waveplace on NPR
Just heard the two-part NPR story on Waveplace's XO and Etoys pilot in Immokalee, Florida. Have a listen here.
Pretty surreal hearing myself on national radio. I'm a bit disappointed that Etoys got characterized as clumsy ... the alligator thing was from one of our advanced lessons for the adults. I imagine someone watching a person learn guitar for the first time would also think it clumsy. Great quotes from Christa and Susan.
Photos from the pilot are here. Video is in the works.
new courseware; new pilots
Waveplace has finished its beta "Squeaky Tales" courseware ... 30 lessons (with videos) that teach how to teach Etoys on the XO. To see examples, or to become a beta tester, visit here
We took everything we learned in our first pilot (in the Virgin Islands) and started completely over. The pacing is much better, as is the storytelling component, which was crucial in St John. We're using the beta courseware in our three pilots this summer, and will then start completely over and make a physical textbook and DVD series (in English, Spanish, and French). All will be sold at cost for physical materials. (We're a non-profit.)
In other news, we finished our intensive teacher workshop last week in Immokalee, Florida. The teachers are very enthusiastic. For the next two months, they'll be using the courseware to teach 42 children, each of whom received their very own XO last week. Larry Abramson from NPR spent a day with us, listening as we taught the teachers and later the children.
Lastly, we've just finished prep work for our 4th pilot ... this time on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua in a school that currently has no electricity. If all goes well, we'll be starting that pilot in mid-July. When this pilot finishs, Waveplace will have given both XOs and training to more than 100 children and 20 teachers.
For more on the Immokalee and Nicaragua pilots, or to hear about our Haiti pilot, read the current issue of our newsletter, visit here.
You can also subscribe to it by visiting here.
immokalee pilot has started!
Today in Immokalee Florida, Waveplace started its third XO and Etoys pilot. We gave laptops to 43 children, and I taught them for two hours.
We also started our first intensive teacher training workshop with our new beta courseware. This week, I'm teaching adults five days, six hours a day, in addition to three student classes. The teachers will then spend the remaining nine weeks teaching the students themselves after I leave.
Let's just say that between the teacher training and the children training, and the endless logistics (setting up the projector, arranging the chairs, unpacking the XOs, recording the serial numbers) ... I'M TIRED!
And I get to wake up and do it all again :)
computer literacy
Our overall goal with Waveplace is to teach children to become digital storytellers. Just what that means, and can mean, is really the crux of where we're headed. I've been thinking a great deal about this.
Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They're missing the point. That's like saying, 'If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you're literate.' Literature is first and foremost about having ideas important enough to discuss and write down in some form. So you have to ask, "What is the literature that is best written down on a computer?" One answer is to make a dynamic simulation of some idea that you think is important, a simulation that you can play with and that you can learn from.
- Alan Kay
To aid in my explorations, I've been researching the early days of film, learning how they created the conventions we now take for granted, such as reverse angle shots and zooms. To us it seems obvious, but to them, each baby step away from "point the thing at a stage and film the actors" was a breakthrough.
I've also been researching interactive fiction, which began in the 70s as text adventures, but has progressed quite a bit, though it's largely unseen unless you use the word "game".
What's the future of digital storytelling? How we will evolve past pre-computer modes of expression? What will our children's children look back on as obvious that we ourselves cannot yet see?
new videos from st john pilot
We've just posted two new videos from the St John Waveplace pilot, which concluded three weeks ago. The first shows mentoring during the pilot. The second shows students presenting their Etoys storybooks.
1) Scenes from the St John pilot (4 minutes)
2) The St John Storybook Awards (8 minutes)
We will be posting the actual storybooks to our website soon.
In other news, the Haiti pilot will resume next week, since things have calmed down in Port-Au-Prince. The kids and teachers are well.
back from st john
Had a great trip to Saint John last week, finishing up our ten week Waveplace pilot with the fourth grade class at Guy Benjamin School. I got to teach the class one day, which was great fun, and for our last class, we had each student present their storybooks, then gave out four iPods as prizes. The judges were me, Dionne Wells (their principal), and Jamie Elliot (a local reporter).
