Posts that are olpc-ish
In the middle of a conference on education, it would be remiss for me to not give thanks to the schools that got me here.
Willowbrook Elementary, where my kindergarten teacher said I’d learn anything I wanted through reading, where the librarians made a special exception to the book check-out limit when I began to max it out each day, and where I had my first taste of small nudges making big systems changes when the grown-ups implemented my solution to the bake sale product drought (give a one-free-goodie ticket to each kid who brought a plate of goodies from their parents). A much younger neighborhood kid came up to me years later when I was in high school. “Are you the one who had the idea for bake sale tickets? I heard the teachers mentioning your name about it yesterday.” I should go back and have breakfast there with some of my old teachers; I haven’t done that in a couple years.
Maple Middle School, where I learned to write my heart out and deliberately wear my geekhood on my sleeve. Where I learned that just because older kids said something was hard (reading Shakespeare, for instance) didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. Where I stumbled onto the idea of math concepts having proofs and fell in love with math before I could discover that preteen girls were supposed to think that math was hard. Where I began to throw myself into my work and pull allnighters at 11, sneaking into the bathroom past my bedtime to read textbooks and the most original source materials I knew of and could access (like the Origin of Species - I still hadn’t become aware of the concept of the “research journal”). When I graduated from 8th grade, my parents told me they were proud of me. That’s the first time I can really remember that happening. I’m pretty sure my teachers repeatedly reaching out to tell them about my somewhat ridiculous overachievement habits played a big role in that phrase coming out of my father’s mouth - he told me nearly a decade later that it’d been the first time in 14 years that he realized that I was actually doing really, really well.
IMSA, the first time I ever struggled to pass a class (Fogel’s legendary number theory elective), the first time I was surrounded by people smarter than me in every way, the first time I was adopted by a group of older kids who taught me, watched out for me, and were… my friends. It was the first place where I was marked more by my intellectual interests than by my hearing. This is where I learned to teach and improvise, where I started speaking up and making suggestions, where I started to see how I could grow up and perhaps even choose to live in a culture that differed from the one that I was raised in; where I had outlets for all my excess intellectual energy, where I discovered computers and Linux (though not yet the communities which made them), where I was stunned to find that I could adeptly participate in group discussions on the internet where I didn’t have to strain to lipread. My teachers pointed out to me that I was good at certain things I’d previously thought of things I “just did,” and coached me on creative writing, social science research, and curriculum development outside of class (though I didn’t realize that was what I was doing at the time - I thought I was being a class assistant for workstudy). There was the expectation that you would grow up to do great things - it took me a long time to believe that I could be included in a statement like that, but eventually the revelation came that not only could I be worth something in the distant future if I worked my butt off, I already was. And what a difference that made.
Olin gave me a place where the entire instutition was a home - all of campus rather than a corner and a nest of friends. It showed me (with great difficulty) that I could define my own goals rather than always finding my way to someone else’s. This is where I caught on fire for education, changing systems of schooling, making learning more self-directed. This is where I learned to work with whole communities, dancing between administrators, students, professors, visitors, having little conversations here and there, making tiny tools, catching others on fire for something so that it became our project instead of mine, relaying stories… until something shifted, quietly, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that something should be a certain way. It’s where I became a hacker, where I started contributing to project communities (including open-source ones) because I thought it would be cool - to have doing something that I wanted to do even cross my mind as an option. I learned how to reflect on my own learning, how to embrace failure as a teacher, and how not to ask permission. How to see my heroes as human and established ways as socially constructed and therefore somehow hackable. And that I could get other folks to realize the same.
None of these schools were perfect; none of them are perfect. Still, I wouldn’t be the person that I am without those years - the good experiences encouraged me, the bad ones gave me empathy that drives me to improve things for the kids who follow.
I am ridiculously strapped for cashflow, but I need to put my money where my mouth is. The latter two ended their fiscal year 15 minutes ago; right before that, I made my donations for the year (IMSA and Olin students are known for pyrotechnically last-minute procrastination sometimes) and will circumvent the same thing happening next year by giving my 2009 donations tomorrow. I’m a public school kid and a scholarship kid; thanks to the generosity of many, many people, I’ve never had to pay tuition, never had to take out a student loan, was able to save some of the money that I earned from working all through college - enough to volunteer for things I loved straight after graduation instead of needing to take a job I didn’t want in order to get out of debt.
I’ve also emailed my old teachers to tell them thank you. (It’s easy to forget, my middle school teachers told me when I visited from college. Most kids never come back. Thank you for coming back.)
If a school or teacher - or most likely, schools or teachers - made a difference to you, please go back and tell them - and do more than tell them. Give them something - money, time, supplies, advice, introductions, whatever you can offer. Pay it forward so that they can do the same for other kids.
I’ll write an actual update on NECC-Tuesday tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | No Comments »
NECC, Days 1-2 - photo slideshow, and then I’ll finish my notes for Monday (with the expectation that I’ll feel better enough afterwards to head to Tuesday’s NECC; I love my immune system.)
