[00:00.000 --> 00:07.480]  Every panel discussion and talk is on DVD shortly after we record it, and they're selling them right out there.
[00:07.640 --> 00:13.720]  Along with some t-shirts, and downstairs they have fine caffeinated beverages from Germany that are non-alcoholic.
[00:13.860 --> 00:16.880]  But there is a deli across the street that has alcoholic beverages.
[00:30.760 --> 00:35.880]  I should also mention that I just walked by the Apple store in Soho, and there is still a line for the iPhone.
[00:38.970 --> 00:46.040]  What's amazing is that if you go into an AT&T store, they have them, but you look much cooler standing in line at the Apple store.
[01:00.280 --> 01:07.160]  This panel is Hacking the Young Ladies Illustrated Primer Dispatches from the Field of Educational Technology with Gillian Gus Andrews.
[01:08.640 --> 01:11.900]  Ivan Krstic was supposed to join the panel, but got ill.
[01:12.560 --> 01:13.700]  So let's give it up for Gillian.
[01:19.590 --> 01:20.190]  Thank you.
[01:21.930 --> 01:25.290]  So like he said, my name is Gillian Andrews.
[01:25.330 --> 01:26.330]  Most of you know me as Gus.
[01:27.210 --> 01:31.090]  I am a doctoral student in Communications and Education at Teachers College.
[01:31.270 --> 01:35.110]  Don't ask me how many years I've been there or how many I have left, because that is the lethal question.
[01:37.010 --> 01:44.410]  I am going to talk a little bit today about my own stuff, but I'm also going to talk about what Ivan was going to talk about, because I'm really sad that he's not here.
[01:45.450 --> 01:48.510]  I am also worried that people will leave the room, because he's really the draw.
[01:48.750 --> 01:52.070]  He is the former head of security for the One Laptop Per Child project.
[01:52.910 --> 02:05.690]  And I invited him to come and talk with me when I was sort of casting about for somebody to talk about educational technology with, because he wrote what is probably the most damning sort of write-up of One Laptop Per Child that I've ever seen.
[02:05.810 --> 02:08.970]  And from what I've heard from other people who work there, it's got some teeth.
[02:08.970 --> 02:17.150]  So I'm going to try to do what I can to do justice to what I think Ivan was going to say before I start my own stuff.
[02:17.290 --> 02:18.810]  So you have to apologize to me while I'm sort of winging it.
[02:18.890 --> 02:20.610]  I hope I don't misrepresent Ivan in any way.
[02:21.090 --> 02:31.690]  And I highly recommend that you go and check out this post, which is the first one that I saw, which is entitled, Sick Transit Gloria Laptoppy, which is his post, which is a great title.
[02:32.490 --> 02:35.770]  His post about One Laptop Per Child.
[02:36.370 --> 02:47.970]  So one of the first things that he says, and I had not realized this, was that there have been really a number of one-to-one laptop projects in third world countries and elsewhere.
[02:48.590 --> 02:52.610]  And Nicholas Negroponte has been involved in many of them.
[02:52.950 --> 02:55.470]  And unfortunately, we have yet to see any success.
[02:55.770 --> 03:00.250]  So One Laptop Per Child is not really the first project of its type.
[03:00.770 --> 03:07.430]  And yet at the same time, one of the things that Ivan brings up is that we have that we haven't really done a great pilot study.
[03:07.990 --> 03:11.950]  There is not really any good research on how to make these programs done.
[03:12.070 --> 03:16.270]  Or if there is One Laptop Per Child, maybe isn't paying so much attention to them right now.
[03:17.810 --> 03:19.770]  So Ivan goes into that for a while.
[03:20.970 --> 03:28.350]  For those of you who sort of have not been that familiar with One Laptop Per Child, a big part of the sort of motivating idea... there we go!
[03:28.550 --> 03:33.790]  We've got people up in the front with their XOs, as they're called, because of the little XO logo on the front.
[03:34.730 --> 03:40.070]  This is a, you know, child-sized, durable laptop that is supposed to create a mesh network.
[03:40.450 --> 03:42.770]  So it doesn't need a hub to connect to the Internet.
[03:42.910 --> 03:44.650]  It just makes a network with the computers around it.
[03:46.030 --> 03:57.670]  And one of the major things that's sort of been driving this particular iteration of one-to-one laptops is the idea of constructivist... constructionist, sorry.
[03:57.870 --> 03:58.430]  There's two things.
[03:58.570 --> 04:00.430]  There's constructivist learning and constructionist learning.
[04:00.770 --> 04:09.250]  And constructionist learning is the idea of Seymour Papert at MIT, who invented the logo, was involved in developing the logo computer language.
[04:10.130 --> 04:16.930]  And the idea is basically that you have children build software and build programs, and that is how they end up learning about computers.
[04:17.070 --> 04:30.650]  And so there really is this sort of ethos with this project, as far as I understand it, that they wanted to get kids not only to use the surface features of a computer, but do what many of us did, which is actually, you know, start from the command line in a lot of ways.
[04:30.830 --> 04:35.590]  So they were hoping... there seemed to be a number of features to the laptop which make it possible for kids to get in.
[04:36.290 --> 04:38.590]  One of these is that a lot of the software is open source.
[04:38.750 --> 04:48.410]  I know I've had people with the Give One, Get One project who have gotten laptops for their kids in the United States, which is not actually something you can do en masse right now, but if you buy one for kids in another country, you can get one yourself.
[04:49.130 --> 04:56.270]  And they always come up to me and they go, oh, you know, my little so-and-so has, you know, gone in, and she's hacked this particular video game, and look, she's programming.
[04:56.450 --> 05:03.530]  And I'm like, that's great, but you also are the head of... you're a lawyer at EFF, so like, you know, is she really representative of what's going to happen with this project?
[05:05.150 --> 05:11.430]  So... but anyway, I mean, so one of the real ideas here is to make a computer which is very accessible.
[05:11.590 --> 05:12.250]  It's open source.
[05:12.490 --> 05:14.590]  The operating system in this case is non-proprietary.
[05:14.750 --> 05:15.350]  It's called Sugar.
[05:16.450 --> 05:21.890]  And that is one of the things that Ivan gets to in this blog post, which I am talking about.
[05:24.850 --> 05:28.690]  Ivan sort of took issue eventually, and I may be mispronouncing his name even.
[05:28.810 --> 05:29.070]  I'm sorry.
[05:29.190 --> 05:30.070]  I haven't met the guy yet.
[05:30.530 --> 05:46.890]  But he talks about the difficulty of using open source software, specifically open source operating systems, Nix-based operating systems, and how, you know, it's really fabulous that you get to tinker with things, but not everybody necessarily wants to.
[05:46.990 --> 05:54.210]  And Ivan sort of goes into something that I'm sure a lot of people who are getting older and sort of just don't feel like they have the time anymore, and I know I am with things that I'm doing in my life.
[05:54.670 --> 05:58.050]  You know, you don't have time to tinker with things, and you want them to sort of just work out of the box.
[05:58.050 --> 06:08.810]  And he sort of questioned whether, by giving people in disadvantaged countries a lot of the time, these laptops that are, you know, that they can tinker with, is that really what they want?
[06:08.970 --> 06:10.070]  And is that really what they need?
[06:10.130 --> 06:12.470]  And is that the best way to support them getting involved for the first time?
[06:12.710 --> 06:17.090]  This is open to debate, and there are a number of people at One Laptop for Child who say absolutely.
[06:18.770 --> 06:21.810]  That's something I think we can talk a little bit more once I'm done here.
[06:24.050 --> 06:38.290]  Ivan goes on to sort of do a little he said, she said with some email that went back and forth at the company and elsewhere, including a letter from Richard Stallman when he was writing about the fact that One Laptop for Child will soon be able to run Windows,
[06:39.170 --> 06:40.550]  which is a relatively new development.
[06:40.810 --> 06:44.230]  And a lot of people in the open source community have been sort of like, oh my god, what are you doing?
[06:44.490 --> 06:48.570]  And Stallman in particular says, you know, proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless.
[06:48.790 --> 06:51.210]  It's functioning as secret, so it's incompatible with the spirit of learning.
[06:52.250 --> 06:53.650]  It doesn't make the world a better place.
[06:53.790 --> 06:55.570]  It puts children under the powers of a systems developer.
[06:55.750 --> 07:05.590]  Perhaps permanently, you might as well introduce the children to an addictive drug, to which Ivan said, oh, for f*ck's sake, you really just employed a simile comparing a proprietary OS to addictive drugs?
[07:05.750 --> 07:08.430]  You know, one's causing actual bodily harm and possibly death?
[07:08.610 --> 07:09.330]  Really, Stallman?
[07:09.390 --> 07:09.670]  Really?
[07:10.150 --> 07:17.610]  So that's just, you know, the blog post is, I mean, it's sort of the most incendiary thing, and I may be misrepresenting by talking about it, but it's full of these really sort of, you know...
[07:18.070 --> 07:25.410]  I mean, he's calling out some things that get said in the open source community, which I think are worth thinking about a little bit.
[07:27.330 --> 07:28.610]  So, let's see.
[07:28.810 --> 07:39.070]  Going on from there, he talks about Negroponte and some of the things that Negroponte has said to him, mostly, I think, more or less privately, not even so much publicly.
[07:39.450 --> 07:46.430]  But Negroponte at one point implied to Kristic, he said, you know, this project is really about getting laptops out.
