Linking learning to awe (and science)

John Tierney describes a review of articles that people emailed to others from the NY Times home page over the course of the last 6 months: 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

(snip)

Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”

Of course there are implications for education: If students have an emotional response to what they're asked to learn, they'll be more likely to share their learning with others -- and in the process summarize it, analyze it, (re)produce the information that they've learned, touching some of the milestones along the path to mastery. 

The possibilities can be found across the curriculum--literature is designed to tug at your core, and historic events, the creation of Borobudur or the emergence of women's suffrage, and certainly discoveries in math that fuel our drive to understand the cosmos have emotional potential--but the researchers finding that science articles are more likely to be shared signals that educators are failing to use a powerful tool:

“Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.” 

But where's the curriculum that seeks to inspire awe? And what are the consequences of curriculum that doesn't attempt to get students even a little excited about what they're learning?

(Is there a topic more potent than natural selection, if you seek out and present speciated adaptations to available niches? Warm, fuzzy salamanders migrating perilously along ancient vernal waterways, now paved. Or obsessive squirrels able to remember 30,000 or more places where they've stored acorns? [I'm not kidding about that last one. Squirrels might not have much reasoning power, but apparently their memories for spatial referents are unsurpassed.)

Competition (between giants) is a good thing I suppose

Google has (lightly) funded a competition for the creation of Wikipedia pages in Kiswahili by university students in Tanzania and Kenya. (First place for most entries gets a laptop.) Why this sudden interest and largesse? Because Google's in a race against Bing for most eyeballs, and there are a few million Internet users in Sub-Saharan Africa who might -- if they aren't multilingual university students, for example -- look for information in Kiswahili. This is out of about 100 million Kiswahili speakers. 

“Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the answer you are looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”

The "right answer," just to be clear, might be accurate and true, but it must be in a language that's appropriate for the searcher. Students quoted in the article have posted the same information to both the English and the Kiswahili Wikipediae, but at least one English version has been earmarked for removal if citations aren't added. 

But the question unanswered by the Times reporter, Noam Cohen, is how creating a specific page on the World Wide Web confers advantage on Google and not on Bing. Aren't they both crawling the same Internet? Is Bing less poly-lingual? I dunno.

About those netbooks...

Mark Beckford  at edutechdebate predicts that in 2010 "Netbook fever and 1:1 computing in education begin to fade into the background."  While I don't have an opinion about 1 to 1 in relation to its prospects, I do think that it's way, way early to make a guess about netbooks in schools...

(The following is cross-posted as a comment to EduTechDebates.) 

While "netbook fever" has certainly passed in commercial markets, it's difficult to tell in education if it's passed or yet to hit. Netbooks have been on market for too little time to have penetrated the project-planning and funding cycles of national governments: XO-1 was announced in 2005; eeePC was introduced in late 2007; developing-country commercial markets received netbooks somewhat later than those of OECD countries. And OLPC is the only netbook OEM, more or less, to market to ministries of education.

Netbooks present an array of features that could be really important in developing-country education systems: most netbooks don't have hard drives, so they're possibly more durable and power consumption is low. And they're cheap. The importance of these features is magnified in large-scale projects, in education systems in which personnel  lack ICT training or familiarity, and in infrastructure-poor environments. Netbooks (as do notebooks) support many different configurations--several netbooks in a few different classrooms, one netbook in every classroom (and a projector, perhaps? An LED projector?), or a bunch of netbooks in one classroom.

This flexibility means that netbooks (and notebooks, with higher cost, higher power consumption, and reduced durability) can support the teacher-led pedagogies that are what most teachers use: "I have the laptop, I have the projector, I show you stuff. At least it's stuff that's more interesting than the textbook stuff we had before. Now, if I also had a digital whiteboard..."

One netbook or a few netbooks in a classroom can support station-based learning or collaborative learning. A bunch of netbooks in a classroom can support computer-lab-style learning, say with students using educational software or productivity software independently.