Many attendees here have flipcams and netbooks - simple, few-function devices that they do not mercilessly power-use. They generally don’t have time to recompile their kernel, let alone know what one is; they need to email their students NOW. They don’t have time to debate the merits of .ogg vs .avi vs other video formats; their high school seniors are presenting NOW and they need to grab something off the shelf and hit a button and have a movie NOW and who has time to figure out licensing when you need to upload that movie for their parents NOW and we need a spreadsheet NOW so let’s use Excel because it’s on our computers anyway or maybe if we aren’t on dial-up) Google Spreadsheets is sufficiently handy to fulfill our need for NOW. Default settings are important.
I need to talk with more teachers to find out how they find about technologies to use, but my current hypothesis is “click first hit from a Google search that has a massive easy-setup download button and is free or very, very cheap.” By that metric, Fedora and Sugar have a long, long ways to go. The workshop on Google Apps, on the other hand, had a crowded line that stretched on down the hallway. The workshop wasn’t run by Google; it was run by a teacher who had used the stuff. Same with the iPhone session.
Went by the Second Life pavilion. This was a master lesson on how to welcome newbies to a space in a way that makes them want to come back again and again. No sooner had I sat down than a volunteer approached me and offered to help get me started - sat with me for a half-hour walking me through making an account and doing basic navigation, didn’t leave until I’d started talking with the remote welcome team in Second Life (who he enthusiastically described to me - “oh, she’s wonderful! One of my best friends in SL! Tell her I say hello!”). By starting as a message courier, I rapidly got drawn into the conversation; the online greeters were equally excited, people kept coming up to me and welcoming me and showing me small interesting things (multiple welcomers treating you as if you were already a key part of their community == good feeling), the on-site volunteer kept popping in and asking if everything was all right and going “oh, you’re doing X! That’s awesome! Check out that thing near X!”
The thing that most impressed me was how they encouraged me to experiment and explore while simultaneously putting “you won’t fail” fallbacks in place (”Mel, can you try to teleport and follow me? Don’t worry, I’ll teleport you if you get lost.”) I tend to be more reckless than the average in terms of launching from unfamiliar trapeezes and trusting that I’ll grab something to break my fall on the way down, but knowing exactly what safety net was in place was nevertheless comforting. They had scheduled tours; we walked around Genome, a world that a genetics professor had constructed (swim inside a cell! talk with chromosomes!) and then Biome (flying up to realize the globe of paramecium I’d been staring at was actually a water droplet in the lens of a gigantic microscope was a lovely moment) and were constantly encouraged to try things, play with things, come back and use the space anytime… Teachers sure do know how to make you feel comfortable taking risks in learning new things. We need to learn that.
Looking at ads like this, I wonder how computers ever got a reputation for making children into socially isolated beings.
Andy Pethan (engineer): “The focus on STEM! STEM! STEM! is driving me nuts!” (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.) “I think English teachers are the biggest untapped market for technology in education. They could do so much with it.” I pointed out to Andy that STEM teachers tend to be the ones that like the tech stuff - which he knew and acknowledged as obvious - and that sometimes English teachers became English teachers, or early childhood teachers, or… well, non-STEM teachers - not just because they loved English or small children or History or such, but also because they might be afraid of STEM. This is a blatant overgeneralization and there are tons of exceptions, but that’s something that’s been drilled into my head by my aunt (who teaches kindergarten) - the phrase “those who can’t, teach,” as untrue and unfair as we think it may be, actually did come from somewhere. Argh! Systems that don’t work!
Happy exception: an art teacher and a physical education (PE) teacher from Ohio had teamed up to get another HP grant - I talked with Julie Lustic, the PE teacher, and was amazed. These teachers started out with very little technical knowledge. Julie described how she had to figure out how to save video files, struggling on her own until she discovered “File > Save As,” and then how it was tough to figure out which folder it had just saved into - a reminder of how many computer skills I take for granted despite trying my best not to. I was awed by their tenacity; they’d obviously gotten far more digitally fluent on their own since.
Julie would film her students running, jumping, and skidding across the gym on scooters. “Kids love to watch themselves,” she said. This was particularly helpful for the very young children (kindergarten, first grade) who were still developing a lot of fine and gross motor skills. Kids go through a continuum of development; for jumping rope, a 4-year-old might start by trying to windmill her arms awkwardly around at the shoulder, arcing over the back of her head; then over the next year or so progress to flailing elbow movement until finally, at 6, she’s jumping rope fluidly with her hands down by her sides and the barest hint of wrist movement. By filming the kids, she was able to track who was in what development stage when, and convey that to the parents, who often would think “able to jump rope” was a binary “yes she can / no she can’t” switch, and profited greatly from seeing the stages of learning they could then help their kid through.