[07:46.570 --> 07:51.410]  It's not about learning, which I think Ivan says was the point at which he decided to leave the project.
[07:52.770 --> 07:54.850]  And that, you know, it makes a certain measure of sense.
[07:54.990 --> 07:56.190]  I mean, if you...
[07:56.850 --> 07:57.990]  What do we want from this project?
[07:58.090 --> 08:00.290]  Is this a project where we want to get technology to people?
[08:00.590 --> 08:10.230]  I have a friend right now who's working in the Himalayas, and she was like, oh, I'm going to go introduce laptops there for the first time, and she gets there and finds that there's already laptops before she got there.
[08:10.310 --> 08:12.550]  So, you know, there's issues like that to think about.
[08:12.550 --> 08:16.890]  I mean, we can think of ourselves as bringing these great things, but they're not always...
[08:16.890 --> 08:19.190]  We're not always necessarily on top of our game that way.
[08:19.970 --> 08:32.790]  The major critique that Ivan levels in this blog post that I think is really critical is that One Laptop Per Child has not itself, my understanding is, really devoted many resources to deployment.
[08:34.690 --> 08:47.090]  And part of the One Laptop Per Child model, in my understanding, and I've got to tell you, I'm not that close to the project, but one of my understandings, though, is that they sort of say, well, we should turn to the community, and the community should help us do things like this.
[08:47.290 --> 09:01.350]  But Ivan says, you know, to the best of his knowledge, the deployment strategy consisted of taking whatever hotshot hacker didn't have to be working on anything for OLPC at the moment, and sending him out into the field, and saying, you know, make this computer get out to people.
[09:02.550 --> 09:06.470]  So it's, for one thing, getting the computers out there, but then there's also the matter of training and learning.
[09:06.690 --> 09:10.670]  And I understand that there are a number... I mean, there do seem to be trainings going on for OLPC.
[09:10.830 --> 09:15.770]  I've seen, sort of, you know, talk about what's going on in Peru and Uruguay and places like that, so...
[09:18.810 --> 09:34.530]  But there are, I mean, part of the thing that really needs to be understood, and one of the things I think, when we say, you know, there's not that much research that's been done on deploying a project like this, one of the things we're saying is, you need to know the lay of the local land.
[09:34.690 --> 09:47.470]  A friend of mine who just went down to Haiti to do a project there that was supposed to be distributing One Laptop per Child Laptops never got off the ground, because in Haiti, graft and corruption are rife, and the One Laptops are... or the XOs are in a container someplace,
[09:47.790 --> 09:49.670]  and will not be getting...
[09:49.670 --> 09:51.310]  will not get out of there until somebody gets bribed.
[09:51.750 --> 10:00.190]  So, you know, it takes a knowledge of the fact that these things will happen on the ground, and somebody who is able to, sort of, work through those things to actually get people to where they need to be.
[10:02.230 --> 10:06.190]  Sort of further going on from there... let's see...
[10:07.430 --> 10:18.010]  Ivan talks a little bit about sugar, and the focus, you know, this debate about should OLPCs run sugar, or should they run Windows?
[10:18.790 --> 10:21.770]  And Ivan says, I wouldn't want to just see them running Windows, but I don't see...
[10:21.770 --> 10:24.770]  I think he says, don't, you know, exclude the possibility.
[10:25.090 --> 10:28.470]  But just focusing the energy on sugar, is that really where we want to put our energy?
[10:28.470 --> 10:34.170]  If we want to focus on One Laptop Per Child, and actually getting, you know, learning out there.
[10:34.290 --> 10:35.870]  Or is learning what we should do?
[10:36.050 --> 10:40.550]  And then, is the software... is having open source software a goal?
[10:40.710 --> 10:42.150]  Or is it a means to an end?
[10:43.110 --> 10:48.250]  And I believe the side he came down on was, if it takes running Windows...
[10:48.250 --> 10:59.490]  If it takes being able to run Windows, and I know some countries that have been offered deals for One Laptop Per Child have said, you're offering a software that's not used by industry, so how is this useful to our children?
[11:01.130 --> 11:07.590]  You know, if they're going to say that, is it really useful to say, well, we're just not going to give you the laptops, and then, you know, not go out there.
[11:07.590 --> 11:11.710]  So, these are basically the issues that I think he was going to talk about.
[11:11.850 --> 11:19.650]  And now I'm going to sort of go into the stuff that I would say myself, which is, hopefully, a little bit more even, and a little bit funnier.
[11:25.930 --> 11:31.050]  So, the last time I spoke at HOPE, I talked about... I'm actually going to read this.
[11:31.050 --> 11:35.950]  I explained the ways that educators have recognized that hackers are correct in their critique of schooling.
[11:36.510 --> 11:40.530]  I actually drew on Steven Levy, the keynote speaker from Tomorrow's book, Hackers, for this.
[11:40.830 --> 11:45.350]  And so, I'll reiterate a few of his points here, backed with findings from research on education and cognition.
[11:46.390 --> 11:47.730]  So, here's the first one.
[11:48.690 --> 11:50.810]  Mistrust authority and promote decentralization.
[11:51.210 --> 11:57.050]  Lectures and teacher-centric instruction tend not to stick, unless people are actively engaged in their learning.
[11:57.750 --> 12:04.770]  Studies of education have basically found that it's better, you know, unless they're hands-on, things don't stick as well and it's harder for them to remember.
[12:05.390 --> 12:06.690]  Always yield to the hands-on imperative.
[12:06.910 --> 12:11.970]  Similarly, when learning happens in context, when you're actually working on a real-world project, you tend to remember things better.
[12:13.210 --> 12:14.530]  Hackers should be judged by their hacking.
[12:15.530 --> 12:18.670]  Standardized tests really kind of make for poor quality long-term learning.
[12:18.810 --> 12:19.790]  It tends to be rather fragile.
[12:20.550 --> 12:23.470]  You learn it over the short term and then you forget it when you cram for it.
[12:23.470 --> 12:28.510]  So, you know, actually being able to have hands-on skills is sort of more permanent learning.
[12:29.710 --> 12:32.630]  And hackers enjoy exploring the details of programmable systems.
[12:34.470 --> 12:40.510]  Cognitive research has found that generating hypotheses keeps your brain limber and develops expertise of a professional sort.
[12:40.870 --> 12:43.270]  So, this is a good critique from Steven Levy.
[12:43.890 --> 12:47.270]  But how do we use these points to change education in some sort of real way?
[12:47.590 --> 12:49.010]  This is why I went back to school.
[12:49.290 --> 12:51.270]  So, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about it.
[12:51.270 --> 12:52.570]  And let's explore the possibilities.
[12:53.870 --> 12:55.650]  This is The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
[12:55.790 --> 12:56.850]  How many people have read this book?
[12:57.690 --> 12:58.790]  I'm so glad to see that.
[12:59.270 --> 13:03.750]  I've found that a lot of the time, you bring this book up and it becomes a real touchstone.
[13:03.970 --> 13:14.650]  Because, basically, the book describes the creation of and the deployment of an AI-driven, nanotech-infused book, which is called The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
[13:14.870 --> 13:18.170]  And it's capable of leading a child through a complete education.
[13:18.730 --> 13:22.810]  What's better, this is not an education with preset lesson plans and standardized tests.
[13:23.050 --> 13:25.430]  The learning process is guided by the child's own curiosity.
[13:25.670 --> 13:37.050]  And the book adapts to what is teaching to answer the child's questions about everything from the alphabets, to programming, to martial arts, to outdoor survival.
[13:37.670 --> 13:43.550]  And so, it's kind of like the XO hopped up on extra AI.
[13:44.110 --> 13:47.670]  And yet, at the same time, the primer is a tool of mass education.
[13:47.970 --> 13:50.350]  It's like the public school system or like Sesame Street.
[13:51.290 --> 13:56.110]  Stevenson's story follows a number of girls as the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer teaches them.
[13:57.150 --> 14:00.890]  Stevenson gives us a lot of room to imagine the primer and it really gets exciting.
[14:00.890 --> 14:12.530]  It feels like a combination of LEGO Mindstorms, and Zork, and Wikipedia, and the Electric Company, and the Enterprise's onboard computer, and hacking Linux kernel, all wrapped up in a Grimm's Fairytales Turing shell.
[14:14.770 --> 14:16.610]  So, basically, the primer is fabulous.
[14:16.910 --> 14:21.270]  It has all the benefits of the technology, and technology can give education with none of the drawbacks.
[14:21.750 --> 14:22.190]  Yay, primer.
[14:22.350 --> 14:23.190]  We all want to make the primer.
[14:23.550 --> 14:24.930]  How far do we have to go?
[14:25.850 --> 14:29.670]  Let me take you through a tour of the back end of the educational media system.
[14:29.670 --> 14:34.470]  What we ostensibly need to hack in order to build the primer.
[14:35.630 --> 14:39.890]  Last year, I was hired to develop a computer systems curriculum for high schoolers.
[14:40.330 --> 14:48.210]  I was really excited about the job at first, because the network of schools it was being written for actually did encourage kids to get hands-on and learn through real-world projects.
[14:48.550 --> 14:51.710]  The only problem was it was being run by...
[14:51.710 --> 14:55.370]  a new minor key music, dun-dun-dun, a textbook company.
[14:58.480 --> 15:00.960]  Working on textbooks can be positively Kafkaesque.
