magic can be captured in print, replicated and distributed by the millions. This allowed more ordinary teachers plus great-books to do some of what great teachers can do. And this changed the world.
Computers can represent books and all other media, and they should be able to actively help us learn to read them (even if we start off not being able to read at all). And we should be able to go much farther beyond the book, to make computer helpers that can also understand and answer many questions in ways that extend our learning rather than undermines the growth of our minds.
These computer helpers also help the human helpers. It's not about replacing humans (even if they don't exist) with computers, but making a more powerful learning environment using technology to help.
This is a hard vision to pull off, just as personal computing was. The funding needed to be long term in the 60s because much had to be done to (a) even find a version of the vision that could serve as "problem and goals", and very importantly (b) to "grow" the grad students and PhDs, who as second and third generation researchers, were able to frame the problem and do the inventions.
The payoff has been enormous. The inventions at PARC alone have generated about $30 Trillion dollars of wealth worldwide (and yes Xerox's return on their investment in PARC has been more than a factor of 200 (from the laser printer alone).
The great funding in the 60s was done mostly by the government, and for personal computing and pervasive networks was spread over more than 15 universities and research companies who formed a cooperative research community. (The story of this is told in "The Dream Machine" by Mitchel Waldrop).
The funders today do not have a lot of vision, and they have even less courage. A new kind of user interface that can help people learn is not just for the very important needs of education around the world, but will also open up learning in business, defense, and for consumer design and products.
How much would this cost? A critical mass of institutions and researchers could be supported starting at about $100M/year. By contrast, the estimated US spending for Iraq and Afghanistan for 2011 is about $170B. So we are talking initially about less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the cost of these wars.
What's the hitch. First there is risk. It is a very difficult problem. But I think a bigger hitch is that it is likely to take more than 10 years to pull off. This is longer than any corporate or government cycle.
Perhaps a larger hitch lies in one of the biggest changes in funding today as compared to the 60s. There is no question that a funder of large research monies for high risk projects is "responsible". Today's funders are so worried about this responsibility that they confuse it with "control" and tried to insert themselves in the decision processes. This is a disaster (they are funders not researchers, and the more visionary and difficult the projects, the less their opinion can be at all germane.)
The 60s funders made no such error. They said "we can't evaluate projects behind the Beltway, so we'll fund people not projects". This required trust in both directions, but it is a proper and good allocation of expertise.
The other thing that the 60s funders pointed out when queried by worried politicians, is that they were "playing baseball" not "going to school", meaning that given the high risk and high payoff of the research, they only needed to bat .350 and "the world will be changed"). Today's funders want certainty, and this is engineering at best, and this does not change the world because the hard important problems never get worked on.
Best wishes
Alan
________________________________ From: Chunka Mui chunka.mui@devilsadvocategroup.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Carlos Rabassa carnen@mac.com; "america-latina@squeakland.org" america-latina@squeakland.org; "squeakland@squeakland.org" squeakland@squeakland.org; Maho 2010 maho@realness.org; IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org; olpc bolivia olpc-bolivia@lists.laptop.org; OLPC Puno olpcpuno@gmail.com Sent: Sat, February 5, 2011 1:31:45 PM Subject: Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric Alan --
I’ve seen many organizations claim to be committed to “innovation,” while eschewing “invention.” Everyone harvesting while refusing to sow makes for bad strategy, both societal and corporate. I guess it’s “rational” in some short-term sense and another example of the free rider problem. There’s an insidious side-effect as well. By rejecting invention, those organizations implicitly or explicitly restrict the consideration set for even incremental innovation. It’s hard to reach for even small aspirations if you’re always being told to not be “too far out.” So my experience matches your general point.
I don’t make much experience, however, with the specific example that you were referring to. I’d like to hear more about your perspective about the guiding principles pre and post ‘82, and how each set of leaders/funders rationalized their viewpoints. I’d also be interested in your sense of the trend on this topic, since we have a new generation of high tech corporate leaders and funders and, clearly, another round of massive wealth being generated.
Regards, Chunka
On 2/5/11 1:11 PM, "Alan Kay" alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
Hi Chunka,
I've been challenged on this point more than once, and have challenged back to come up with one invention that was done after 1980 that matches up to the top 10 done before 1980.
This has not happened. I've been able to show the prior art for all
suggestions.
Essentially everything in the last 30 years has been commercializations and other forms of "innovation" based on what was funded by ARPA, ONR, and by extension, Xerox in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
The important point here is that there are many new inventions needed, and they can be identified, but no one has been willing to fund them. It's not that the early birds got the worms, but that most of the needed worms out there are being missed.