She showed videos of adult athletes doing the moves she was about to teach them. “None of these kids had ever seen somebody vault before. They thought it was something I had invented.” They got projectors so kids could see the videos closer to the scale of actual people. All three teachers also set a target of raising 4th grade math test scores; they did this by talking with the 4th grade classroom teachers to find out what vocabulary words they were using in their classrooms, then working those words into their lessons (”run around the perimeter of the gym, measure the circumference of your head…”). While Julie and I talked, Ida Bergson - the art teacher - played stop-motion videos of dancing geometric shapes that she and the kids had made. Ida and Julie were proud of how it had worked out, and also said it had taken an immense amount of extra effort to pull it off.
These were teachers clearly going above and beyond and having huge effects on their students. And they had to fight every step of the way. Nobody in their district took their grant application seriously, because “they thought we weren’t going to get it anyway, sure, apply.” When they got it, there was an uproar because “who gives a PE teacher a computer?” They were refused district tech support and told they were on their own, which is entirely reasonable. But when they tried to fix things on their own, they got in trouble for not going through the district tech support that had already said it wouldn’t help them. There was a long story about how they had to keep on fighting through administration to keep doing this - even after the results had been apparent and positive.
We talked about where that might come from. Politically, it is unusual for art/PE teachers to get technologies the classroom teachers don’t have themselves (then again, Julie and Ida put in the work to make the grant happen and succeed). It’s new. It’s scary. New things are scary. And if you barely have the resources to keep afloat, taking the energy to deal with scary new things is not high on your priority list; you kinda wish that it would go away. Another systems problem. It’s hard to fix. I’m glad that Ida and Julie are still determined to fight the good fight; those kids in Cleveland Heights are very, very lucky.
My cousin Audrey watches this TV show, so I had to take a picture with the SuperWhy! team.
Walking around the vendor exhibition area, I was reminded that I’m not really the type of person that’s attractive for a sales rep to talk with. For good reason. I look too old to be a K12 student but too young to be a teacher (though I’m old enough to be a brand-new one) or someone who actually makes or influences purchasing decisions (ok, wearing a t-shirt rather than business attire may have made a difference) so I wasn’t pegged in the “education” space, and as a young woman I usually don’t get pegged in the “technology” space, so educational technology vendors probably don’t see me as a fit for who they ought to talk with. (Many happy exceptions here, but compared to the response to my friend Evan, a 21-year-old asian male engineer a in collared shirt, it was a fascinating contrast.)
I actually like being invisible, since I can easily choose to make myself visible by turning on the SHEER ENTHUSIASM!!! switch. This let me quietly wander around and watch what people were doing; there was an overwhelming amount of marketing shiny - far more than I would usually think contributes to conveying the real value of a product or service. Does a salesman dressing up as Indiana Jones (complete with whip and cave-themed booth) make your product any more valuable? Can you be more specific than “RAISES STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT!” in terms of what you’ll do for me? Primary colors and exclamation points everywhere; buzzwords on every sign. There were a lot of mini-workshops where the presenter “taught” the audience something with their technology, be it a clicker response system or a smart whiteboard; they were very polished and energetic, but I felt like most of them were…. sort of manufactured. One booth had a film crew taping the presenter on a stage, elevated about 4 feet above an audience of roughly a dozen people - few enough to jump down and have a real conversation with, in any case.
I have very mixed feelings about branding and marketing and PR. (This means, of course, that if I ever get an MBA, it’ll probably be in one of those, since that’s the thing that makes me most uncomfortable. And I do realize the three are different things… the MBA interns at RH are trying to teach me the difference, but I don’t yet really understand it. Anyway.)
NCWIT did see me walking by, and went “oh! you need to go encourage young women to pursue technology careers!” That’s a paraphrase, but I got a packet of materials (…actually, with rather good statistics) and a howto on approaching a local school to volunteer to do a presentation or something with them. I’ve got mixed feelings about this too. I am female, and I do like technology (and education, for that matter), and… okay, so? I’m wearing sandals, and I like technology, and you don’t see campaigns crusading for more sandal-wearers to get into IT. I was amused by how they tried to persuade me to particularly target low-income schools to volunteer at, though. “You know first-hand that engineering is a way to not have a low income!” I’m fairly certain that if you tallied up my work hours and my income since graduation, I would be making way below minimum wage, but that’s what I chose when I decided that volunteering and working on interesting things to help people trumped getting a stable job with lots of monies immediately after getting my degree (which was certainly an option - and I can see that someone from a low-income background might be more motivated to pursue that route than a child of the middle class with backup savings, no student loans, and no family to support).
Apparently Joseph Schumpeter wrote about Disrupting Class 70 years before the book came out.
Generally speaking, I have not found the below photograph to be true.