[15:04.140 --> 15:14.940]  If you've read, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, which I hope everybody has, by the physicist Richard Feynman, who was also a great lock picker, as it turns out.
[15:15.480 --> 15:18.220]  He was also once called on to review textbooks.
[15:18.220 --> 15:23.200]  He and his fellow reviewers were given a blank book, since the publisher hadn't finished it yet.
[15:23.520 --> 15:30.600]  And on the basis of these blank pages, his fellow reviewers gave the book a good grade, and the title was set to be distributed to schools.
[15:32.120 --> 15:39.440]  I should have been warned in my own curriculum when my co-writers and I were asked to develop a lesson plan entitled, Software Piracy, as an exercise.
[15:40.400 --> 15:46.920]  We were given a suggested list of questions, which included, what should I do if I think I have received illegal software?
[15:51.360 --> 15:53.700]  What are the four main types of legal software?
[15:53.800 --> 15:54.660]  There's only four of them.
[15:54.920 --> 15:55.440]  Four main types.
[15:55.540 --> 15:56.100]  Can you guess what they are?
[15:56.180 --> 15:57.100]  I couldn't guess what they were.
[15:57.440 --> 15:58.440]  And how do they differ?
[15:59.420 --> 16:03.080]  And then, how does software piracy affect our nation's economy?
[16:03.920 --> 16:05.500]  And our future job opportunities?
[16:07.880 --> 16:14.820]  Also, it might have been a hint when the outline showed a preventing security problems lesson with the subheading, Using Windows Accounts.
[16:16.640 --> 16:19.500]  The task I was given was as Kafkaesque as Feynman's.
[16:19.740 --> 16:26.440]  The nationwide program I was writing for was supposed to prepare disadvantaged high schoolers for the kind of abstract learning they'd have to do in college.
[16:26.740 --> 16:32.300]  However, the course I was developing was supposed to get the kids A-plus certified, which is basically a technical certification.
[16:33.180 --> 16:37.980]  Now, the A-plus certificate supposedly requires 500 hours of hands-on work with computers.
[16:38.300 --> 16:42.700]  So I started writing a curriculum where kids were building machines from scratch and f*cking around with RegEdit.
[16:43.440 --> 16:45.440]  But then the editors started to ask questions.
[16:45.720 --> 16:48.140]  Would teachers have administrative access to their machines?
[16:48.680 --> 16:49.380]  Probably not.
[16:49.680 --> 16:52.680]  Would schools be willing to spare machines for kids to open up?
[16:53.180 --> 16:53.840]  Guessing no.
[16:54.500 --> 16:56.480]  Would teachers even be comfortable opening up the case?
[16:56.700 --> 16:57.640]  Well, yeah, not likely.
[16:58.200 --> 17:06.700]  So they told me to take out the hands-on stuff, which, if you recall, their school's mission actually called for, to focus on making kids write and read about computers.
[17:10.940 --> 17:12.660]  So frankly, I was part of the problem.
[17:12.900 --> 17:18.640]  They hired me knowing that I've done a little bit of Java coding, but don't actually have much expertise under the hood of a computer.
[17:19.260 --> 17:24.080]  When I asked to get paid for doing research to further my knowledge, they said, you're not being paid to learn.
[17:24.340 --> 17:25.280]  Just write the curriculum.
[17:26.500 --> 17:33.440]  So when they finally hired somebody to review my content, I was really thrilled because I was worried I'd write something wrong and thousands of kids would end up electrocuted.
[17:34.680 --> 17:36.420]  And I also thought, this guy's an old hand.
[17:36.580 --> 17:38.660]  He's a computer systems instructor at a community college.
[17:38.800 --> 17:42.280]  He'll be able to give me tips on teaching in an engaging way to students who are kind of out of it.
[17:42.900 --> 17:45.620]  So I wrote to him and I said, hey, Tim, I can have lesson plans.
[17:47.240 --> 17:48.900]  And he sent me back the following.
[17:49.660 --> 17:51.300]  Now, mind you, these are his slides.
[17:51.420 --> 17:55.000]  The only thing I've altered is the backgrounds kind of came up, and I haven't changed them in any way.
[17:55.920 --> 17:57.040]  I can't do this.
[17:57.920 --> 18:00.260]  Witness the wonders of the typical computer system.
[18:00.500 --> 18:03.460]  Gratis Encyclopedia Britannica, copyright 2003.
[18:04.780 --> 18:13.760]  Please note that you should be learning that the mouse is a very complicated device, and it has a scroll wheel, and a left click, and a right click, and components.
[18:14.400 --> 18:19.500]  While the computer's internal layout is very small, incomprehensible, and can be described in three words.
[18:19.940 --> 18:21.260]  Computer internal layout.
[18:22.380 --> 18:24.540]  Also, upper right hand corner, pink ponies.
[18:27.440 --> 18:28.440]  OMG ponies.
[18:29.700 --> 18:32.880]  A lot of his instructional materials were step by step.
[18:33.640 --> 18:41.560]  And unless I forget to mention, there was one lesson that was going to be Mac and Linux, and the rest of the curriculum was supposed to be in Windows.
[18:43.580 --> 18:49.480]  The process of individually picking up and moving thousands of files on a hard disk is a slow process.
[18:51.540 --> 18:54.700]  Obviously, this is an important piece of knowledge that kids need to memorize, right?
[18:56.620 --> 18:58.840]  No further explanation was given to me about this one.
[18:59.000 --> 19:02.620]  I can only hope that when he used these slides, he actually explained what the hell was going on.
[19:03.140 --> 19:04.820]  And yes, his headlines were all in all caps.
[19:06.500 --> 19:07.300]  Storage devices.
[19:07.580 --> 19:08.440]  Yes, they are.
[19:10.320 --> 19:11.840]  And my personal favorite.
[19:12.140 --> 19:13.660]  Can you name the device?
[19:14.180 --> 19:15.000]  Can you name it?
[19:15.160 --> 19:15.580]  Let's try.
[19:16.000 --> 19:16.700]  Security phone.
[19:16.940 --> 19:17.660]  Top hat.
[19:18.200 --> 19:18.680]  Glados.
[19:19.100 --> 19:19.880]  Hot dog.
[19:20.680 --> 19:21.640]  Flying saucer.
[19:21.800 --> 19:22.500]  TI-81.
[19:22.900 --> 19:23.240]  iMac.
[19:23.420 --> 19:24.860]  Hotel do not disturb tag.
[19:25.840 --> 19:26.800]  Space invader.
[19:27.100 --> 19:27.500]  Sewing machine.
[19:27.720 --> 19:27.980]  No!
[19:28.420 --> 19:28.660]  No!
[19:28.900 --> 19:29.040]  No!
[19:34.580 --> 19:39.000]  I think it might be a speak and spell in a microwave, and then there's something teledildonic down at the bottom.
[19:39.600 --> 19:41.760]  But they're not going to tell the kids that's what it is, of course.
[19:41.960 --> 19:45.460]  So, they didn't hire me to be an expert on computer systems.
[19:45.520 --> 19:46.280]  Who did they hire?
[19:46.440 --> 19:49.680]  The guy who was supposed to be my oversight rarely questioned anything I wrote.
[19:49.880 --> 19:53.240]  It was the blind leading the blind, and frankly, we needed you guys there.
[19:55.920 --> 19:58.660]  When I entered grad school, I thought what we needed was the primer.
[19:58.980 --> 20:01.060]  Better technology than we have now.
[20:01.600 --> 20:03.880]  But let's read the primer a little bit more closely.
[20:04.940 --> 20:08.100]  Stevenson's book mainly follows three girls, Nell, Elizabeth, and Fiona.
[20:08.800 --> 20:12.380]  No spoilers, but Nell's the one who ends up making the most of what she learned from the primer.
[20:12.840 --> 20:15.940]  And when we look at why, it comes down to a human factor.
[20:17.000 --> 20:25.780]  A single devoted teacher, Miranda, or in this case, the onboard computer of the USS Enterprise, Majel Barrett, is behind the scenes working with Nell through the book.
[20:27.160 --> 20:36.660]  What we really need, and this is what Isaac's been saying, or not Isaac, sorry, what Ivan's been saying about OLPC, what we really need is better people at the wheel and better social institutions.
[20:37.960 --> 20:41.880]  Another point of Steven Levy's that I'd like to return to is the sharing part of the hacker ethic.
[20:42.780 --> 20:44.760]  It's obviously behind the open source software ethic.
[20:45.000 --> 20:52.260]  But unfortunately, simply promoting open source software will not change how people use technology, as Ivan has explained in detail.
[20:52.740 --> 20:54.260]  Nor is sharing information enough.
[20:55.380 --> 21:00.500]  Research shows us that technology usually does not solve social problems without social help.
[21:01.080 --> 21:04.380]  People take old habits and apply them to new situations and technologies.
[21:05.040 --> 21:06.780]  We see this around the Internet all the time.
[21:08.400 --> 21:10.060]  Let me introduce you to my dissertation.
[21:10.460 --> 21:12.780]  This is not my dissertation, this is one of the websites I'm looking at.
[21:13.420 --> 21:20.820]  I like to describe my dissertation as either scraping the bottom of the Internet, or discovering the source of eternal September, for those of you who remember eternal September.
[21:22.780 --> 21:25.420]  This kind of blog thread is basically what I'm looking at.
