“I thought it was about recording videos and making them flawless. What I discovered is that it’s about making a personal connection. Finding a way for the students to make a commitment to do the work,” he told me.
I first met Norvig at the 2007 Singularity Summit in San Francisco. We chatted for a bit and the subject soon turned to education. At the time I was needlessly concerned about the effect that Google could have on the future of learning. I pointed out that 50 percent of high school seniors (at the time) couldn’t tell the difference between an objective Web site and a biased source. I asked him what he would do to preserve critical thinking skills in an era when such technologies of convenience as Google seemed to be doing a lot more “thinking” and students a lot less.
He answered, “What can you do about that? I think part of it is education. We’re used to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; now we should be teaching these evaluation skills in school and so on. Some of it could be just-in-time education. Search engines themselves should be providing clues for this.”
When I ran into him again at the 2012 Singularity Summit he was about ten pounds lighter and still wearing his trademark Hawaiian shirt. He was well on his way toward fulfilling the forecast he had made several years earlier: using the technologies of data storage, retrieval, and machine learning to bring just-in-time education closer to reality for millions of students.
“We’re going to make rapid advances in understanding what works and what doesn’t on the basis of interaction statistics,” he told me. I asked him if he believed every student would have access to a predictive model of their own learning style in the next five years; if, in effect, there was a naked future for education. “That’s the hope,” he answered.
Today, online learning platforms that measure individual student performance are in their infancy. Andrew Ng, Sebastian Thrun, and Peter Norvig are still learning what works and what doesn’t. But it is within the capability of the Coursera platform to offer individualized instruction on a level that surpasses what almost any in-person teacher today provides.
“We are analyzing the data as we try to understand when students are likely to have problems, when they are at risk for dropping out of the course. These are things we’re looking at. And eventually, hopefully, this will allow us to catch and to encourage the students along when they need that bit of the extra encouragement. These are things we’re working on. It hasn’t happened yet,” says Ng.
So far in this book I’ve covered some of the ways we’ve begun to accept rapidly evolving notions of privacy. In such areas as epidemiology, sharing more personal data can have a positive effect but at the personal cost of telling the public that you’re sick. It’s nakedness in the worst sense: the benefits are public and the costs are private. Learning and education is one example of where individuals will begin to see benefits of exposing a bit more of their life stream. Those who elect to take a different course will find themselves ever more at a disadvantage.
We haven’t begun to understand how those depreciating costs of collecting and analyzing real-time scores, footnotes, and time-stamped marginalia will change the definitions of teacher, student, and learning. If Andrew Ng and Peter Norvig’s experience is any indication, teachers are going to realize the dual and compounding benefits of being able to provide much more personal attention to a far greater number of students. The teachers who are extremely effective at this will model the way forward for everyone else. But in the coming decade, teaching will come to mean something very different than what it means today.
The End of Teaching
It’s January 2012, the setting is the Ethiopian village of Wenchi, which sits on the rim of a volcanic crater lake some eleven thousand feet above sea level. Wenchi village is one of the poorest communities in one of the poorest countries in the world. The majority of the houses here, without running water or electricity, are scarcely larger than a single room. They have dirt floors and roofs constructed of branches, which seem to provide little more than shade.
A group of non-governmental organization (NGO) workers arrives in the village from the nearby capital of Addis Ababa. They bring with them a sealed cardboard box. The workers have a brief conversation with one of the village elders and explain that inside the box are tablet computers, one for every child in the village ages four to eleven. The tablets have been outfitted with solar screens so they can charge in the sun and come fully loaded with hundreds of apps, movies, and games, all in English. English is the official language of this village and this was the chief criterion in its selection for this gift. But “English speaking” is just a technical designation because the population of this village is illiterate down to the last person and unable to understand instructions or subtitles that are part of the apps or the movies on the devices. In fact, almost no one here has ever encountered the written word in any form. There are no street signs, no candy wrappers, Coke bottles, flyers, or advertisements. It is a tabula rasa in the desert.
The relief workers from Addis Ababa leave the box and return to the capital. They will circle back to the village soon, in about a week or so, to swap out the subscriber identity module (SIM) cards in the tablet PCs.
Software running on the tablets will log every keystroke and swipe when it occurs. The devices will record each child’s progression through the games and apps, step-by-step, command by command. The cards will then be express mailed from Addis Ababa to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Nicholas Negroponte and a team of researchers he’s assembled will analyze the data and search for clues to reveal how the children are improving at written and spoken English despite having no instruction whatsoever.