As an open source geek, I find it interesting to see proprietary software vendors trumpet that their products give users the “freedom to create, share, and discover everywhere.” If you buy their product, you are free to use it to create non-interoperable files and share those files with other people who have purchased the exact same software, and thereby discover what they’ve done. You can take your laptop running this software with you, hence the “everywhere.” (Or maybe you can pay to make it work on your cell phone for a year.) I know this is a very biased view, but it makes me feel kind of like… “yes, cookies from a box are mighty tasty, but in comparison to cookies that my brother bakes from scratch - you really don’t know what you’re missing…”
Sat down next to two teachers (well, one is now a teacher trainer) for lunch. When I conveyed my mixed feelings about what I’d seen that morning, Sandy Scragg helped me sort it out by explaining that there were two tracks of thought in educational technology. The one we come from is the one that sees tech as a tool for creation, for enablement, for greater interaction between individuals. The other one is an entirely reasonable response to the current system which is full of high-pressure, high-stakes assignments and tests and unions and long hours and low pay and high turnover; it sees technology as a way to automate teaching, not to free teachers to be more creative, but to turn them into standardized automatons. “Can you believe, I actually heard them say, ‘with this, your teachers don’t even need to think!’ They give you these scripts, say ‘read this word for word,’ the idea is, since we have high turnover, with a script it doesn’t matter who’s in front of the kids.”
We talked about how K12 education in the US has had this huge “lectures are bad! we need to make things more interactive! no lectures!” thing going for quite some time, and when our most successful students from that system graduate and go to college as we hoped they would (the topic of whether college as The Desired Endpoint of K12 is another debate), where do they end up their freshman year but 200+ student lecture rooms. We also talked about standardized testing; Sandy differentiated between testing as a benchmark (”that’s okay”) vs high-stakes testing as The Thing that the futures of “students, teachers, entire districts” ride upon.
Later that afternoon, I sat with a teacher from the Bronx and another one from a tough part of Texas who were discussing the difficulties of dealing with parents. In the good ol’ days (long before I was born, according to their dates - they’re both veteran teachers), parents were More Involved; schools made an effort to reach them. They’d bus the parents in for meetings and workshops once a month after school, so they could teach the parents too. They had a place where non-working parents could go and study and learn in the library after they dropped off their kids in the morning. Nowadays they’re seeing far more teenage parents who don’t know how to raise their kids because they didn’t have a chance to finish growing up themselves, 24-year-old mothers with 10-year-old children. The mothers still want to go out and party all night because they missed prom, missed hanging out with friends, dropped out of school, etc. because they had a kid to take care of… both the child-rearing and the childhood-having can’t coexist, so both get done quite badly, in most cases. There was no mention of what happened with the dads.
That’s all for Monday. I’ll write about http://edtechfuture.org/ separately, since I hope to find out more about it today.
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 | events, fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
In the style of “release early release often” and “perfect == good.enemy()” we bring you this totally unedited, rapidly typed post, because I need sleep.
This was the late-night idea. Results forthcoming. Traffic not as good as hoped, but it did meet our primary criteria of “hey, we need a way to meet people!” (In other words, we were so busy talking to people that we didn’t have time to constantly man #neccwall. This is good.)
Manned the Sugar Labs booth for a bit; had a good conversation with Scott Bullock on how engineers interested in education tend to make things for the kids they used to be (a tiny minority) and the problem of how to reach the rest.
Stopped by and talked with teachers who had gotten HP tablet PC grants. An Arkansas school had children annotate photographs with geometric drawings (”This sunflower exhibits symmetry over this line! *drawdraw*”). I asked if it was far more engaging to do that than to print out the picture and hand the kid a marker. They said yes, but didn’t know why - I wonder how much “technology helps students!” is attributable to students being excited by shiny new things, how much is due to the self-selecting nature of teachers willing to experiment with new tech (they’d tend to be the more adventuresome, dynamic ones even without “technology”), and how much the design and enablements of technology actually chips in to “increased performance.”
Another note: as an engineer, I’m used to being able to think about the “perfect” solution and then take the time to build it. Most teachers can’t do that; they don’t have the skills or time to create much in the way of new things (said the Arkansas teachers). You look around and see what’s on the shelf and do something with it. You don’t waste time thinking of things to build from scratch because you’ll never have the resources.
Then there was the Mt. Vernon high school that had gotten tablet PCs for their teachers. They didn’t have them for students; maybe 50% of their students had computer access at home. One of the teachers mentioned that he’d done his student teaching in a neighborhood with much more computer access, where you could actually email the students files and expect all of them to be able to print them out and bring them in the next day - this was a very different situation. Computers are expensive.
They were so proud that they had moved to using Powerpoint for classes. “The students love it,” they said. “Some teachers don’t have good handwriting… and this way it’s clear what they have to study [by memorization]… if they’re absent, they can watch the video at home without having to come to class and talk with the teacher…”
I… have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, they’re doing the best they can with a difficult situation. On the other hand, this is an incremental improvement down a road I don’t agree with (drill and kill, turning learners into automatons and using technology to script away human interaction). But to overturn such a difficult situation would be extremely difficult, so maybe this is the best that they can do.