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From: Chunka Mui chunka@cornerloft.com
To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: Carlos Rabassa carnen@mac.com; "america-latina@squeakland.org" america-latina@squeakland.org; squeakland.org mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org; Maho 2010 maho@realness.org; IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org; olpc bolivia olpc-bolivia@lists.laptop.org; OLPC Puno olpcpuno@gmail.com Sent: Sat, February 5, 2011 10:53:44 AM Subject: Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
On Jan 30, 2011, at 9:21 AM, Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
GE is being congratulated for recognizing that the iPhone and iPad are pretty good ideas and technological realizations. But isn't this like the congratulations Bill Gates got for finally recognizing the Internet (about 25 years after it had started working)?
Seems as though Apple had a lot more on the ball than Bill Gates or GE here (they used to do computing in the 60s, but couldn't see what it was).
And most of the ideas at Apple (and for personal computing and the Internet) came from research funding that no company or government has been willing to do since 1982.
Alan -- Could you say more about this point? Surely there's been tons of CS and IT funding since '82, both govt funding to universities and massive research budgets at msft, hp,
Regards, Chunka
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________ From:Carlos Rabassa carnen@mac.com
To: america-latina@squeakland.org; squeakland.org http://squeakland.org mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org; Maho 2010 maho@realness.org; IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org; olpc bolivia olpc-bolivia@lists.laptop.org; OLPC Puno olpcpuno@gmail.com Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 4:11:49 AM Subject: [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
We try to learn from those who have succeed for a long time:
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1XWm2q8nQ-l5KUJ_PWkQruLDx-nZ7nsKDfg4idDlsU50 https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1XWm2q8nQ-l5KUJ_PWkQruLDx-nZ7nsKDfg4... 0
Carlos Rabassa _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
squeakland mailing list squeakland@squeakland.org http://lists.squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland
A lot of thought provoking ideas listed in one mail. Wow!
On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 5:20:15 am Alan Kay wrote:
For the US, it has been calculated that it is not possible to create enough knowledgeable K-8 teachers for math and science over the next 25 years, even for the 30:1 student teacher ratios we have today. It has been estimated that this problem is much worse in the developing world.
Student-Teacher ratio is about teaching not learning. I learnt the hard way that a different mind-set is needed to work with learning.
Parents and Family seems to have done a fairly good job in the 0-6 year range. When we get into the next stage (6-12), the learning environment breaks down. Mothers don't go around with a growth chart and taunt their babies with "You should have been crawling by six months. You will get a C for your crawling. Sit facing the wall for the next five minutes!" ;-). In India at least, families are held responsible for their children's development. In the next stage, why not hold teachers responsible for outcomes but facilitate them to achieve their goals using whatever they find appropriate?
In one exercise, we worked with teachers across 120 rural schools near Bangalore to attain one specific goal, 'get every student to read Kannada and Division by 7th grade' using whatever means at their disposal, even if they have to take assistance from locals who are not teachers but like being with children. Teachers took the help of external evaluators to detect non-learners in June to create a target set. When the eval was repeated six months later, the number dropped to near zero in 102 schools. Other schools are now catching up. The effect of empowerment spilled over into other topics and boosted the overall morale of students. The marginal funding required for this exercise was trivial.
Computers can represent books and all other media, and they should be able to actively help us learn to read them (even if we start off not being able to read at all).
Children will learn to read only when they have to read to learn. The thirst for knowledge has to go beyond what they can get from their family or school. This is a challenge in countries like India with dense population and an oral tradition. The chasm between pre-literate to semi-literate is quite large.
A teacher in a rural public school narrated a case of a 6th grade student who wouldn't write or read and was at the bottom grade. When we introduced computers into the school, he was attracted to TeX morph in Etoys that typeset multilingual texts. He played with this morph sporadically over four months to generate various letter shapes and words (including misspellings) and then broke into fluent writing and reading. He had stumbled on a strong reason to read. Once he crossed the chasm, he stopped using the computer and switched over to books. Computer became a complex device. This incident had a big impact on the teacher who was, at that time, in her third trimester of her pregnancy.
The great funding in the 60s was done mostly by the government, and for personal computing and pervasive networks was spread over more than 15 universities and research companies who formed a cooperative research community. (The story of this is told in "The Dream Machine" by Mitchel Waldrop).
Given the scale and scope of education, public funding and social participation is the only solution. Private funding comes with too many strings attached :-(.
Subbu
I don't think of "teachers" or "teaching" as dirty words. And I don't separate them by age group, profession, or whether parents or not. (Do I have to say that good teachers facilitate learning ....?)
There are lots of poor teachers in the world (for many different reasons), but it's important to understand that no child ever invented Calculus, nor did any adult until very recently in our 200,000 years on the planet. Good teachers are vital, and most especially for the powerful invented ideas and knowledge that is less strongly built into our genetically and culturally fashioned brain/minds.
So we need good teachers from our peers, our parents, our schooling systems, our vocations, our delights, etc.