[21:25.640 --> 21:38.220]  Some hapless blogger posts about something random from their own life, and suddenly commenters show up asking for help with something, usually contacting a celebrity, canceling a technical service, or finding arcane information like, what kind of spider just bit my brother,
[21:38.360 --> 21:39.120]  and is it poisonous?
[21:40.080 --> 21:47.860]  The blogger can't help them, and the blogger and his friends spend an increasingly long thread full of basically mocking AOL users as clueless.
[21:48.460 --> 21:58.080]  So what you see here is a post from a blog called Communications from Elsewhere, where a guy is telling a nice little anecdote about how he canceled his eFax service, and how incredibly freaking hard it was.
[21:59.160 --> 22:05.740]  And you go a little ways down in the comments, and you get people starting to say, I do not need eFax, please cancel and let me know if I cancel.
[22:06.460 --> 22:10.780]  And I don't believe she left an email address, so I'm not sure how she's supposed to be allowed to know if she canceled.
[22:11.080 --> 22:14.940]  And the blogger comes back and says, Woggle, what the hell is wrong with these people?
[22:15.320 --> 22:19.760]  And then somebody else says, I did not order eFax service, my youngest daughter did this, she does not live here.
[22:19.760 --> 22:21.460]  I do not want or need this service.
[22:21.780 --> 22:24.620]  I'm having enough problems paying my bills now on SSI.
[22:24.780 --> 22:29.080]  Please contact me at my email address, and here it is, along with her name in all caps.
[22:30.320 --> 22:31.800]  So we see this over and over.
[22:31.920 --> 22:39.860]  I mean, it's the point where there's actually a consistent linguistic way of posting a comment like this, and a consistent set of things that bloggers are saying to them.
[22:40.640 --> 22:50.260]  The funny thing is, you end up seeing enough of these, and you side with the clueless commenters, because the bloggers almost always give their post a title which is really misleading, canceling eFax service.
[22:50.520 --> 22:52.280]  Is this the page for canceling eFax?
[22:52.420 --> 22:52.760]  I don't know.
[22:52.880 --> 22:53.400]  Maybe it is.
[22:53.560 --> 22:57.660]  I mean, the title heading there is just about as big as communications from elsewhere.
[22:57.880 --> 22:59.200]  And what is a communication from elsewhere?
[22:59.300 --> 23:00.420]  What elsewhere are we talking about?
[23:00.740 --> 23:01.760]  Whose blog is this?
[23:01.900 --> 23:05.500]  I mean, maybe you know how to read the URL, but URLs are long, complicated things.
[23:08.000 --> 23:09.240]  What's it for that matter?
[23:09.380 --> 23:10.340]  What the f*ck is a blog?
[23:10.620 --> 23:11.080]  So, you know.
[23:12.580 --> 23:15.240]  And in this case, the guy says, my name is Josh, but which Josh?
[23:15.340 --> 23:16.240]  I know a lot of Josh's.
[23:16.320 --> 23:17.320]  Is this one of Josh's I know?
[23:17.420 --> 23:19.360]  Is it like a Josh who's famous or something like that?
[23:19.420 --> 23:20.620]  I have no idea who this guy is.
[23:22.120 --> 23:30.680]  You know, and in this case, he has put a little bar there once people showed up that says, to learn how to cancel your eFax service, click here.
[23:31.080 --> 23:32.160]  Very nice of him, very friendly.
[23:32.300 --> 23:34.440]  It contrasts very nicely with his very beige website.
[23:34.940 --> 23:45.060]  But if you went to the Evil Interfaces talk earlier today, which was fabulous, the speaker there basically said, yeah, if it looks like an ad, people are going to start to ignore it.
[23:45.220 --> 23:45.920]  It's banner blindness.
[23:46.140 --> 23:47.280]  Basically, people can't see this.
[23:47.380 --> 23:53.220]  So if they see that thing and it looks like maybe it's a deceptive ad saying this is where you cancel eFax service, who knows if we should believe it?
[23:53.300 --> 23:54.040]  I just don't know.
[23:55.080 --> 23:56.420]  How are we supposed to read this?
[23:57.000 --> 24:00.680]  Remember, until 2000, there wasn't even any convention for building blogs.
[24:00.980 --> 24:03.860]  So there weren't any conventions for how to read blogs either.
[24:04.780 --> 24:06.720]  Our understanding of blogs is very new.
[24:07.180 --> 24:10.800]  It's even newer for the long tail of readers than it is for early adopter writers.
[24:11.620 --> 24:17.200]  And you can't just blame this on the stupid people out there, because it's not just AOL users who are responsible for the phenomenon here.
[24:17.960 --> 24:26.420]  Josh, the blogger, obscures who he is with the help of the blogging software, which puts its about link somewhere over on the right-hand side, which, once again, is not where people's eyes track when they're looking at this page.
[24:27.520 --> 24:34.860]  And then AOL's crap-ass search algorithm looks at the site and ranks it highly, because it's like, oh, cancelling eFacts is in like H6 or something like that.
[24:35.040 --> 24:35.880]  So, you know, there you go.
[24:36.820 --> 24:41.800]  Google, their slightly less crappy algorithm ranks this page number two for cancelling eFacts.
[24:42.180 --> 24:45.240]  Because Google is basically a popularity contest.
[24:45.480 --> 24:52.280]  And a number of smart-ass bloggers indicated this is a good site to go for, for, hey, look about this funny site about cancelling eFacts.
[24:52.440 --> 24:53.480]  So great job, guys.
[24:53.640 --> 24:55.060]  You know, you just made the Internet stupider.
[24:55.220 --> 24:55.540]  Way to go.
[24:59.640 --> 25:00.040]  Right.
[25:00.380 --> 25:03.120]  And frankly, they don't teach you how to read a website in school.
[25:03.460 --> 25:04.860]  It's not the same as reading a textbook.
[25:05.100 --> 25:06.480]  It's not the same as reading a newspaper.
[25:08.100 --> 25:18.660]  So anyway, while Steven Levy's distillations of the hacker ethic are really smart ideals, which I'd like to see more people conform to, they're not the only axioms we need if we want to enlighten people and build the primer.
[25:19.520 --> 25:21.560]  Hackers need to be smarter social engineers.
[25:22.080 --> 25:24.540]  And I want to suggest some corollaries to the hacker ethic.
[25:27.560 --> 25:31.040]  Conversations begin sin-sin-ack, not sin-f*ck-you-ack.
[25:37.820 --> 25:39.100]  You don't want to be like this guy.
[25:39.300 --> 25:44.020]  As I've been trolling around looking for examples of misunderstanding at the Internet, this came up.
[25:44.660 --> 25:51.320]  You've got a city council person from Tuttle, Oklahoma saying, who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and everyone else from accessing it?
[25:51.320 --> 25:52.400]  Question mark times three.
[25:52.640 --> 25:56.040]  Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!
[25:56.320 --> 25:57.360]  Exclamation point times two.
[25:57.580 --> 25:59.600]  I am the city manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
[26:00.580 --> 26:06.620]  And he sent this to the company Centos whose, I guess it was a man page or something, was showing up in place of their actual website.
[26:06.800 --> 26:11.040]  And the response he gets from Centos begins, I feel sorry for your city.
[26:13.360 --> 26:18.480]  Don't begin a conversation with an insult even if the other person insults you first.
[26:18.480 --> 26:21.540]  It's just not a good way to manage your tech support, frankly.
[26:22.220 --> 26:23.700]  I am clearly no saint here either.
[26:23.940 --> 26:30.540]  When it came to that job at the textbook company, I eventually quit and said to my boss, you were feeding the children crap and lies and I'm not going to participate in this anymore.
[26:31.040 --> 26:32.940]  I think social niceties are retarded.
[26:33.100 --> 26:35.000]  I know a lot of you think social niceties are retarded.
[26:35.140 --> 26:39.540]  But unfortunately they are the way to finesse social hack and brute force solutions don't work.
[26:42.020 --> 26:43.440]  So, thank you.
[26:45.580 --> 26:53.260]  The next corollary I'd like to offer is, when your code expects binary input, you don't call it irrational when you feed it hex and it crashes.
[26:55.060 --> 26:57.380]  People reason using the tools they have at hand.
[26:57.700 --> 27:00.480]  They act according to rules they have developed with people around them.
[27:01.120 --> 27:09.020]  Consider the hole in the wall project in India, which found that street children using a public windows machine called the hourglass cursor a drum and the pointer a needle.
[27:09.340 --> 27:14.360]  They didn't know about hourglasses and they had no context for a cursor, so they made sense of them using things in their community.
[27:14.800 --> 27:19.260]  And calling a cursor a needle probably helped them understand what was going on on the computer, but how about the drum?
[27:21.300 --> 27:24.220]  The actions of many noob tech users may look illogical to us.
[27:24.360 --> 27:35.960]  For example, using your computer in the rain with only some saran wrap to help you, or using a CD as a mirror while you comb your hair, or the classic using your CD drive as a cup holder and breaking your machine that way.
[27:36.500 --> 27:47.320]  Up top, this is actually not necessarily a bad use, but it's an interesting use of the one laptop per child that's going on, I think in Thailand, where the kids were doing a biodiversity project by documenting local plants using the camera and the computer.
[27:47.500 --> 27:49.660]  So obviously some awesome things are happening with OLPC.
[27:50.740 --> 27:54.320]  So people reason using the tools they have at hand, and I said that already.
[27:54.920 --> 28:00.000]  The actions of many noob tech users may look illogical to us, but they often simply expect other input.