Overheard amusing conversation: “Municipal wifi? Won’t that spread all sorts of viruses around?”
There is a film titled “Autism: The Musical.” It is a documentary of an acting teacher coaching 5 autistic children to perform a musical, and looks intriguing.
The exhibit hall is HUGE.
These notes take me nearly to lunchtime on Monday. I will have to finish them tomorrow.
If I were making NECC bingo cards, they would have the following words: collaboration, sharing, management (as in “classroom managment” - this bothers me, as if children were an industrial process that we need to keep in line), problem-solving, 21st century learners, integrative, accountability, standards, immersive, constructionist, community, reaching-outside-the-classroom-walls, rigorious, standards, innovate.
There’s power and honesty here. There’s also a lot of thin glossy washes of sounding-good - educators aren’t in particular positions of power, nor are the kids they teach, and both have (as people in those situations tend to do) become extremely good at giving the answers that those in power like to hear. You can see that gloss occasionally washing over someone’s passion - projects designed so that the outcome is in ready-made press-release format, obligatory scatterings of buzzwords (you know what? I will make that bingo card) but it gives me heart that oftentimes the fire will break through. The best thing I can do, I think, is be on fire myself these next two days so that nobody else will be the only one outside their comfort zone.
Speaking of fire, I’ve got a low-grade fever - my immune system has decided that DC is full of allergens that it must FIGHT! NOW! so I’m going to sleep and write the remainder of Monday’s notes tomorrow.
Monday, June 29th, 2009 | events, fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 3 Comments »
Hypothesis: sometimes it is better to release crappy existent stuff rather than nonexistent perfect stuff. It is late, I am tired and quashing a mild fever, here we go.
Breakfast with Mike Lee while we picked up Sugar Labs flyers. Talked about the digital divide; seniors and the underprivileged are being left out; the interfaces we assume are also leaving people out (typing, reading, and able to carry 5lbs of laptop are big assumptions). Pointed Mike towards IIF’s session with Ezter Hargittai, who studies social inequity online.
Mike mentioned that the MIT Media Lab was working on a collaborative development environment. ACTION: find out what this is - it sounds neat!
Email discussions with Eric, Mikell, and Greg about FIRST robotics and open source, prompted by FIRST presence at NECC (yay!) Why aren’t teams producing open source robotics code? Why don’t they have code repositories, even? Some of this is in the works to being fixed, and there are certainly people interested in making it happen, but nobody’s stepped up to drive it yet. I am trying to plant as many seeds as possible this week because I know I don’t have the bandwidth to drive this (but I think I might have the bandwidth to help mentor and encourage someone who wants to). Should track down Denise Lewis tomorrow.
All For Good - another excellent Mike Lee conversation. The balance between shiny top-down endorsement/marketing from the big players and the grassroots movements they’re trying to start is fascinating. I admire the effort - aggregating and matching volunteers with opportunities is certainly not a new idea - at the same time, I wonder if it’s going to work.
There are serious signal-to-noise problems to overcome without bottlenecking at a single point of quality control; it’s hard to make sure organizations can actually handle the volunteers they ask for. Even the amazing Leslie Hawthorn puts in tons of effort filtering Summer of Code orgs and certainly doesn’t have a perfect hit rate. Compounding this problem is the divide between “traditional” volunteer coordinators (volunteer coordination as done, say, 20-30 years ago) and the kind of volunteer coordination folks like Mike and myself and the Red Hat CommArch team do (which is less coordination and more… the best word I know for it is Karsten’s “gardening” analogy). It’s always a problem when two people use the same word thinking they mean the same thing when that’s not actually the case. We tossed around the idea of content stamping before letting it rest as a wait-and-see.
And then we got to the convention center. This conference is freakin’ HUGE. I have never seen anything on this scale before. You stand in the entrance and look up and there are four stories of displays and then hallways that go back and back and back and then there is another building and it is LARGER THAN MY COLLEGE BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. (Granted, that’s not extraordinarily difficult.)
The keynote was Malcom Gladwell, who is a good speaker. I’ve watched him before, though, and he tends to rehash points from his books. (And sure enough, he did it again this time. Still a good speech.) I didn’t actually watch the keynote; I caught up with people on it afterwards, and read the written summary. Instead, I helped set up the 60 VMs in the Open Source Pavilion, hereafter referred to as the OSP. Thin clients are sweet. With the money one school saved by getting a thin client system, they got huge monitors, sound systems in every classroom…
Mike has a video of every machine here simultaneously rebooting (with cheers from the crowd). It’s sweet.
Jeff Elkner arrived. I introduced him to April-Hope (one Sugar/OLPC chapter founder to another, with the “high school chapters are awesome” bonus shared category). And Luke Faraone and I have finally met face-to-face.