Skip ahead a few months. On October 25, 2012, Negroponte stands in front of a gathering of technology enthusiasts at MIT to relay what months of research have uncovered. “In five days they were using forty-seven apps per day,” says Negroponte. “In two weeks they were singing ABC songs.” By the end of five weeks, Negroponte reports that several were able to activate the tablet’s disabled camera and take their photos. “They hacked Android!” he shouts to the crowd.3
Negroponte is the founder of the MIT Media Lab. He’s credited with being the first investor in Wired magazine and is the author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital, a forward-looking treatise on the future of man and machine that seems to grow only more influential with the spread of the Internet. He’s probably best known for his One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Association, which donates specially designed laptops to children across the developing world.
When you go to the association’s Web site, you’ll see pictures taken of OLPC initiatives across the globe. One in particular has become closely associated with the program. It features several dozen Nigerian boys all about age ten. Each one is wearing a school uniform of avocado green with forest green trim. They sit in neat rows at long schoolhouse desks. Each boy has a bright white and green laptop. These devices, set against the blandness of the cement wall classroom, the rustic benchlike tables, the dour green uniforms, look like artifacts from the future deposited in the past. All of the boys are smiling politely.
A casual observer would say the picture speaks to the enormous success of the program, which has given away more than 2 million laptops around the world since the first full model was revealed in 2005. But Negroponte admits to a degree of ambivalence about this scenario.
“This was the image that started to spread because, sadly, our partner was always the government, and the government wanted us to do schools.” He says “schools” with a distaste that’s reminiscent of a ten-year-old at the end of summer vacation.
Negroponte doesn’t measure the success of the program on the basis of units distributed or test score improvements. Not only are these the wrong metrics but he believes the continuous focus on testing, curriculum, indeed on teaching, often gets in the way of real learning. The assumption that the latter is impossible without the former is wrong. “We kn
ow that a vast recall of facts about something is in no way a measure of understanding them,” Negroponte wrote for the online edition of MIT Technology Review just before his lecture. “At best, it is necessary but not sufficient. And yet we subject our kids to memorizing. We seem to believe that rote learning is akin to physical exercise, good for their minds. And, quite conveniently, we can test whether the facts stuck, like spaghetti to a wall. In some cases knowledge is so drilled in that you know and hate a subject at the same time.”4 For Negroponte most of what we call school is a gratuitous time suck at best, and a real impediment to learning at worst.
This view is somewhat unusual for someone who is, at least in name, an educator. But Negroponte isn’t the first teacher to condemn the institutionalization of education, which has been an evolving process throughout history. In his writings and speeches, educator John Taylor Gatto describes the emergence of a teaching system that, from the 1800s onward, served primarily as a means to house the children of factory workers while their parents toiled in sewing rooms, slaughterhouses, and mills. The objective of public education was to create more of the same. By its very nature, Gatto observes, formal education works to suppress creativity and unnaturally lengthen—as well as dull—childhood. “Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants . . . After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”5
Negroponte’s skepticism about school also recalls some of the more provocative insights of the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, who observed, “A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.”
The MIT Media Lab that Negroponte cofounded exists in stark contrast to the picture of education painted by Mill. Classes happen but the emphasis is on cobbling and tinkering. “We don’t teach at the MIT Media Lab. We do research. We assemble teams. We don’t have students so much as apprentices,” says Negroponte. His poor opinion of regimented schooling is, in part, why he created the OLPC Association. He had hopes that the program would decouple learning from teaching in the developing world just as the MIT Media Lab was helping young designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs build expertise outside the formal teacher-student relationship. He was soon deflated to realize that this emphasis on rote memorization, testing, discipline, and regimentation was even more pronounced in the developing world than it was in the United States.
In his lecture at MIT he recalled going to villages in Pakistan and meeting first-graders who were actually excited, “wide-eyed,” he described them, for the first day of school. He returned two years later and discovered those same children, who were then third-graders, as we encounter third-graders today: subdued, uninterested, and robbed of the desire to learn.
It was on one such trip while he was in nearby India that he met Sugata Mitra, a computer scientist with a PhD in the theoretical solid state physics of organic semiconductors from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. As a physicist Mitra had an interest in complex ordered systems in which the actors organized themselves into coherent forms without outside intervention, similar to bee and ant colonies. Mitra believed that human learning and knowledge formation might be subject to the same invisible, cohesive forces. But how was he to test this idea, as any human-led effort to set the parameters for knowledge formation in a subject (in this case, a child) might be called teaching?