[28:00.840 --> 28:04.940]  Computer science's particular flavor of Western logic is not culturally universal.
[28:05.320 --> 28:08.640]  It's built on our metaphors and language and other abstractions.
[28:08.880 --> 28:20.500]  And you can call me a relativist hippie if you have to, but even some people from our own hometowns grew up in other historical material circumstances, which makes the ways we use technology look baffling and counterintuitive.
[28:21.000 --> 28:29.560]  One of the major things I see as I'm going around the Internet looking for examples of misunderstanding, and this happened on my own blog, is people showing up and mistaking the blogger for a celebrity.
[28:29.780 --> 28:37.300]  The classic example showed up on Metafilter a while back, where somebody wrote a post saying, I went to see Maury Povich's talk show, and Maury said this really stupid thing.
[28:37.420 --> 28:38.020]  I had a great time.
[28:38.160 --> 28:38.480]  The end.
[28:38.640 --> 28:41.380]  And people showed up saying, Dear Maury, I need you to find my baby daddy.
[28:41.380 --> 28:42.620]  I need you to give me a makeover.
[28:42.680 --> 28:43.820]  I need you to change my life.
[28:44.740 --> 28:46.100]  And that happens a lot.
[28:46.380 --> 28:57.580]  But the interesting thing is, if you go back in time, there is really a really incredible long-standing precedent of writing letters to people who you don't know at all about things that are kind of crazy.
[28:57.760 --> 29:04.620]  Like in the 1950s, Wilkie Collins was a romantic writer at the time, wrote one of the first, I guess, thriller novels.
[29:05.120 --> 29:12.120]  And he got letters from people saying, I know your heroine isn't real, but she's really awesome, and I want to find the woman she's based on.
[29:12.200 --> 29:13.360]  Can you tell her I want to marry her?
[29:13.360 --> 29:15.140]  You know, so marriage proposals are coming out of this.
[29:15.820 --> 29:21.880]  The town of Verona, Italy, for a long time, has received letters for Juliet, as in Romeo and Juliet.
[29:23.280 --> 29:29.600]  And that's sort of funny, considering if you've read the play, you know that even if she doesn't exist, she's sort of not in a condition to be answering any mail.
[29:29.920 --> 29:30.740]  You know, so...
[29:31.940 --> 29:39.660]  But so yeah, and there's some really great examples of people writing letters to celebrities to newspapers for years and years, and some newspapers have basically held on to these letters.
[29:40.320 --> 29:42.320]  The fact is, the Internet just makes this more transparent.
[29:42.320 --> 29:44.940]  It's not that people are getting any stupider, and it's not that they're stupid.
[29:45.140 --> 29:49.540]  They're just doing something that makes sense to them, and my interest is more in finding out why it makes sense.
[29:54.630 --> 30:04.750]  So basically, treating their technology use as irrational or illogical doesn't help us build any better technology, and it doesn't help us spread the messages we'd like to send.
[30:07.510 --> 30:11.290]  This is why what Ivan says about the One Laptop Per Child project is particularly troubling.
[30:12.010 --> 30:13.450]  Deployment is the most important step.
[30:14.350 --> 30:22.750]  History suggests that social change programs which don't research the culture of their target countries die tragic, wasteful deaths, which are sometimes darkly amusing, but tragic and wasteful nonetheless.
[30:23.710 --> 30:31.690]  If you're deploying any technology, you need to get into the mindset and the culture of the people who are supposed to use it, and then you need to get the technology into shape to fit that culture.
[30:34.290 --> 30:43.250]  And finally, my last candidate for additions to the hacker ethic is that vulnerability is opportunity, which I sort of actually kind of expected Stephen Levy to say, but he never really did.
[30:43.790 --> 30:46.750]  This goes not just for security, it goes for social systems as well.
[30:47.410 --> 30:56.070]  Changing the way people use technology is a matter of finding the right vulnerabilities in a network of laws, funding, media, and other social institutions, including the education system.
[30:56.750 --> 30:58.610]  I've been thinking about these vulnerabilities a lot.
[30:58.970 --> 31:04.210]  Currently, the No Child Left Behind Act makes it hard to talk about teaching anything else in schools but standardized tests.
[31:04.810 --> 31:06.750]  Technology is basically completely out the window.
[31:07.410 --> 31:09.530]  With the election coming up, this might change.
[31:09.890 --> 31:15.030]  The Department of Ed changed guard completely when Bush took office, and it could happen again.
[31:15.710 --> 31:19.890]  And speaking of that changing the guard, I just need to say a couple things about what's going down in the Department of Education.
[31:20.070 --> 31:22.030]  First of all, this is the building, the Department of Education.
[31:22.210 --> 31:23.150]  This is how it looks right now.
[31:23.350 --> 31:25.410]  I did not Photoshop this, unfortunately.
[31:25.770 --> 31:35.270]  What they did is they took this hideous concrete block Soviet-style building, and they're like, let's put some little tacky red facades on the front that say, No Child Left Behind, like an old schoolhouse.
[31:36.570 --> 31:38.550]  Basically, it's like what we do to schools.
[31:38.550 --> 31:41.190]  It's a band-aid on a larger problem, as far as I can tell.
[31:41.290 --> 31:45.750]  The other scary thing about the Department of Education is, you can go around D.C.
[31:45.790 --> 31:52.070]  and talk to people who have been in educational change work and just educational policy work for a really long time.
[31:52.290 --> 31:53.330]  They're 70, 80 years old.
[31:53.530 --> 31:54.350]  They're battle-scarred.
[31:54.430 --> 31:57.110]  They know, you know, what's a trend and what's a fad and what's not.
[31:58.230 --> 32:00.730]  None of them are working for the Department of Education right now.
[32:00.810 --> 32:08.850]  We spent a day in my policy class going down and talking with the septuagenarians, and we went to here, and everybody inside that building is younger than me.
[32:09.030 --> 32:09.550]  I'm 31.
[32:10.230 --> 32:14.750]  And their main claim to fame is that they worked for congressman so-and-so up on the hill as a page.
[32:15.610 --> 32:19.070]  So that's who's at the wheel right now, and we better hope that things kind of change.
[32:19.230 --> 32:31.050]  I would really like to see somebody who actually gives the first flying care about educational technology in there, because it is not... I don't think it's even mentioned in any of the policy briefs right now, or any of the policy recommendations.
[32:31.470 --> 32:34.850]  It was mentioned in the Clinton administration once Bush came in, nothing.
[32:35.050 --> 32:36.370]  Nothing in documentation to speak of.
[32:37.870 --> 32:38.830]  So it could happen again.
[32:38.970 --> 32:40.570]  I mean, things could change with the next election.
[32:40.710 --> 32:41.450]  Things could not change.
[32:41.570 --> 32:42.690]  We'll really have to see how that goes.
[32:43.210 --> 32:49.010]  And even if things do change, maybe people are too scared by the economy right now to think about being anything less than rigorous in the classroom.
[32:49.150 --> 32:51.730]  And rigor to people means standardized tests a lot of the time.
[32:52.450 --> 32:54.250]  So I'm thinking of other options.
[32:54.470 --> 32:57.510]  What about after-school programs as places to teach technology?
[32:57.590 --> 33:01.530]  What about the superhero store in Brooklyn and the pirate store in San Francisco, 826?
[33:01.870 --> 33:02.450]  Really good places.
[33:02.870 --> 33:05.870]  Lots of ways to connect with kids without the formal structure of schools.
[33:06.710 --> 33:08.230]  Mass media aren't mass anymore.
[33:08.230 --> 33:12.950]  So getting educational media as broad of a distribution as Sesame Street is less likely.
[33:13.850 --> 33:16.130]  How do we assure that we reach that many kids?
[33:16.530 --> 33:20.650]  And how do we mobilize millions of Miranda's teachers to teach through our primers?
[33:21.210 --> 33:23.550]  What about Google's 20% program, I've been thinking?
[33:23.870 --> 33:29.450]  Where employees are, in theory at least, encouraged to spend the equivalent of one day a week doing work with social benefits.
[33:29.450 --> 33:32.630]  I hear it doesn't usually work out that way, but it's on the books at Google.
[33:32.790 --> 33:35.170]  Google, if you're not going to be evil, hey, we could work something out.
[33:36.370 --> 33:40.030]  So we have to basically find the places which will actually give a little when we push.
[33:41.750 --> 33:45.510]  Aside from the nanotech, we more or less have the technology we need to make the primer.
[33:46.030 --> 33:49.590]  We've got the Internet, we've got Wikipedia, we've got OLPCs.
[33:50.070 --> 33:55.530]  We can keep perfecting educational technologies until we're blue in the face, and we can make new and even better ones.
[33:55.850 --> 33:58.070]  This is just not the problem anymore.
[33:58.630 --> 34:02.870]  If we really want to change technology in education, we need more Miranda's to help deliver.
[34:03.210 --> 34:04.270]  And that's all I have to say.
[34:12.910 --> 34:20.690]  And we have plenty of time left, and I know I've got some colleagues from my department in the audience and other folks who I know are interested in the subject, so let's start a discussion.
[34:22.890 --> 34:28.030]  Mics are up front, and please stand at them, because they actually catch you on camera, so we get to record the entire discussion.
[34:30.430 --> 34:38.690]  How much of this do you think is just a resource question of getting more teachers into classrooms and lowering the student-to-teacher ratio?
