Slashdot Mirror
Testing Technology on a Veritable Army of Children?
"The idea is to bring together children ages 10 to 15 years old from around the world at 8 or 9 centers scattered about all continents except Antarctica. The children will congregate at these centers for two days in 2005 to participate in creative technology workshops both virtually between centers and hands-on at their particular center. There will be a heavy emphasis on community building and shared information, in many ways similar to Slashdot. The entire event and all the projects it entails are designed to live on after the kids go home when the two days are up. How this will be done is as of yet uncertain, but will most definitely involve net connectivity to some extent (whether through the village kiosk's 28.8kbaud line in Cambodia or the living room broadband line in NYC). Naturally, issues such as language barriers will have to be addressed. In the particular case of the language barrier, there is talk of designing a custom written language (again, think mediaglyphs from 'Diamond Age') for children to use, build upon, and shape. What other projects are worth considering?"
Or does it seem as though a 2-day conference full of children speaking different languages is an awfully short timeframe to train them to reshape the world? In the case of Crystal Age (neal stephenson,) this was only possible because the technology was so powerful as to be able to train the user how to use it without any interaction... are you guys able to do that?
BEN
It would be interesting, I think, to be that young and share in the world culture. It's a powerful idea that things like laughter are so universal, despite cultural and linguistic barriers.
Is it me, or does a point to this gathering of 3000 children escape anyone else? I read over the blurb twice, and noticed the reference to Stephenson, PDAs, and something about a million dollars, but, I didn't read anything about what it is leading up to, or what it is all for.
Anyone have any hints for me?
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
No. It should absolutely not be cultural based. "cultural" programs have a long and sordid history of complete failure. What I mean by "cultural programs" is programs who's focus is specifically and by design on the interaction of groups from different usually arbitrarily defined social groups, for example, the Camp David experiment with the Israeli and Palestinian children.
Cultural exchange and interaction is an incidental effect of lots of other things. It's only possible when people already have an interest in each other for more personally motivating reasons.
Example? Chess. Lots of cultural and philosophical interchange happens between chess players because they share a passion. When they meet people who share that passion with them and who in interesting within that context they naturally try to enlarge the context: who are you, where are you from, what's it like to be Swahili or Pakistani or American, or whatever...
But placing the focus on cultural interchange is dooming a project to failure. Firstly, it does so because most people (let alone children) do not identify strongly motivational level with their cultural groups. How often have you heard a programmer say, "I program because I'm a Jew", or an athlete say I wrestle because I'm Chinese? Secondly, because if that "cultural" is the context, people - regardless of intentions - will try to find things that motivate them. Their stereotype themselves in order fit with what they perceive as their grouping (ethnic, cultural, national). This results in talented programmers not talking about programming because they're a Cossack and Cossacks are warriors and programming is beneath any good Cossack. And thirdly, once you've established that context you make it irrelevant by claiming equality and just confuse everyone.
Base it on soccer.
Base it on chess.
Base it on a proper appreciation of falling snowflakes in summer.
Whatever, but don't force a "cultural" basis.
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
Ever read Lord of the Flies?
For heaven's sake, don't pit them against each other across cultural/national dividing lines. If you must divide them into teams, make the teams cross-cultural. Even better would be to make them all one team.
Then come up with a dramatic demonstration of what they can accomplish as a human swarm if they ignore cultural boundaries and all cooperate. Concentrate on drama. Give them an experience that will imprint on their minds the power of letting go of nationality and attacking problems instead of each other.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Handing out technology is pretty much the mindset that has prevailed in the schools up to now, and it doesn't work. Teachers don't have the time or resources to effectively use the Macs/PCs they have, and most schools have no competent SysAdmin--they usually draft a teacher and they grudgingly do it for a year.
Talk to your local elem. school teachers, esp. ones with diverse classrooms, and get a feel for their challenges. Then tailor a technology approach that meets their needs; if you can find ways to improve the effectiveness of teaching, you will help more kids.
I think that the ideal device would be a PDA that is so ubiquitous and inexpensive that it is not worth stealing, and no great loss if damaged or misplaced. Now, design a classroom around that device-- the child carriers the PDA home or to school, but at either place it can be plugged into the desktop and become part of a more capable, flexible learning system, with a keyboard, mouse, or other input device depending on the child's need.
The main initial benefit of the EDA (let's call it) is to provide local storage of homework assignments, calandar, contact, basic reference information, and statistics on use. This ensures that kids can't forget their textbook, or homework assignment, or spelling list, or worksheet, because the teacher can synch every EDA in the class at the end of the day.
