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Interviews: Ask Senior Director Matt Keller About the Global Learning XPRIZE
The former Vice President of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Matt Keller is currently the Senior Director of the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE. The competition challenges teams from around the world to develop open source software solutions that will allow children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within a 18 month competition period. After 18 months a panel of judges will evaluate the projects and announce semi-finalists. Semi-finalists will have a month to tweak their projects and/or reconfigure their teams before the judges elect the top five finalist to proceed. Each of the five teams selected will receive $1 million to field test their ideas with the eventual winners receiving the Grand Prize of $10 million. The Global Learning XPRIZE is recruiting teams now through April 30, 2015. Matt has agreed to answer any questions you might have about the competition and the future of education in general. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
Tech is changing fast, and almost free tablets are coming. It can be argued that efforts to promote one solution eg. the iPad or this software actually detract from the spontaneous emergence of new ideas via the grassroots. See what happened with the OLPC ...
Why can't the kids learn basic reading, writing and arithmetic from regular teachers ?
I have spent more than a decade accumulating a library of ebooks, audio books, videos, etc. My big question was how to organize it.
Book stores have a system for books, but fitting movies into that system broke it.
I tried another system that worked with books and movies, but not with random short how-to (YouTube) videos. Now, factor in Aunt Mollie's pictures from her 1963 vacation to Disney World. It gets hysterically complicated to organize it all.
Finally, I figured out that librarians had it all along. It's called the "Library of Congress Cataloging System" (or You could use the Dewey Decimal system, except that it is a bit dated.)
I know this is not what the prize is for, but after we get a computer that teaches kids to read, write, and do arithmetic...then we need a way to organize the books for them.
Of course You also have a full search like Google Books or Amazon...but the beginning is to organize items by category. A library is organized by category, while an archive is organized by source (where the material came from.)
That is about the only thing I have to offer after 20 years of stashing bootleg ebooks on every available disk. Well, that and standardize on a few common file formats, and know that the 1st and 2nd edition of a book are truly two different books that should be listed on the same page (which has every version of the book known to exist, possibly ranked by popularity.)
Software developers today commonly use Linux. Many of the major distros now use systemd. Systemd is known to cause severe problems in some circumstances, such as computers that refuse to boot and the presence of binary log files.
How do the Global Learning XPRIZE teams who are using Linux avoid systemd? Do they use Slackware, even if it means using a 1997-vintage environment? Do they use Gentoo, and have to wait days or weeks before everything has compiled and their systems can be used? Do they have some other innovative solution to this problem?
Has this ever worked before? Has anyone ever shown that it's possible for children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic? And have they published their results in peer-reviewed journals?
I thought that most of the research found that computers weren't too useful in teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic, even when students had assistance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10...
Inflating the Software Report Card
By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL
October 8, 2011
(United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”)
The competition challenges teams from around the world to develop open source software solutions that will allow children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.
It has been the geek's wet dream for at least the past ten years to take the teacher out of the grade school classroom --- which damn little evidence to show that he has was ever on the right track.
Matt, why are you doing an interview here instead of participating day-to-day on forum.xprize.org, where there seem to be dozens of questions from interested and would-be participants?
There is a cycle with technology in education.
Next technologies or approaches are develop. We are promised they will revolutionize education. The hype builds. Everyone shells out cash. Research kicks in. Research shows only small gains were made in small populations. Look the next great thing is here to save education.
This cycle has been going at least since the invention of the radio and likely before. What have you seen as Senior Director that gives you hope that we will eventually break free from this cycle and actually see significant gains in education?
Lots of these developing countries aren't known for being very stable or have issues with educating portions of their population (girls for example). Do you work directly with the governments in these developing areas? Do they seem enthusiastic to your goal?
Who is on the judging panel? Is it just educators or do you have people with other areas of expertise like economists, programmers, or people with specific knowledge of these developing areas?
The site mentions submitting the intention to compete form, and pay the fee after the approval. However, no approval emails are sent, and the site in not helpful either.
not everyone has the money to pay the teachers. Nor are there enough people educated to be teachers.
True enough but in that case how are they going to have the money to buy computers and have people educated enough to be able to support them and keep them running? Not to mention the electrical power to run them let alone a network connection. It seems to me that if they have what they need to purchase and keep running all these computers they probably have what they need to teach basic literacy and arithmetic without computers.
Will smaller startups have an equal opportunity to compete? Or will you judge competitors by pedigree and other superficial criteria?
James Stewart, the Calculus textbook author, recently passed away.
It famously took him seven years to write his first edition.
Given the difficulty in creating content why do you think 18 months is enough time?
Why does it cost $500 to enter? Doesn't this make it impossible for a local team to enter and wouldn't they have a leg-up since they know the problems/challenges directly?