Mitra’s solution was to go around the human.
In 1999, at his office in New Delhi, he launched an experiment he called the “hole in the wall” to demonstrate that self-organized learning via an electronic interface—with no teacher intervention at all—was possible.6
He and his team members “cut a hole inside that wall and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end,” Mitra explained at the 2007 Lift Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The PC had a touch pad and Internet.
A few hours later, an eight-year-old boy, shoeless and dressed only in a dirty kurta (long shirt) from the nearby slum neighborhood (Mitra’s description) of Kalkaji, approached the hole and began to play with the keyboard and the mouse. The boy had never seen a computer before. A few hours later, when his six-year-old sister showed up, the boy was able to tell her—without knowing exactly what he was talking about—how to browse on AltaVista.
Mitra performed the experiment several times across India. In a rural village called Madan Tusi there was no formal English instruction at all. He set up a hole-in-the-wall kiosk, left behind some educational CDs in English (the village was devoid of Internet service), and returned a few months later. “I found these two kids, eight- and twelve-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. And as soon as they saw me they said, ‘We need a faster processor and a better mouse,’” Mitra told the Swiss crowd.
When he surveyed the kids, he found they were using an average of two hundred English words in casual communication with each other. Though they couldn’t pronounce the English correctly, they understood the proper usage for each of the words. In other cases, where the hole-in-the-wall computer was connected to the Internet, the children taught themselves how to browse and e-mail, how to use drawing applications and the most basic Windows functions. But this learning only took place when a big group of kids was crowded around the computer, jostling and shouting and playing, as kids do.
This is an important point. We associate educational technology with lots of individual screen time, such as those kids at desks in forest green uniforms, each kid burrowed into his own laptop. The kids in Mitra’s experiments spent far less time learning from the machine than from one another.7 Mitra realized a startling conclusion.
A machine doesn’t teach you as well as the act of teaching others.
“What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what to do. If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. Around these four are usually a group of about sixteen children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that’s going on, on the computer. And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing,” Mitra explained to the Lift group.
In the OLPC program, Negroponte observed something similar. He estimates that of the 2.4 million cases where laptops were distributed, in 3 or 4 percent of the cases the kids taught their parents how to read and write.
The findings are inspiring but not particularly conclusive. They don’t suffice as an argument for radically redefining primary school education. Mitra could only observe the aftereffects of putting the computer in the town square, just as Negroponte can’t stand over the shoulder of 2.4 million kids to whom he’s given laptops in order to observe how they learn and when.
But Negroponte’s Ethiopian tablet initiative takes an important step forward; it closes that feedback gap in the way it records every interaction that takes place over the medium. Though not exactly telemetric, this data could provide clues as to the causal link between group interaction and learning. Those clues exist in a time between the two moments—months apart—when the cardboard box was dropped off in Wonchi village and when the kids hacked Android. The data are open to anyone.
You might describe the one tablet experiment as exploitative. It’s hard to imagine an American parent reacting w
ell to the idea of her child coming home from school with a “free device” loaded with shadowy surveillance software, even if it is part of an experiment that comports with International Review Board standards. Many others have criticized the entire OLPC project as expressing too much faith in the Western technologies of personal electronics, particularly the emphasis on English. In 2005 computer designer Lee Felsenstein likened the initiative to dropping flat-screen TVs on villagers from helicopters: “It is sufficiently discomfiting to consider that the outcome of a massive project like OLPC may be a different form of commercial television for the developing countries. Worse yet would be the preemption of funding for many other projects designed under a community model. Future talk of computer systems for the developing world would meet the dismissive response that ‘it’s been tried and it failed.’”8,9
As an act of charity, dropping computers on the world’s poorest kids is self-serving and patronizing.
This is one view.
An opposing view holds that Mitra’s and Negroponte’s work is a long-overdue response to one of the more enduring legacies of actual colonialism: the continued export of the classroom model to ever-poorer communities where the model does not always work. In separate research conducted throughout India, Mitra has found that the quality of education declines as a function of distance from the capital. Teachers in the more remote villages simply lacked either the desire or the ability to perform at the same level as their urban counterparts.10
The Naked Future Page 17