Mid-trip we presented the results of the pilot to the new USVI Education Commissioner by having A'Feyah, one of the students, sit with the Commissioner and show her what she had learned. From what I hear, our meeting was a great success.
Here's a webcam shot of me, Jan, and Bill with our XOs, just before taking the ferry to St Thomas to meet with the Commissioner.
XO donor comments
Today I read some very nice comments from a few of the people who donated their XO laptops to children in our Haiti pilot. Last week I posted photos of the children that got their laptops as well as a new video.
The first donor comment was from Emily Davidow, who also blogged:
Thank you so much for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful program! Seeing the pictures and movie made me so happy. Looking forward to following the progress in Haiti and all your programs through the newsletter.
The next was from author David Weinberger, who blogged as well.
I can’t say much makes me happier than this photo of the One Laptop Per Child laptop I donated in the hands of its owner. (I had done the “buy two, get one” program, and then donated the laptop they’d sent me. That’s the one you see here.) Thank you, Waveplace, for doing this, and for letting me see what you do.
The last was from Harlan Limpert:
I’m so appreciative of this link to the photo of the young girl that received out XO laptop. It’s given me an additional opportunity to “plug” the good work of Waveplace.
If you'd like to donate a laptop for our upcoming St Vincent pilot, please contact us. If you'd like to donate money to help us finish our documentary and courseware, please click here.
photos from haiti and st john pilots
Just received some photos from the start of our Haitian pilot, along with some new photos from our St John pilot, which is in its sixth week.
haitian pilot starts
Today we're starting our pilot in Haiti, at one of the Mercy & Sharing schools in Port-Au-Prince. Our very own Bill Stelzer, leader of our St John pilot, will be teaching Emile Roulsa Jean and two others to become Haiti's first Waveplace mentors. They'll then start a ten-week pilot using the nineteen laptops we were able to receive in time.
Our greatest thanks go to the ten kind souls who donated their XOs last weekend, along with David Weinberger, Jerry Michalski, and Wayan Vota for helping spread the word. David & Jerry are A-List blogerati and Wayan runs OLPC News, which published my article last weekend.
For those that have wondered, we're going it alone in Haiti, with none of the laptops donated by OLPC's G1G1 program going to Mercy & Sharing. Our goal is to raise $250,000 to purchase one thousand laptops and train enough mentors and teachers to really engage the kids and get them excited about education.
We met with the Haitian government yesterday and plan to share our discoveries freely with them. They're working directly with OLPC, though they're interested in our experiences as well. They'll be at the laptop unveiling today.
Again, thank you everyone for your kindness and your encouragement. Stay tuned for more video from Haiti next week.
give two, keep none
Just sent out a plea to forums and bloggers I know. David Weinberger not only posted it, but he's sending us his XO!
Here's the plea:
Waveplace is a non-profit starting an XO pilot in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, in ten days. OLPC was going to be giving us laptops, but it fell through, which is why I'm trying to get twenty XOs from elsewhere.
Your laptop may end up in the hands of one of the most needy children in the Western Hemisphere. The school where the laptop will be sent is run by Susie Scott Krabacher, who has been the Mother Theresa of Haiti for 15 years. In fact, a major motion picture is being made about her life right now, based upon her autobiography.
You could really help by agreeing to sell us your laptop. We've only got ten days to get the laptops to Miami, as we're leaving for Haiti on Feb 17th.
To see the kids that will get them, watch this video, which we shot last month.
* Susie's organization
(click slideshow to see the conditions)
* An article by Susie from our newsletter.
One way or another, we'll be in Haiti in ten days. Please help us bring more laptops. Please pass the word, and if you have a laptop to sell, click contact on the Waveplace site.
Thank you!