Unplugged, the EDA stores key imformation for homework, reading, and studies-- much like a handspring or palmpilot. Plugged into class net or a home PC, it is the front-end of a more powerful networked information device.
More ambitiously, use the EDA and the wired classroom to give teachers instantaneous feedback on student interaction, learning, participation. The Teacher's workstation would enable them to scan the entire class during a writing or reading assignment, enable or disable instant messaging or polling, and even measure the time use and interaction on a class assignment, realtime, or record statistics that can be analyzed later. This would also make standardized testing much more consistent across school.
Stop with the "Apples for the Students" already. It is having little positive impact on learning, burdens teachers that are already overloaded, and amounts to little more than a toy that teachers use to distract students while the provide individual attention on handle admin duties.
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This sounds like a big conference put on by the MIT Media Lab a few years back:
www.jrsummit.net
To be perfectly honest, I think that while kids playing with technology is cool, it truly suspends disbelief to argue that it will result in tremendous advances or new ideas. Frankly, taking that same money and educating poor children around the world will pay back far greater returns than a two-day conference.
There are cultures where nodding your head means no, and shaking your head means yes. So much for that idea.
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As someone who's been working with at-risk kids in Brazil for the last eight years, I'd like to suggest some things that I think you wouldn't want to do:
- Don't assume that everyone everywhere speaks or even understands English - or even has a basic grasp of literacy!
- Don't assume that a fifteen-year-old in the two-thirds world has the academic background or world-view as an American kid - remember that many of them won't have even finished primary (grade) school!
- Please don't assume that American kids have something important to teach these other kids - or that two-thirds world kids would necessarily even want to talk to Americans (other than to ask for money)
- please remember that poor in the two-thirds world often really means poor and that these kids mightn't be able to buy spare batteries, use phone lines or the Internet, or maybe have even pen and paper.
I really can't imagine any useful application of this technology. Some kids, I'm sure, will try to use the PDAs as GameBoys or trade them with someone for food or Nikes.
Anyway, I hope I don't come across as too much of a wet-blanket, it's just that I've met some fairly "out-there" ideas for helping Brazilian kids.
I agree. I'm involved to make sure that doesn't happen. As usual, we'll see in the end how it turns out.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why this is deserving of the millions of dollars you're putting into it.
When it comes to money, there is no such thing as deserving. This is happening only because one very rich corporation/person (corperson... heh, heh, you heard it here first) wants it to happen. Who deserves what never came into play as far as I know.
golem1024
Specifically Hungary. When the Turks invaded Hungary they basically barged into every village and put swords to people's necks. They asked the villagers, "Will you convert to Islam?" If the villagers nodded, they would survive. If they shook their head "no" their throat would get slashed by the sword's edge. Hence the switch of the nod for no and the head shake for yes.
Cultural imperialism is FUN!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Having skimmed the other comments prior to posting, here's somebody's articulation of the first idea that sprung to my mind (so consider it voted for again):
"so make a pda that has a handcrank, uplinks to a satellite, and is basically nothing but a glorified Instant Messenging App with some sort of Babelfish [altavista.com] (the fish!) built in that translates whatever native language is involved into a neutral heuristic. then that xml heuristic is uplinked via satellite, downloaded to a recipient, and retranslated into whatever language the recipient is using on their pda."
'Cept that if you need low latency -- these are kids -- you'll want WAPs and IM 'Fish servers at the point of the conference.
But how are you planning on getting 3000 kids to use it? Won't they just seek out the other kids from their individual cultures -- the ones who don't "talk funny"?
The exception to this probable trend would be the few kids who either don't need the PDAs to communicate cross-language or the gaggle of other kids who just want to have casual sex with somebody who lives half a world away. (~750 hormone-charged boys aren't going to spend the first day trying to solve that problem? Heck no!)
Your company may have high hopes for this "conference", you may get a lot out of good product ideas from observing it. But you have to keep the human element in mind here -- there's a huge potential for a lot of negative fall-out. Either it will be too constrained and neither your corp nor the kids will get anything, or it won't be constrained enough and the kids will go home with interesting new diseases and/or scars only to turn around and be a lingering PR nightmare for your corp.
But I kind of expect this is a bit more thought out than that. I hope.
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Yeah, pictures are good, right after you figure out what they mean. Example: Chinese. 60,000 (or so) pictures. Not that easy to learn all of them :)
:)
Japanese is better with about 2000 commonly used, 6000 less commonly used, and several thousand antiquated/infrequent characters.
Still a pain in the ass to learn all of them
My point is that pictures are nice, but too many of them are hard to learn; too few and you can't communicate.
My other car is first.