Best wishes,
Alan
________________________________ From: K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu.ml@gmail.com To: squeakland@squeakland.org Cc: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com; Chunka Mui chunka.mui@devilsadvocategroup.com; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org; "america-latina@squeakland.org" america-latina@squeakland.org; Carlos Rabassa carnen@mac.com; Maho 2010 maho@realness.org; olpc bolivia olpc-bolivia@lists.laptop.org; IAEP SugarLabs iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org; OLPC Puno olpcpuno@gmail.com Sent: Sun, February 6, 2011 6:36:38 AM Subject: Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
A lot of thought provoking ideas listed in one mail. Wow!
On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 5:20:15 am Alan Kay wrote:
For the US, it has been calculated that it is not possible to create enough knowledgeable K-8 teachers for math and science over the next 25 years, even for the 30:1 student teacher ratios we have today. It has been estimated that this problem is much worse in the developing world.
Student-Teacher ratio is about teaching not learning. I learnt the hard way that a different mind-set is needed to work with learning.
Parents and Family seems to have done a fairly good job in the 0-6 year range. When we get into the next stage (6-12), the learning environment breaks down. Mothers don't go around with a growth chart and taunt their babies with "You should have been crawling by six months. You will get a C for your crawling. Sit facing the wall for the next five minutes!" ;-). In India at least, families are held responsible for their children's development. In the next stage, why not hold teachers responsible for outcomes but facilitate them to achieve their goals using whatever they find appropriate?
In one exercise, we worked with teachers across 120 rural schools near Bangalore to attain one specific goal, 'get every student to read Kannada and Division by 7th grade' using whatever means at their disposal, even if they have to take assistance from locals who are not teachers but like being with children. Teachers took the help of external evaluators to detect non-learners in June to create a target set. When the eval was repeated six months later, the number dropped to near zero in 102 schools. Other schools are now catching up. The effect of empowerment spilled over into other topics and boosted the overall morale of students. The marginal funding required for this exercise was trivial.
Computers can represent books and all other media, and they should be able to actively help us learn to read them (even if we start off not being able to read at all).
Children will learn to read only when they have to read to learn. The thirst for knowledge has to go beyond what they can get from their family or school. This is a challenge in countries like India with dense population and an oral tradition. The chasm between pre-literate to semi-literate is quite large.
A teacher in a rural public school narrated a case of a 6th grade student who wouldn't write or read and was at the bottom grade. When we introduced computers into the school, he was attracted to TeX morph in Etoys that typeset multilingual texts. He played with this morph sporadically over four months to generate various letter shapes and words (including misspellings) and then broke into fluent writing and reading. He had stumbled on a strong reason to read. Once he crossed the chasm, he stopped using the computer and switched over to books. Computer became a complex device. This incident had a big impact on the teacher who was, at that time, in her third trimester of her pregnancy.
The great funding in the 60s was done mostly by the government, and for personal computing and pervasive networks was spread over more than 15 universities and research companies who formed a cooperative research community. (The story of this is told in "The Dream Machine" by Mitchel Waldrop).
Given the scale and scope of education, public funding and social participation is the only solution. Private funding comes with too many strings attached :-(.
Subbu
On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 8:13:55 pm Alan Kay wrote:
I don't think of "teachers" or "teaching" as dirty words. And I don't separate them by age group, profession, or whether parents or not. (Do I have to say that good teachers facilitate learning ....?)
Neither do I. The debate around good vs. bad teachers is a distraction that gets us nowhere close to ensuring that all our students get education. The real debate should be around empowerment of people who are assisting learners. What we found is that teachers, even in crowded schools, were able to find their own resources to ensure that their wards acquired basic skills. Learning happens if we leave teaching to teachers.
Subbu
I agree.
But now we have to figure out how "to help the helpers", because besides wisdom, many need much more knowledge than they have
Best wishes,
Alan
________________________________ From: K. K. Subramaniam kksubbu.ml@gmail.com To: Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com Cc: squeakland@squeakland.org; Chunka Mui chunka.mui@devilsadvocategroup.com; voluntarios y administradores OLPC para usuarios docentes olpc-sur@lists.laptop.org; "america-latina@squeakland.org" america-latina@squeakland.org; Carlos Rabassa carnen@mac.com; Maho 2010 maho@realness.org; olpc bolivia olpc-bolivia@lists.laptop.org; OLPC Puno olpcpuno@gmail.com Sent: Sun, February 6, 2011 8:53:53 AM Subject: Re: [squeakland] [IAEP] Plan Ceibal y/and General Electric
On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 8:13:55 pm Alan Kay wrote:
I don't think of "teachers" or "teaching" as dirty words. And I don't separate them by age group, profession, or whether parents or not. (Do I have to say that good teachers facilitate learning ....?)
Neither do I. The debate around good vs. bad teachers is a distraction that gets us nowhere close to ensuring that all our students get education. The real debate should be around empowerment of people who are assisting learners. What we found is that teachers, even in crowded schools, were able to find their own resources to ensure that their wards acquired basic skills. Learning happens if we leave teaching to teachers.
Subbu
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Alan Kay -
K. K. Subramaniam