Tim Falconer
Waveplace Foundation
good press
Great article about Waveplace in the St John Tradewinds. Talks about our Virgin Islands pilot, which is into its second week. We also launched our new website, which has a terrific new video from our trip to Haiti earlier this month.
the OLPC airdrop model
Yesterday in a talk with OLPC, we were again confronted with their "airdrop model" of laptop distribution (the term is mine). OLPC advocates a "full saturation" approach to giving laptops to schools and countries. When Waveplace then says, "Our plan is to start with a smaller pilot and scale teacher training to assure effectiveness", they counter with their belief that larger numbers have a magic all their own. Their experience is that full saturation is more important than scaled training.
Now these are smart guys with a lot of experience at this, so I'm tempted to believe them. I'm also aware that this airdrop model has been a chief criticism of OLPC's approach. While I agree with making a laptop that's "better than a bad teacher, or no teacher", I'd have to say I'm with Alan Kay when he says, "you can buy pianos for a school, but they work better with music lessons," so much so that it's the chief mission of Waveplace. We make laptop lessons. Moreover, we're following Alan's advice with a one-to-seven teacher/student ratio, which seems opposite of OLPC.
So here's the question ... does OLPC's airdrop model have merit? If you drop a thousand laptops on a school system so that every child has one, does a kind of kid-to-kid ecosystem really emerge that's beyond the reach of adult interaction? Or does it just seem so because we're increasing the odds of incredible anecdotes from a small percentage self-starter students?
squeaky tales and waveplace vision
Today I posted my twentieth Etoys tutorial in the Squeaky Tales series, bringing the total to five hours of ten planned.
Each fifteen-minute screencast forms the basis for an hour of hands-on instruction with a child, with the mentor first presenting the concepts in their own fashion, then leading the class for the remainder of the time. The videos themselves are aimed at the mentor, not the students, though I suspect older students could watch the videos on their own.
Now half done, I've been spending time on techniques to manage complexity. Just like a real software project, the beginning is fresh with clean white designs, but midway through it's a mangled mess of coalescing code.
I also posted a 25 minute video of me talking into a camera, explaining the Waveplace vision. I've had the same conversation about two hundred times in the last six months, so I figured it'd be good to get the rap down on tape. The video breaks down into ten minutes on education, five minutes on the XO, and ten minutes on Waveplace. Let me know if you find it helpful.
launches aplenty
Been a pretty cool week so far.
On Monday, Viewpoints Research contracted Immuexa to redesign their Squeakland website. Given that Etoys is the crown jewel in the OLPC lineup, we're pretty excited. We're hoping to launch this winter.
On Tuesday, OLPC started mass production of the XO laptops. I've been a fly on the wall listening to their team talk for months. Having been entrenched in development mayhem much of my life, let me simply say it's a big accomplishment. Congrats to all.
On Wednesday, we launched the beta of Blazemark 2.0, which is being shown at a fire-fighting convention in Las Vegas. This most recent fruit of our labors may actually save lives, which is humbling and gratifying.
Today, I'm loading my XO with the newest build and shipping it to Saint John for our pre-pilot, where our team will teach one student in preparation for our full pilot in December. It'll be sad to see the little tyke go. My two-year old is particularly fond of TamTam.
Tomorrow, I'll be signing the final papers for the creation of Waveplace Foundation Inc, a new 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to bringing digital media skills to West Indian children. We've got nine board members steering the ship, all of whom are true believers in all things OLPC.
Next week should be even cooler. I'm traveling to Boston to meet with Walter Bender, Jim Gettys, and SJ Klein at OLPC headquarters.
Stay tuned.
extreme poverty
In the year 2000, world leaders made eight pretty incredible promises, which are known as the Millennium Development Goals.
The first of these goals is to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1 USD per day. More than 1.5 billion people qualify, which is roughly 1 out of every 4 people alive. Two-thirds of these people don't have access to clean water, and malnutrition is so bad that six million children die EVERY YEAR before their fifth birthday. That's a holocaust-sized catastrophe every single year.