Talked with teachers from northeastern NC about BBQ until one of them started telling the story of how her (middle school) kids put on a film festival - “have you ever seen a room of middle school students fully engaged? They would cheer, and then whent the next video started, they would become absolutely quiet…” The same group of teachers pointed me towards animoto, which which I have attempted to produce a slideshow. I’ll post this when the pictures are done processing.
ISTE has a lot of SIGs. It’s a list worth looking at to see the topics and the language educators interested in technology are grouping into right now. Of note: there is no early childhood category here. In fact, they don’t even really have books on it. There is a huge debate on whether computers should even be used in early childhood - with “computer usage” meaning “sit the kids in front of a screen and have them type.” I don’t think that’s age-appropriate (these kids usually are learning how to read and don’t have much fine motor control for rapid typing) but also think that type of computing is just a tiny, tiny piece of what “technology” can mean. Teachers doing vlogs of their young students, for instance.
Then there’s #neccwall. It’s one of those “it’s 11pm and we have AN IDEA!” moments (3 people now, but we’re going to try to find other first-time attendees to help out). It will be… explained more when I don’t have to wake up in 4 hours to prepare for it. In the meantime, the best explanation I can give is this video.
Finally made the mile+ hike to my hotel, accompanied partway by a group of teachers (a retired edu prof and her former students, it turns out) who gave me a blackboard pointer (I am not sure what to do with this, but I can point at things with inpunity and 2 extra feet of reach now!) and once I mentioned I’d attended a math and science magnet high school, we talked about math and science training for teachers until our paths diverged.
Need sleep so badly.
Monday, June 29th, 2009 | events, fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | No Comments »
The open-source-and-education fun at NECC started even before I hit the conference. On the shuttle from the airport, I sat in front of a bone marrow transplant delivery man and next to Randall Samstag, an environmental engineer from Seattle who (as it turns out) had some questions about OpenOffice.org. We quickly got into a discussion about sanitation systems, designing waste processing plants for the developing world, and the difficulties of breaking into the field of appropriate technology and the difficulties of changing a large-scale entrenched system when customers want to throw money at the problem and be done with it rather than taking the time to get involved with the design needs of the community they’re serving. This sounded pretty familiar.
A lot of sanitation projects are large-scale government-backed operations, and getting the technology in place was harder than inventing it - he told the story of his friend, the inventor of a 3-chamber sequential flow gravity-fed wastewater treatment system designed for Venezuela that was a huge improvement over the prior “dump ‘er in the lagoon and the bacteria will break it down” method (which works, but you need a lot of lagoon space for a lot of people; this system was much smaller). It worked like a charm. Then the Cubans came. They wanted sanitation everywhere (a noble goal) but didn’t understand this newfangled 3-chamber system - they knew lagoons. So the new tech sat unused and the lagoons got dumped in and the harmful effluents in the water supply increased by an order of magnitude… and there was no way to share the information, the design, the knowledge of how to use it, so there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.
I brought up the idea of open design repositories such as Appropedia (where Chris Watkins has been doing work on sanitation), and how they serve as knowledge bases and watering holes for projects like IDDS as well as ways for potential future sanitation engineers to get involved without the high entry barrier (”must have experience to get experience”) that makes it tough for folks like Liz and Chris to break into the field. Randal was intrigued.
What does this have to do with open source and education? (more below the fold, for the sanity of Planet aggregator readers…)
Continue reading NECC[-1] = Saturday
Monday, June 29th, 2009 | events, fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | No Comments »
I was originally going to wait for all my travel plans to finalize, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t holler out right now that I’ll be at NECC this year. If you are also coming, let me know!
NECC is the National Educational Computing Conference, and it is - from what I’ve heard - the stuff of legend and the place to be for people interested in teaching and technology. I say this based on two things: (1) 100% of the people I know who’ve been to NECC have emailed/called/found me immediately afterwards and bellowed “YOU HAVE TO GO TO NECC!” and (2) when asked to describe what NECC was like, their first reponse is to drop their jaw into a massive grin and flail their arms around in wordless happiness before they’re able to start describing it in English.
So when I found out I was going down to DC, I quietly and calmly finished up some time-sensitive morning tasks and then RAN AROUND THE OFFICE BUILDING IN EXCITEMENT! Until it started to rain - at which point I went inside and sped another half-mile on a treadmill before I had expended enough adrenaline to sit down and be productive again. (Otherwise all my coworkers would be wondering why someone was whooping and hollering through the hallways.)
Needless to say, I’m looking forward to this. I’m looking through the program and starting to loosely map out my time there. It’s a given that I’ll want to check out “open source in education” stuff, but I also want to examine the basis of my kool-aid drinking on it, since to most of the world, this is not obvious. In fact, I’ve heard brilliant people whom I admire and respect tell me that open source and education is a terrible idea. They have good reasons. I don’t know what those reasons are yet.