[34:39.210 --> 34:47.190]  I think lowering the student-to-teacher ratio is important, although there's some sort of questions about whether that is the most important thing.
[34:47.650 --> 34:48.610]  But I think you're right.
[34:48.730 --> 34:54.310]  I mean, one of the things that we know now about classrooms is there really is nationwide like a five-to-one computer-to-kid ratio.
[34:54.450 --> 34:54.810]  No, sorry.
[34:55.150 --> 34:55.770]  One-to-five.
[34:56.330 --> 34:59.230]  One computer for every five kids in school, which is a pretty decent ratio.
[35:00.510 --> 35:01.910]  Most schools are pretty well connected.
[35:02.050 --> 35:03.530]  They still got a lot of net-nannying software.
[35:03.670 --> 35:04.190]  That kind of sucks.
[35:04.190 --> 35:10.290]  But the real issue that we found, and my advisor is big up on this, is that people teach the way that they were taught.
[35:10.610 --> 35:14.310]  And most of the teachers who are alive right now were never taught using technology.
[35:14.670 --> 35:15.250]  I wasn't even...
[35:15.250 --> 35:19.310]  I mean, a lot of the time technology, even in our generation, has been taught as an add-on.
[35:19.490 --> 35:23.490]  So, you know, I did logo and basic programming, but it wasn't applied to my English classes.
[35:23.710 --> 35:28.330]  And if it had been, I might have started programming earlier, because, you know, I was interested in it as a linguistic thing.
[35:28.890 --> 35:34.110]  So, yeah, I mean, I think really one of the critical things is going to be teacher training and introducing more educators to this kind of thing.
[35:34.750 --> 35:35.330]  In the back.
[35:35.870 --> 35:37.310]  Hi, does this microphone work?
[35:37.510 --> 35:37.910]  It's good.
[35:38.650 --> 35:42.890]  Now, when you said OLPC is like a tool against the government...
[35:42.890 --> 35:43.630]  Did I say...
[35:43.630 --> 35:44.710]  I don't think I said...
[35:44.710 --> 35:45.350]  Did I say that?
[35:45.470 --> 35:50.190]  I thought you were saying we had tools like Wikipedia to, like, kind of counteract the government, right?
[35:51.630 --> 35:55.710]  I basically meant that we were, you know, we got tools to...
[35:55.710 --> 35:57.030]  I mean, it's not to counteract the government.
[35:57.170 --> 36:00.730]  I mean, the whole idea with the primer is it's a tool to educate kids in the way the kids want to be educated.
[36:01.570 --> 36:02.090]  So, I don't know.
[36:02.190 --> 36:08.930]  Doesn't it seem weird that we would export white people's technology to Africa and not give them the infrastructure to actually build those things?
[36:09.050 --> 36:09.290]  Yeah.
[36:09.510 --> 36:12.670]  Just kind of ship them these things that they're not actually able to build?
[36:12.910 --> 36:13.110]  Yeah.
[36:13.510 --> 36:16.250]  And also, like, kind of ruin the environment in making these computers?
[36:16.470 --> 36:16.770]  Yeah, yeah.
[36:16.830 --> 36:18.850]  And are you just trying to make new generations of consumers?
[36:19.070 --> 36:21.110]  Those are other critiques that have been raised against OLPC.
[36:21.330 --> 36:31.830]  And I know, I mean, particularly in African cultures, at countries, a lot of the governments down there, you know, they have seen this, these policies of structural adjustment and other things that have come down to Africa.
[36:32.770 --> 36:37.910]  And they sort of go, this is another set of technology which doesn't take our local situation into account.
[36:37.910 --> 36:39.010]  Why are you guys doing this?
[36:39.110 --> 36:40.270]  Can't you give us something that's useful?
[36:41.750 --> 36:44.070]  So, you know, I mean, probably that's not everywhere.
[36:44.490 --> 36:45.710]  So, what is something that's useful?
[36:45.970 --> 36:46.250]  Sorry?
[36:46.410 --> 36:47.710]  What is something that's useful?
[36:47.870 --> 36:48.750]  I think dialogue.
[36:48.950 --> 36:49.550]  I think dialogue.
[36:49.810 --> 36:51.370]  Getting more people talking.
[36:51.370 --> 36:52.670]  I think talking is important.
[36:52.830 --> 36:53.330]  I think...
[36:53.330 --> 37:00.590]  And like I said, I mean, like OLPC and the previous projects that Nicolas Negroponte was on and many, many social change projects in general, don't necessarily...
[37:00.590 --> 37:04.770]  They're not built on good research on how communities already do things.
[37:05.310 --> 37:13.850]  One of the really interesting examples, if you want to look into good and bad examples of how cultural change is adapted, there's two things.
[37:13.930 --> 37:23.290]  If you like the tipping point, you should read the book that it was, like, stolen from, which is Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers, which is a book this thick on the best of things we know about social change.
[37:23.550 --> 37:41.830]  And a more... a less dry policy-like book and a more entertaining book is The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which is a great book about how some policies in the Hmong community and I think Laos and Cambodia did sort of look into how do people spread messages about health change,
[37:42.010 --> 37:42.670]  health technologies.
[37:43.310 --> 37:44.830]  And it looked into the ways they did that.
[37:44.830 --> 37:45.870]  So they held parades.
[37:46.110 --> 37:50.050]  You know, they didn't do, like, a radio broadcast, which is maybe not necessarily what people were into there.
[37:50.170 --> 37:56.470]  They held parades with traditional storytelling characters and they said, you know, this is, you know, this is how you do this particular health thing.
[37:56.510 --> 37:57.730]  And that works a little bit better.
[37:57.910 --> 38:02.830]  But I just want to suggest that maybe radio is more important for developing world Yeah.
[38:03.010 --> 38:04.350]  Because you can actually build those things.
[38:04.630 --> 38:04.790]  Yeah.
[38:05.110 --> 38:07.370]  Radio is certainly very useful.
[38:07.570 --> 38:09.050]  And I've seen some good projects there.
[38:09.390 --> 38:11.450]  So, question up front this time.
[38:11.710 --> 38:12.790]  Well, just two quick comments.
[38:12.790 --> 38:18.370]  One to follow up on Guides' issue with lack of infrastructure.
[38:18.710 --> 38:25.030]  Lee Felsenstein, who started the Homebrew Computing Club and kind of started the whole personal computing revolution.
[38:25.330 --> 38:29.050]  And, you know, not to take credit away from other people who contributed to that either.
[38:29.210 --> 38:32.570]  But he makes exactly that same complaint as well, or criticism.
[38:34.070 --> 38:35.810]  And it's well worth looking at what Lee has said.
[38:35.910 --> 38:37.410]  I think about OLPC specifically, right?
[38:37.550 --> 38:39.070]  Because, I mean, Lee had a lot of experience.
[38:39.230 --> 38:40.690]  And Steven Levy wrote about him as well.
[38:40.830 --> 38:46.250]  And, you know, they had a system in the Bay Area back in the day where they just had, like, computers up on the wall.
[38:46.330 --> 38:47.270]  And people could go up and play.
[38:47.430 --> 38:48.110]  And it was really just play.
[38:48.210 --> 38:49.530]  They sort of did what they wanted with computers.
[38:49.530 --> 38:58.830]  And the second, I guess it's a plug, or just have you read this, is The Muddle Machine on Edutopia.
[38:59.430 --> 39:08.450]  Specifically about the academic textbook industry and how it's processed and marketed and reduced down to PAP.
[39:09.070 --> 39:16.730]  It clearly illustrates the entire process and political forces behind why textbooks are written the way they are.
[39:16.730 --> 39:23.450]  I mean, there's some interesting stuff with that, like New York and Texas and Florida and California sort of have...
[39:23.450 --> 39:29.930]  I mean, when I worked in Texas at McGraw Hill across the street, they were basically like, we do whatever they say because they have the most kids and so they're the biggest market.
[39:30.090 --> 39:31.570]  And so what they say goes...
[39:31.570 --> 39:33.730]  Give us the... say that title real clear one more time.
[39:33.890 --> 39:34.810]  The Muddle Machine.
[39:35.210 --> 39:35.570]  Muddle?
[39:35.610 --> 39:35.970]  Muddle.
[39:36.130 --> 39:36.490]  Muddle.
[39:36.630 --> 39:38.350]  Like, yeah, muddling through something.
[39:38.410 --> 39:39.470]  Muddle Machine is fabulous.
[39:39.470 --> 39:44.110]  And it's on Edutopia, which I think is edutopia.org.
[39:44.190 --> 39:44.450]  Cool.
[39:44.450 --> 39:47.510]  I mean, Google will turn it up and I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of the author.
[39:48.030 --> 39:48.690]  Good stuff.
[39:48.910 --> 39:49.530]  In the back.
[39:51.330 --> 39:57.170]  I'm from Canada, so the education issue is a little bit different here, where I'm from.
[39:57.590 --> 40:04.850]  We do have technology programs, but I like the whole theme with the Young Ladies Illustrated primer.
[40:04.850 --> 40:18.250]  And the technology programs I... that when... when we have a technology program, it's basically, here's Word in Excel, write a resume in a personal letter and learn how to add two cells.
[40:18.450 --> 40:18.630]  Yeah.
[40:18.910 --> 40:25.470]  And I feel like that's almost more of a hurdle to overcome because it's not just, let's change a policy.
[40:25.470 --> 40:29.270]  It has to... you have to change the whole way everyone thinks about it.
