| Open Systems for Broader Change | |
| Author: Walter Bender | January 14th, 2010 | |
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Seymour Papert's vision of a children's machine, a computer as a thing to think with, was already realized in part by the mid-1980s. The personal computer had become sufficiently inexpensive that it was feasible to outfit clusters of computers—in a lab or classroom setting—where young learners could engage in activities ranging from word-processing (“writing to read”), LOGO programing and game design, multimedia publishing, and robotics. Twenty-five years ago, all of these learning activities—and more—were part of a program at the Hennigan School, a public elementary school in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston; the program was a harbinger for much of the ensuing technological intervention in the classroom. But as Papert said at the time, "The context for human development is always a culture, never an isolated technology." How do we change the culture of school, not just the technology in school? Today we are in the midst of the 1-to-1 laptop revolution. I take pride in having been a member of the team (One Laptop per Child) that built the first netbook computer for children—which among other impacts continues to put great pressure on the computer industry to lower prices and bring laptops within reach of many more children. However, advances in hardware and access are only addressing part of the challenge we face in educating our children. Quoting Papert again, "Using the computer not as a 'thing in itself' that may or may not deliver benefits, but as a material that can be appropriated to do better whatever you are doing (and which will not do anything if you are not!)" How do we raise of generation of children who can appropriate knowledge—learn to learn—and put that knowledge to work towards critical thinking, inquiry, and problem-solving? (The next generation will certainly inherit from us any number of intractable problems that need solving.) I argue that open systems, designed for appropriation, is the most efficient means to bring about a broader change in education. The culture of open systems--open knowledge, open communication, and open tools--has perhaps best manifested itself in the Free Software movement. With Free Software and any computer that can run GNU/Linux—i.e, any computer, control and knowledge creation are shifting to the end user, enabling new opportunities, particularly around learning, which, irregardless of pedagogy, inevitably involves content consumption and creation. Sugar is a Free Software learning platform used by more than one-million children around the world. Sugar provides a unified framework for learning-activity developers to support collaboration, reflection, and sharing in their programs. Those features were chosen with a purpose: to encourage learners to engage in authentic problem-solving and a critical dialogue about whatever problem in which they are engaged. Sometimes that dialog is with your peers, sometimes it is with a teacher or mentor. Sometimes it is open-ended and sometimes it is within the context of structured instruction. In every case, it involves expressing, debugging, critiquing, and reflecting. In every case, it is enhanced by "the hard things to learn", Alan Kay's "non-universals", e.g., reading and writing; deductive abstract mathematics; model-based science; etc. Being open, with an emphasis on ''en plein air'' debugging and critique, is part of our pedagogy and also a central tenet of our community. Sugar embodies the message that everyone has an opportunity and responsibility to contribute to our knowledge commons. Free Software and open content represent a path to a lifetime of learning for the next generation. To help them along that path, we must: * explore, share, evaluate, and debate best practices; * provide technical and pedagogical support; and * create new learning activities and pedagogical practice. A new version of Sugar has just been released: Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry. Join our community by downloading it from http://www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be freely loaded onto any ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and Apple OS X. Walter Bender is executive director of Sugar Labs, a non-profit foundation he founded in 2008, in order to support the further development of the Sugar learning platform. Bender is coordinating the efforts of thousands of volunteers from around the world, a melting-pot of software developers and educators, who are working together to provide powerful tools for learning to every child. In 2006, Bender co-founded the One Laptop per Child, a non-profit association with Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. The team designed and built the OLPC-XO-1 laptop computer and put it into the hands of over one-million children, worldwide. As director of the MIT Media Laboratory, Bender led a team of several hundred researchers in fields as varied as tangible media to affective computing to lifelong kindergarten. |
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