I want to understand where that comes from - not to argue or fight back against it, but because there’s certainly a lot that we can learn from it and use to make our own work better. The realities and presures of working in a classroom, in a lab with creaky old equipment, with a massive district to oversee, within the government, with an overloaded IT staff, with tests and rules and regulations, with a host of kids with challenging needs, with things I can’t even imagine… and the solutions and mistakes and triumphs and opportunities that other people are already finding - what is this world? I have a lot to listen to and learn.
I’ll post more plans here when I have them, but in the meantime… who should I meet? What should I go to? Are there questions I should ask, topics I should seek out, things I should watch for? General conference-attending tips I should heed?
I plan on documenting everything I can, primarily through abusing my typing speed for live transcriptions (if you’d like me to transcribe your talk, or any particular talk, please let me know) and collecting short one-question interviews, for which I need a good question to ask. Maybe “What is your biggest learning goal for the upcoming school year, and what would help you get there?” - but that’s awkwardly phrased. Any ideas for a better one?
Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 5 Comments »
In the middle of the discussion on opening up a discussion on the Philippines, I got a bit impatient with all the conversations about “the core team” (which I’d been invited to, whereupon I immediately asked “what does that mean?”).
Here’s the crux of it: are we the core team, period - or are we the core team so far? (If it’s the former, then I’d consider myself to not be on the “core team” yet, since I don’t understand the expectations that entails.) Arbitrarily delineating “insiders” and “outsiders” with no criteria as to how you progress from one to the other eventually becomes an artificial cap on community growth.
I then proceeded to state that, to put my money where my mouth was, I would forward all the conversations to the public mailing list if there were no objections within 4 days. Boy, did discussions ensue. Then, in a bit under two hours, we went from this:
While I think it’s a great idea to have an open meeting… I believe it is important for us (core members) to hold a closed meeting first…
To this:
Community growth and ownership has an inseparable link. It took this email thread, a quick chat… and kim chi, to see that our success really lies in our community. So lets go for this open meeting!
So today I kept my promise and forwarded all those conversations to the list, with context. (Yeah, it took a while; I think I’ve learned to do it faster for next time.) It was interesting, trying to strike the right balance between presenting a summary of existing ideas (which I’d only heard myself a few days prior) and leaving things open for suggestions, as well as how to tactfully nudge people in the start doing things! ask forgiveness, not permission! direction.
A number of us interested in open-source educational technology in the Philippines have decided to get together online to share the respective projects we’re working on and the roles we’re starting to find ourselves playing in the hopes that we’ll be able to find a better way to move forward together… So far, the discussion leading up to this meeting has been on private email, and the meeting was also supposed to be private. After some conversations, we realized that this was counterproductive to community-building, and that we should open both the meeting and the planning for it to anybody who is interested.
This was done with the understanding that since we’re all individual volunteers, people are free to do what they want to do - this means that you can work on what you’re interested in without having to ask permission, but you also shouldn’t expect your suggestions to be followed unless you pick up the work and do it yourself. This email thread is, in part, me following my own suggestion to open up the meeting…
This was one of the most awkward emails I’ve sent in a while. And the context-filling-in emails are still incomplete and choppy, because even with cleanup, threaded forwards are just messy. It remains to be seen whether this made any difference.
On the up side, I get to point to this thread and say “See? If we’d had this conversation on a public mailing list from the beginning, how much easier would life be right now?” And I think it was The Right Thing To Do. Because we fixed it now, we don’t have to go back and fix it later (for an even later value of later) when it would be even harder.
Cultural adjustments are the hardest kind to make - I’ve been incredibly impressed with how willing everyone involved was to discuss and try out new (and potentially unfamiliar) ideas. I mean, the culture in the Philippines is not generally… open-source-ish. But hey! We’re learning and adjusting - in both directions. Having grown up as a Chinese-Filipino in the US, I’m coming to understand, at a more-than-intellectual level, that getting open source into the Philippines means that the culture has to be an open-source one… but it also has to be a Filipino one.
I’m not yet sure how you get there. We’re all flying by feel. But I think we’ve gotten the radical transparency lesson down, at the very least. (And a shout-out to Planet Fedora - reading other people’s posts there over the last few weeks has given me a way better idea of how to explain this sort of thing to others. Thanks!)
Monday, June 8th, 2009 | fedora, olpc, sugar | 2 Comments »
Since I learn by documenting, I’m starting to chronicle the things I’m learning about doing open-source community work here.
Over the past week (or two years, depending on how you count it), I’ve been talking with a group of people - many of them who I’ve known for some time - interested in bringing open-source educational technology to the Philippines. The OLPC and Sugar projects serve as convenient starting places for this. They know it’s going to be a volunteer effort. So far so good.
And then I was told that our next step was to hold a private meeting to discuss high-level strategies amongst ourselves. (Virtual nods all around.) Wait, stop. Hold on, I told them. Why?
The resulting discussion was fascinating; I’d forgotten how much I’d taken radical transparency for granted, and their questions made me stop and explain to them - and myself - why it was the way to go. Some of our more interesting discussion points are below - I’m curious what people think of the questions and my responses. (Would you have phrased things differently?)