[40:29.670 --> 40:42.110]  Like, the computer program is nothing like Castle Turing from the primer, where instead of learning to sit down at a computer, she was given chains and you could flip bits on the chains.
[40:42.290 --> 40:43.030]  Like, it's like...
[40:43.030 --> 40:54.070]  This is a story that gets told in the primer of the heroine, Nell, goes into this world and ends up in a castle, where she's solving this puzzle using chains and basically just demonstrates, you know, how a bit works through playing with chains.
[40:54.250 --> 40:55.150]  It's just lovely.
[40:55.650 --> 41:01.910]  It's like that old quote, computer science is to computers as astronomy is to telescopes.
[41:02.970 --> 41:14.210]  And I'm just kind of curious as to what you think is the trick to overcome the feel that technology courses should be about making good little office workers and secretaries.
[41:14.230 --> 41:14.450]  Go teach.
[41:14.930 --> 41:15.730]  You go teach.
[41:15.930 --> 41:16.830]  All of you, go teach.
[41:16.970 --> 41:18.710]  At least for a little while, you'll burn out really quickly.
[41:18.810 --> 41:19.130]  Go teach.
[41:19.230 --> 41:20.550]  Go work in an after-school program.
[41:20.790 --> 41:21.430]  I'm serious.
[41:21.770 --> 41:22.870]  Find some hackerspaces.
[41:22.970 --> 41:24.910]  Your hackerspaces should get high school kids in there.
[41:24.990 --> 41:27.370]  They should get junior high school kids, elementary school kids.
[41:27.430 --> 41:28.210]  Their parents are freaking out.
[41:28.310 --> 41:31.170]  They're like, oh my god, they're gonna molest my children because that's what the media is telling them.
[41:31.250 --> 41:39.390]  But get as many children as you can in there in these liminal spaces because, I mean, if we don't have teachers, if the teachers we have only know how to use word.
[41:40.610 --> 41:48.830]  And I've really been sort of unfortunately exposed lately to the digital divide in gender.
[41:49.210 --> 41:57.890]  I did some studies on high school girls and technology and it was just alarming how the girls would try to hide from me that they were playing video games at all.
[41:58.070 --> 42:00.070]  Like, they just did not want to think of themselves as gamers.
[42:00.250 --> 42:01.270]  Like, they'd admit to anything.
[42:02.070 --> 42:05.030]  You know, they'd be like, hey, I played Xbox and PlayStation and blah, blah, blah.
[42:05.030 --> 42:06.710]  But I never play at home and I never play with my friends.
[42:06.770 --> 42:07.690]  I'm like, where are you playing?
[42:07.890 --> 42:08.810]  You're lying to me in some way.
[42:08.910 --> 42:09.930]  And they conflict themselves.
[42:10.610 --> 42:12.970]  So, I mean, and most of the teaching force is female.
[42:13.350 --> 42:16.550]  And it's just, you know, we're gonna keep perpetuating this.
[42:16.750 --> 42:17.930]  This is just how it's gonna be.
[42:18.030 --> 42:21.690]  There's gonna be these gender divides unless we start breaking up the usual molds of who does what.
[42:21.890 --> 42:24.050]  And this guy in the front's been waiting, so I wanna make sure that I give him some time.
[42:24.330 --> 42:27.250]  Okay, first I wanna plug my Hackerspace.
[42:27.250 --> 42:30.610]  So, to be honest, we have, I'm part of HacDC.
[42:30.950 --> 42:35.230]  And we are actually looking at doing an after-school program.
[42:35.830 --> 42:37.370]  So, whoever was...
[42:37.370 --> 42:37.510]  Good on ya.
[42:37.810 --> 42:39.970]  Back of the mic, just come to see me.
[42:40.470 --> 42:41.010]  My name's Tino.
[42:41.750 --> 42:49.650]  I wanna know, has your research done anything about how to get kids to plug in?
[42:49.650 --> 42:55.910]  I mean, you know, this, this whole conference should be, like, ten times as huge.
[42:56.310 --> 43:00.490]  Cause, it's, like, interesting stuff that we're doing, you know.
[43:00.790 --> 43:04.470]  But, at a very early age, we just tune out.
[43:04.670 --> 43:04.930]  Yeah.
[43:05.310 --> 43:05.530]  You know.
[43:05.670 --> 43:07.610]  It's, I think that's something we need to think about.
[43:07.790 --> 43:10.990]  Because, obviously, to the people in this room, the stuff that we do here is really fascinating.
[43:11.190 --> 43:12.270]  Like, it's really interesting stuff.
[43:12.770 --> 43:14.290]  Why is it not fascinating to the other kids?
[43:14.370 --> 43:14.990]  I don't know.
[43:15.150 --> 43:16.350]  I mean, I am not doing it.
[43:16.350 --> 43:18.650]  Part of it is probably the gender stuff, you know.
[43:18.810 --> 43:20.710]  Where girls are just like, the computer is not for me.
[43:20.930 --> 43:22.190]  But, it is...
[43:22.190 --> 43:22.510]  Thank you.
[43:23.510 --> 43:24.590]  When you are...
[43:24.590 --> 43:27.830]  I mean, if you are going to go out and do a program like this, listen to the kids.
[43:28.110 --> 43:28.670]  Listen to the kids.
[43:29.150 --> 43:32.070]  Let them tell you what they wanna do and what they wanna use computers for.
[43:32.990 --> 43:39.630]  I don't know if there's some way to get people more into getting their hands messy with the guts of the machine.
[43:39.890 --> 43:41.190]  If we can find that, we should do that.
[43:41.270 --> 43:42.350]  We gotta be working on that.
[43:42.630 --> 43:43.750]  Cause, OLPC's not doing it.
[43:43.830 --> 43:44.850]  I mean, they think it's just gonna happen.
[43:44.850 --> 43:47.110]  It's like, you give people the guts of the machine and hey, they go crazy.
[43:47.290 --> 43:48.570]  But, it doesn't always happen.
[43:49.450 --> 43:49.850]  So...
[43:49.850 --> 43:50.370]  Okay.
[43:50.630 --> 43:56.310]  No, cause I was just gonna say that most people that I see nowadays are...
[43:56.310 --> 44:04.790]  Education is a means to an end to get a great job so they can live the bling bling lifestyle.
[44:04.790 --> 44:08.790]  And, you know, go out and drink, you know, Cristal at night and stuff like that.
[44:09.090 --> 44:09.790]  And, you know...
[44:10.370 --> 44:11.210]  I mean, you know...
[44:11.210 --> 44:12.530]  And that's not...
[44:12.530 --> 44:12.950]  That's not...
[44:13.630 --> 44:14.150]  I mean...
[44:14.150 --> 44:14.570]  That's one...
[44:14.570 --> 44:15.710]  Ask them why they want that.
[44:15.870 --> 44:16.330]  I mean, think about it.
[44:16.410 --> 44:19.290]  I think a lot of times that comes from feelings of current insecurity.
[44:19.570 --> 44:21.910]  It's like, I am in a place where I...
[44:22.370 --> 44:23.630]  You know, my mom's on section eight.
[44:23.770 --> 44:24.750]  Our house just burned down.
[44:24.850 --> 44:27.230]  I'm talking about a particular student that I've been working with since she was 12.
[44:27.370 --> 44:28.070]  She's now in college.
[44:28.890 --> 44:32.910]  You know, and she very much at first was just like, I need to be able to buy my mom a house.
[44:33.310 --> 44:35.950]  And so, you know, there are very specific financial goals that they get.
[44:36.030 --> 44:37.830]  But if you get them into that and if you get them into...
[44:37.830 --> 44:42.570]  If you help them get to a place of safety, I feel like there are ways to sort of go...
[44:43.350 --> 44:45.230]  Let's rethink why that's your goal, you know?
[44:45.350 --> 44:46.450]  But you gotta talk about those things.
[44:46.550 --> 44:49.350]  You can't just assume that they have those goals and that's not gonna change.
[44:49.490 --> 44:50.690]  You have to open a dialogue.
[44:50.930 --> 44:52.590]  And it has to be long term and it just has to go on.
[44:52.650 --> 44:53.490]  It has to be face to face.
[44:53.950 --> 44:56.750]  You know, you can't always get people on IRC, you know?
[44:56.870 --> 44:57.350]  It's just...
[44:57.350 --> 44:58.210]  No, yeah, I know.
[44:58.410 --> 44:59.190]  Yeah, so... Okay.
[44:59.430 --> 44:59.870]  Okay.
[45:00.270 --> 45:00.270]  Thanks.
[45:01.050 --> 45:02.930]  Got behind you, actually, because this line is getting a little bit long.
[45:03.550 --> 45:03.990]  Okay.
[45:05.010 --> 45:06.610]  And we have five minutes left, I think.
[45:06.830 --> 45:07.250]  Okay.
[45:07.290 --> 45:11.390]  I would like to mention that I do teach computer science at a college level.
[45:11.930 --> 45:17.750]  And I was teaching last year in a liberal arts school, Potsdam College in upstate New York.
[45:17.930 --> 45:22.910]  And most of the kids there were actually interested in building a better world, not just getting a better job.
[45:23.070 --> 45:24.450]  And that was very encouraging.
[45:26.490 --> 45:35.410]  But my question is, actually, you mentioned that we have to adapt our technology to the culture of wherever we're trying to deliver this technology.
[45:35.650 --> 45:43.550]  But when we're talking about educating America's youth, nowadays, more and more, technology is their culture.