Netbooks can enable all of these activities AND they can support computer-lab-based ICT instruction. While it might be preferable to eliminate ICT classes and instead contextualize the development of ICT skills in other subjects, a lot of developing-country school systems (all of the OECS countries in the Caribbean, for example) already have ICT curricula and exams plus teachers to administer these. And in a lot of cases (but not all) they've invested in technology. It's unrealistic to think that "basic ICT" instruction will go away without a kind of glacial resistance. At the same time, it's a waste of money to launch province-wide or nationwide programs to invest in computers in schools if those computers are going to be dedicated to learning technology-as-subject.

Netbook fever might not be out of the picture just yet. It's probably too soon too tell.

OLPC Rwanda is falling short of goals, but who's looking?

Via the amazingly energetic Wayan Vota at OLPC News we learn that Mineduc (the Ministry of Education) of Rwanda) is able to provide only 8,000 of its target delivery of 250,000 OLPC laptops (Childrens XO machines) per year. The reason? 

"It looks like the programme is not having enough financing that can lead to its realisation like the EDPRS had projected," [Mineduc OLPC coordinator] Niyonkuru said.

(EDPRS is the Economic Development Poverty Reduction Strategy.) 

In 2006, Jon Camfield (probably equal in energy to Wayan, altho I don't know for sure) pegged Total Cost of Ownership of an XO laptop in a school environment as US ~$1,000 over five years. (I think, but am not sure, that this does not include replacement of the machine at the end of its five-year service life.) However Mr Camfield's initial estimate is very heavy on 5-year Internet connectivity ($541) with much lower costs for amortized training ($128). He also includes a one-time set-up fee of $108 per laptop, which seems completely reasonable.

These projections might be generic (cost of Internet connectivity in East Africa will presumably fall over the next 5 years), but they are at least responsibly made. The question, then, is:

Why are the smart, committed, and experienced Rwandese failing to accurately budget for and finance this high-profile laptop deployment? 

There are of course a thousand suspects, although failure as we know obscures patrimony.

One strong possibility is "ministry overreach." The OLPC initiative is split between the President's office, the newly created Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST) and the Ministry of Education.

The government of Rwanda has established itself precisely as a visionary among African governments in relation to the uses of technology for development. However in several instances--ranging from the Terracom fiasco to early projects involving laptops in primary schools and computer labs in secondary schools--implementation has not come close to matching plans.

It's very likely that the more powerful MOST has provided the MOE with a laundry list of "unfunded requirements" in relation to OLPC deployment. (You'll observe that the quote regarding financing is from a person in the Mineduc staff, not at MOST.)

But it's important to observe in all of this that the $20 million spent on laptops and however much is budgeted for deployment results from strong donor support for education in Rwanda. (DFID provides the bulk of support for education in Rwanda, but other sponsors include AfDB and WB.)  $20 million in hardware procurement over 5 years ain't chump change in a total annual education budget of about US $100 million. So why aren't donor agencies more visibly excited about this? 

Could it be because Rwanda is more or less on track to reach its Millennium Development Goal targets, including its targets in education? Does that buy MOST and Mineduc the opportunity to make a $20 million boo-boo?

Perhaps this is a job for AidWatch? (Wm Easterly never mentions OLPC. Of course he rarely discusses education in relation to development.) 

In re the race between tech and edu...

Pursuant to my notes on the Gilpin and Katz book, The Race Between Technology and Education, today's NY Times carries David Leonhardt's business-section article describing the failure of US universities to graduate students -- despite relatively high enrollments. 

Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.

Gilpin and Katz describe in exhausting (!) detail the impact of college completion on both an individual's wages over the course of a lifetime and on macro-scale increases in productivity (as GDP, basically). 

Leonhardt goes a step further and suggests that: 1) Costs (tuition, etc) are key determinants of where kids go to school, with many students outside of the upper-income bracket ending up "under-matched," attending schools that aren't the best for which they are qualified; 2) state colleges and universities, which serve those students in families with non-elite wealth, are the worst offenders in terms of completion percentage. 

(A first-hand example from the excellent Education Trust website: the California State University at Monterey Bay, an affordable school relatively near me,  a graduation rate of 36% over the last 6 years. WTF?)

What's this mean? 

It means that disparities in university education in the US contribute greatly to the growth of inequality. Or, to put it another way: the non-rich--by virtue of the inadequacy of institutions that are designed to serve them--are getting even less rich, which is to say, eventually they will be poor.