[We can't have this discussion on the mailing list because] there are still people on the mailing list that have different ideas on where the organization is.
That’s really good to keep transparency on, actually. You get multiple points of view, and clarity on which ones you aren’t working with so you can go your separate ways and not wait on each other.
One of the reasons that the meeting wasn’t highly publicized is that it could grow too big.
Why is this a problem? Size shouldn’t be a problem; issues that ”appear” to be caused by size are the problems, and they’re solvable. In general, if more participation is a negative, there’s probably some other bottleneck we need to fix.
(Paraphrased:) Last time we tried to have an open meeting, we got a lot of off-topic questions on basic things we’ve answered a million times before.
Yeah, I can sympathize with that. The best solution I’ve found is to tightly define the meeting scope (”during this meeting, we are hammering out a mission statement” = by definition, we aren’t doing anything else) and ruthlessly defer things that are off-topic, but have one or two people offer to stick around after the meeting and take additional questions.
Another solution is to have meetings open to all, but only allow certain people to speak.
Also: make a FAQ.
The mailing lists have become a “catch-all” [and they're such a mess, we're going to split into separate blog sites for each topic].
I’d actually advise against this, from a community-building perspective. The olpc-ph list is still pretty low-traffic - it’s just that the traffic we get there is… well, lousy traffic. (My own posts are not exempt from this description.) There aren’t a lot of good email discussions there.
But people are there. So instead of starting separate blogs (or even separate mailing lists), we should start good conversations in the spaces we already have. When the good conversations are clearly bursting the mailing list’s attention capacity at the seams, or when they’re clearly being hurt by all the lousy conversations, *then* we start new things - generally, you want to tighten groups before you split them.
We need to work on our capacity (or volunteer model) to handle inquiries and cultivate our member base [before we open participation up to people outside this small group].
All the more reason to publicly discuss how we’re going to handle incoming volunteers/requests so that the folks who may be volunteering/requesting things from us have a chance to participate.
Mind you, I don’t expect many (if any) other people to join in - I think that if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll get 5 observers, 2 of whom might talk at some point. But we should give them the option! And publish full logs afterwards for the people who couldn’t come - we must default to transparency if we want other people to step up and take their own initiatives on this, because that is what is going to give us that capacity to handle inquiries and cultivate our member base. (I mean, I sure don’t want to handle all those inquiries and do all that cultivation on my own…)
An open meeting is our first full-step forward. If that’s how we want to do this entire thing, that’s how we should operate from day 1.
Monday, June 8th, 2009 | fedora, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | 1 Comment »
Via Steve Jacobs: The Communications of the ACM has an analysis of what happened to OLPC. It has a lot of generalized statements - I’d like to have seen it backed up by more specific stories - but it is a good summary, as far as I can understand it.
Information technologies are not standalone innovations but… socially embedded systems, the use of which cannot be isolated from the social and cultural environment or from local norms of practice… The fact that OLPC was much stronger in developing innovative technology than in understanding how to diffuse it may reflect the engineering orientation of the organization and its lack of understanding of the needs or interests of the nontechnical people who will ultimately buy and use the innovation.
I’d also like to see a similar thing written on Sugar Labs (now that it’s nearing its one-year anniversary) by someone with an MBA-like mentality who can step back and see more of an operational picture rather than just technology or education alone (though “learning” has to be the metric of success, somehow).
As an aside to the students and alumni of my alma mater: I’m deeply thankful for the education I got at Olin. It didn’t necessarily teach me everything about how to make innovative technologies or how to diffuse them (what academic program can?) but it did teach me that I needed to learn both, and gave me the tools to do so. I feel like I can absorb a lot more learning from experiences like working on OLPC because of the things my undergrad years gave me to reflect on. Working on these kinds of things definitely showed me why our profs tried to teach us the way they did.
Finally, I do agree with this comment from Julian Bass:
The OLPC appears to prioritise a technocratic solution to what is essentially a social problem. Large scale educational change requires a social movement.
…and I suppose that’s why I’ve moved into community work over the past few years, though I didn’t realize that was what I was doing for quite some time. Sometimes you need to do technology work because the tools that people need to change things don’t exist. Sometimes you need to do policy work because they’re not legally allowed to. Sometimes you need to do journalism and marketing because they don’t know about it. Sometimes you need to do education work so they can teach themselves to understand. Sometimes you need to move between them all (and more), busting bottlenecks in whatever disciplines they come up in.
It’s interesting to watch people and organizations adapt to better save the world.
Sunday, June 7th, 2009 | olin, olpc, sugar | No Comments »
(The shortness of this post brought to you by RSI.)
The Boston deployments need some help. Here is what we have been up to lately. (Should I also post those updates on this blog?)
Sunday, March 29th, 2009 | olpc, sugar | 1 Comment »