[45:43.790 --> 45:47.150]  I mean, you know, I'm from a way rural town.
[45:47.430 --> 45:48.790]  I came here in this place.
[45:48.970 --> 45:49.710]  I love this place.
[45:49.830 --> 45:53.490]  I went down to the Apple store at about 10 or 11 o'clock last night.
[45:53.490 --> 45:56.010]  And at least half the people are kids.
[45:56.030 --> 45:58.430]  And they're just into it.
[45:58.850 --> 46:04.190]  And the adults are kind of standing around going, you know, does this play in K3s?
[46:04.790 --> 46:06.550]  So you're saying it's their culture, basically.
[46:06.830 --> 46:06.970]  Right.
[46:06.970 --> 46:08.730]  So technology is more and more their culture.
[46:08.930 --> 46:14.470]  So it's almost like we, trying to be the teachers, are the ones that are behind.
[46:14.470 --> 46:22.190]  And we're really being prideful in thinking that we can teach them about the technology.
[46:22.330 --> 46:23.050]  We've got to learn that.
[46:23.050 --> 46:26.070]  That's one of the ideas behind this sort of constructivist education.
[46:26.230 --> 46:28.830]  The idea is that you help... you're a guide on the side.
[46:28.930 --> 46:30.950]  You're not a sage on the stage, like, unfortunately, I'm being right now.
[46:31.170 --> 46:35.210]  You're a guide on the side of the kid, helping them build their own forms of knowledge.
[46:35.490 --> 46:40.890]  One of the better studies that I've found that our wonderful professor, Ellen Meyer, gave us...
[46:40.890 --> 46:42.930]  She used to hack on kit computers back in the day.
[46:43.030 --> 46:43.610]  She's friggin' awesome.
[46:44.750 --> 46:46.990]  She has done a lot of work on technology and school change.
[46:47.090 --> 46:51.190]  The best studies she gave us was the ACOT study, Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow.
[46:51.530 --> 46:53.550]  The book is Teaching with Technology.
[46:54.250 --> 46:55.930]  The project went on in 1984.
[46:56.190 --> 46:58.590]  And one of the things they found was that there...
[46:58.590 --> 47:02.170]  The classrooms where it was more successful were the ones where the teachers were okay with noise.
[47:02.550 --> 47:05.330]  They were okay with not kids sitting at desks in rows and having order.
[47:05.630 --> 47:08.330]  Where they were okay with letting particular kids take a leadership role.
[47:08.330 --> 47:09.810]  And maybe even kids were sort of marginalized.
[47:10.070 --> 47:11.470]  Like, the geeks got to leave the class a little.
[47:11.590 --> 47:13.730]  And that really sort of changed the dynamics in their classroom.
[47:14.010 --> 47:19.290]  So, yeah, I mean, we have to change our idea about teaching in order to teach with technology better.
[47:19.890 --> 47:22.550]  Yeah, they have their ways of using technology already.
[47:22.750 --> 47:36.330]  I mean, one of the other things that we're finding in the new literacy studies, which is sort of my official field, is that you bring kids who already have knowledge of technology into a classroom where teachers are like, Yes, you're gonna do a Microsoft Excel Word spreadsheet and blah,
[47:36.370 --> 47:37.110]  blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[47:37.450 --> 47:40.050]  And the kids are like, oh my God, I cannot go to school anymore.
[47:40.090 --> 47:42.810]  This does not jive with what I know about technology at all.
[47:42.890 --> 47:44.570]  So, yeah, I mean, that is a tremendous problem.
[47:44.990 --> 47:48.510]  So, I mean, yeah, this is why it's a big issue of teacher training to a great extent.
[47:49.170 --> 47:49.870]  It's teacher training.
[47:50.010 --> 47:58.530]  And, you know, one principal I know who used to be my ninth grade English teacher, he just started up at a new high school and he's like, I'm really trying to change the faculty and how they think.
[47:58.570 --> 47:59.430]  And I'm like, how are you doing that?
[47:59.450 --> 48:00.810]  He's like, by hiring and firing.
[48:01.590 --> 48:04.610]  Because honestly, it's really hard to change how teachers think.
[48:04.610 --> 48:06.930]  You can send them to all the professional development you want to.
[48:07.210 --> 48:08.370]  They know how they were taught.
[48:08.550 --> 48:12.570]  They know that, you know, people in policy have been telling them for years, do this, do that.
[48:12.690 --> 48:20.390]  It's like a Christmas tree model where you're hanging more little ornaments on your educational program and it doesn't lead to an overall vision of what should be happening or a net change.
[48:20.810 --> 48:22.750]  So, principals should have a vision for these things.
[48:23.610 --> 48:26.910]  And we need to know that, like, it's very hard to enact changes with teachers.
[48:26.910 --> 48:31.550]  I mean, the place to start, we think, at Teachers College, is in teacher training a lot of the time.
[48:32.670 --> 48:33.470]  That's what I've got to say about that.
[48:33.490 --> 48:34.230]  I have many more questions.
[48:34.250 --> 48:35.130]  I'll catch you afterwards.
[48:35.530 --> 48:35.710]  Cool.
[48:35.890 --> 48:36.210]  Thanks.
[48:36.210 --> 48:37.610]  I think we have one minute left.
[48:38.570 --> 48:38.890]  So...
[48:38.890 --> 48:39.230]  I don't know.
[48:39.450 --> 48:40.410]  I feel so bad.
[48:40.970 --> 48:41.570]  Girl in front.
[48:41.710 --> 48:43.470]  Because how many women have we had talked today?
[48:43.570 --> 48:43.910]  Go for it.
[48:43.970 --> 48:44.130]  All right.
[48:44.250 --> 48:45.530]  And you're wearing the awesome shirt.
[48:45.730 --> 48:46.210]  So anyway, go ahead.
[48:46.850 --> 48:47.170]  Okay.
[48:47.230 --> 48:49.550]  My name's Liam, involved with hacklab.to.
[48:49.550 --> 48:54.330]  And I wanted to ask you, coming from a hackerspace, do you have any advice for people who run hackerspaces?
[48:54.330 --> 48:55.790]  Because I know there's a couple of us in this room.
[48:57.390 --> 49:01.370]  On approaching local high schools and middle schools and saying, hey, we have this.
[49:01.490 --> 49:03.470]  We want to do some sort of after-school program.
[49:04.250 --> 49:06.950]  It's a big, scary, like, oh my God, you're talking to kids.
[49:07.390 --> 49:07.710]  Yeah.
[49:08.190 --> 49:08.790]  What do you do?
[49:09.190 --> 49:11.950]  It's probably going to be really hard with the name hacker in your title, for starters.
[49:12.110 --> 49:13.950]  Because people, I mean, they have the whole black hat mentality.
[49:15.090 --> 49:18.090]  If you can register as an NGO, I think that probably would give you some cred.
[49:18.090 --> 49:19.430]  Or on the path to be a non-profit.
[49:19.550 --> 49:19.630]  Yeah.
[49:19.750 --> 49:20.310]  Be regular.
[49:20.910 --> 49:22.330]  Be ready for permission slips.
[49:23.030 --> 49:24.990]  You know, I'm trying to think of other things.
[49:26.190 --> 49:26.510]  Dominic?
[49:26.750 --> 49:28.990]  But more so, how do you sell it to a teacher?
[49:29.210 --> 49:30.290]  How do you sell it to a teacher?
[49:31.470 --> 49:33.230]  You don't have to teach technology anymore.
[49:33.270 --> 49:34.430]  I'm going to do it for you.
[49:36.390 --> 49:37.830]  I think that works pretty darn well.
[49:37.910 --> 49:39.290]  Because they know that they're supposed to be doing it.
[49:39.350 --> 49:41.130]  And they're like, oh yeah, oh, I don't understand this.
[49:41.170 --> 49:41.950]  The kids these days.
[49:42.150 --> 49:43.850]  So, you know, present yourself as the kids these days.
[49:43.870 --> 49:45.170]  And I think that'll probably work okay.
[49:45.430 --> 49:46.410]  So, good luck.
[49:46.410 --> 49:49.610]  Actually, the one other little comment about like, kids these days.
[49:49.890 --> 49:51.230]  And how they learn technology and stuff.
[49:51.770 --> 49:56.550]  One of the best ways to get kids into programming is say, you can make new MySpace codes.
[49:56.910 --> 49:58.150]  You can make MySpace codes.
[49:58.150 --> 49:58.890]  They like, lose their shit.
[49:59.050 --> 49:59.530]  You can totally...
[49:59.530 --> 49:59.930]  No, be right.
[49:59.990 --> 50:01.510]  No, don't you groan.
[50:01.630 --> 50:02.050]  Don't you groan.
[50:02.150 --> 50:04.130]  Because if that's what they want, you f*cking give it to them.
[50:04.250 --> 50:04.370]  Okay?
[50:04.630 --> 50:05.690]  You give it to them.
[50:06.350 --> 50:10.370]  If they want to make the little sparkly shinies, you want to make the little sparkly shinies on their MySpace.
[50:11.670 --> 50:13.310]  That is sheerly aesthetic.
[50:13.610 --> 50:14.910]  That has nothing to do with the code.
[50:15.130 --> 50:15.910]  That is aesthetic.
[50:16.130 --> 50:17.850]  And if that'll get them interested in the code, that's where you go.
[50:18.310 --> 50:18.590]  Goodnight.