Where is this happening? Here's a list of the twelve countries with more than half of their population living in extreme poverty:
| 1. | Zambia | 76% |
| 2. | Mali | 72% |
| 3. | Nigeria | 71% |
| 4. | Central African Rep. | 67% |
| 5. | Madagascar | 61% |
| 6. | Niger | 61% |
| 7. | Gambia | 59% |
| 8. | Tanzania | 58% |
| 9. | Zimbabwe | 56% |
| 10. | Burundi | 55% |
| 11. | Haiti | 54% |
| 12. | Rwanda | 52% |
All countries are in Africa, with one Caribbean exception. Haiti has nearly five million people living on less than a dollar day, and it's a mere 600 miles from the United States.
My mom brought me to Haiti when I was eleven. I remember walking the streets of Port-Au-Prince and asking her about the children. She told me they were starving. "If they're starving, then why are their bellies so big?"
Well, what can we do? I'd start by telling other people you know, since the biggest crime is the almost complete lack of knowledge in the States about such things. As for myself, I believe that lasting answers are all about education. By proving the Waveplace approach in the Virgin Islands, we'll give strength to OLPC's mission elsewhere, particularly Haiti.
One thing's clear ... if we're not doing something, then we're essentially standing idly by while children die ... one child every three seconds.
two hours of tales
I've just posted my eighth 15-minute Squeaky Tales tutorial, bringing the collective time to two hours of Etoys fun. My plan is to create four 15-minute movies each week for the next eight weeks for a total of ten hours of video tutorial.
What topics will I cover? Well, I'm trying to make the Squeaky Tales series as subject-neutral as possible. My hope is that this approach will allow mentors to adapt the concepts to different ages and subjects more easily. By necessity, there will be rudimentary math concepts like addition and multiplication, but these will be presented as a means to another end, not a discussion of math itself.
As the name of the series implies, my ultimate goal is storytelling. I'm teaching programming as a means to telling stories, which hopefully will engage students that might otherwise be timid about math and science.
spark jobs and rote jobs
Just had the Shift Happens video link sent to me. Quite an eye opener, as is the terrific Pay Attention video, which focuses more on teaching.
Put simply: within our lifetime, the "rote jobs" will ship overseas. It's clear from the numbers. What's left are "spark jobs" ... high creativity jobs.
Our schools aren't teaching spark. They're teaching rote.
nothing wrong with being wrong
Towards the end of yesterday's Squeaky Tale, I tried changing the color of something and found (while recording) that I didn't know what I was doing. My first reaction was "Oh geez, I should reshoot that" lest I lose face to the viewing public. Instead, I left my mistake in the video, since it helps demonstrate an important point.
Programming is about making mistakes. You try something, see how it goes, try something else, and grin at your flaws. A programmer that thinks he knows everything in advance is a bad programmer.
Such an approach might seem alien, since our educational system continually insists that there's a right answer to everything. As any artist, scientist, or programmer will tell you: there aren't any right answers in this world, and there's nothing wrong with being wrong.
I'll be writing a lot more on this. For now, ask yourself if you feel bad whenever you make a mistake. If yes, does it help?
the saga continues
Over the long weekend, I got some very positive feedback regarding my Squeaky Tales series. People seemed to like my movies, though my first attempts had some video compression snags which forced me to temporarily abandon Flash video in favor of Quicktime. The downside was that the movies took a long time to start, since they were essentially fully downloading before beginning.
Today I worked out the kinks and encoded them back as Flash FLV movies. They should start up more quickly and should also be more compatible with different systems. FLV is the video format used on YouTube.
I just posted Squeaky Tale #2, which introduces a new character in the plot besides Seymour the turtle. As before, let me know if you have any problems. Also, keep the kudos coming. It helps to know you're out there!
squeaky tales
I've just posted the first two screencast tutorials on Squeak Etoys. Originally, the plan was for us to be in St John right now, prepping for our three-day Etoys workshop at Caneel Bay. Since the funding didn't materialize, I'm making these short movies instead, hoping they're enough for Bill & Mary to struggle through on their own.
The first movie discusses how to install Squeak Etoys and the latest OLPC Etoys image on your computer (particularly if you own a Mac). The next shows Etoys in action for about fifteen minutes.
My next screencast will be on Tuesday. Let me know if you were able to view these movies. I used two different approaches to encoding the video, so I'm interested to see how others fare on different systems.
go fly a kite
In the last two days, I've been teaching twenty-year-old Nicole to use Squeak Etoys. She's never done any programming before, nor does she really know why she'd want to be a programmer, which puts her in the majority. I'm teaching her as warm-up for some video tutorials I'm making for the general public, the first of which is rendering right now.
Teaching a novice to program is a humbling task, particularly for an expert. I'm mindful of the pacing of my presentation. Too much and eyes glaze over, too little and boredom sets in. Constructionism is a great fit to the task, since pacing is about keeping the student engaged, which happens more easily when they feel connected to the topic. Making and keeping that connection is the tough part.
It's a little like flying a kite. You start pulling in a direction and hope the wind takes hold. If you pull too hard, the kite won't fly. Once flying, the kite moves to its own muse, with only subtle guidance from below. When the string goes slack, give a little tug and suggest something new to try.
This is the way to teach Etoys.
hello, (children of the) world!
Yesterday we received our very own XO laptop from OLPC to play with. We'd seen one up close at Squeakfest last August, but now we've got time to get to know it and show it off to others.
Here Paula's trying Squeak Etoys on it:
As you can see next to her 15" MacBook, the XO is made for little hands. I was very pleased with its performance. Fedora & Sugar booted in a minute and Etoys loaded in about ten seconds which is plenty fast enough.
Also very impressive was the reflective display. You really can read things in full sunlight, which I had heard about but didn't really appreciate till today. It's a wonderful thing to behold, and saves power as well.
There's too many things to note in one post. Tonight I upgraded to the latest build and talked with some of the developers. They're inches away from code complete, which is always a heady time in any software project.
An excerpt from IRC:
<Mitch_Bradley> has NN seen the new screens? I need affirmation. <cjb> You're a unique and beautiful snowflake. <jg> does that mean he melts and becomes all wet? <kimquirk> I think it was just the flake part...
Anyway, today I make my first Etoys tutorial movie. More tomorrow.
papert's point
So here I am, with three months of research, and nowhere to use it. Over the summer, I immersed myself in the writings of Seymour Papert and the works of Alan Kay and Mitch Resnick, both of whom drew inspiration from Papert. I've been walking around with a running dialogue in my head, inspired by the same ideas that launched OLPC and countless other efforts.
So what's Papert's point? What's the common gist of the half-dozen books he's written, starting with "Mindstorms" in 1980?
Okay, I'll give it a shot. Seymour Papert thinks that we're programming our kids in school in much the same way that we program computers.
"Yeah kid, here's a fact."
(dumps information in kid's head)
"Now pay attention, here's a skill."
(dumps in kid's head)
"Here's more facts."
(Dump, dump, dump)
"Okay, quiz time ... regurgitate what you've learned."
(reference memory and display earlier data)
So the point here is: do the kids actually learn anything, or do they learn how to play the game ... how to memorize facts and skills. This approach is called "drill and kill" in some circles, and it's really our education system.
It's also how we teach dumb computers to do what we want. We enter data (facts) and we create programs (skills). This allows computers to regurgitate in the same way many kids do .... without understanding.
This is a very big problem.
the why of waveplace
Somewhere along a distant shore a child walks with eyes that burn. She sees everything, from the mother dog and pup searching through garbage for food, to the tangle of fishing line in the sea grapes. She takes in the details, both beautiful and terrible. She braces through flood of feeling.
At home, she cannot speak of it. At school, she fears response. In her heart, there is a passion for the world. Her talent is on the edge of immeasurable.
Would that we could say to her, "Be true" ... to tell her this flood might someday sustain her, become career.
We in the world are waiting for her wisdom. She needs only the path, and the courage, and the chance. This is a gift we can give.
