Computers, creativity and learning

I has an OLPC project - join in!

Good news! I have just started an open source software project for the One Laptop Per Child program. It's going to be for student projects here at the uni, but anyone else who wants to can join in. The development laptop is being shipped now and should arrive within a few weeks. The project is abuout storytelling software for young learners.

If you can program and want to volunteer time to write some educational software to help children all over the world, leave a comment on this post to say you are interested. Equally, if you're a teacher who wants to contribute educational expertise let me know. Or indeed, if you are a writer or a storyteller, we'd love it if you could donate some stories.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Storybox - It's empty just now but once students start to sign up, we can fill it in. Here is my proposal which was accepted:

A treasure box of stories

The plan is to develop an application to support children to share

and express their stories with others across the world. It would provide

 brainstorming, planning, composition and review features as well as

some example writing exercises. It would also enable children to

 browse for stories written by other learners, and eventually would

 create a rich archive of stories; a window onto the cultures of the

world. It would draw on aspects previous academic research systems,

 including StoryStation which is an intelligent tutoring system I

 developed a few years back. An interesting feature is that it would  be

based on a model of the creative process of writing, which would

 enable to software to give intelligent prompts to help students with

 the writing process. In future versions there would also be a

 facility to record oral stories (for those who find written language

 difficult, or for cultures where oral transmission is particularly valued). A

 future extension would be to include a comic authoring tool to give

children an opportunity to develop skills in new media literacy.

One laptop per child: give one, get one

One laptop per child on Amazon

Looks like OLPC is now available for purchasers outside the US from 16th Dec. Excellent!

OLPC update

It turns out the OLPC "buy one, donate one" is happening is the US first, and it is not clear when it will extend to the UK or elsewhere. I'll let you know when I find out.

One laptop per child

If you've been following  One Laptop Per Child , you will be interested to know that you can now "buy one, donate one". If you haven't, let me explain. It's a non-profit organisation founded by an MIT media lab chap which aims to improve education for children in the developing world. They have developed a very cute and dinky cheap laptop specifically for education called the XO. "Using the XO as both their window on the world, as well as a highly programmable tool for exploring it, children in emerging nations will be opened to both illimitable knowledge and to their own creative and problem-solving potential." (http://www.laptop.org/vision/mission/).  The laptop is also know as the $100 laptop (kind of aspirationally), but it is more expensive at the moment.

It's interesting for a number of reasons. One, it's technically innovative in both hardware and software. It is designed for out of door use and extreme weather conditions, and uses mesh networking for internet access. It also is child powered (no, not in hamster wheels - hand cranks and pedals!). From a software point of view, it has an operating system called Sugar which is built on top of Redhat linux. No Apple, no Windows! And no bloomin' MS Office either.  It has a nice new interface which was designed for children, based on constructivist principles. Two, the whole project is based on supporting children's creativity, self expression and meta-cognitive knowledge (learning about learning). It's billed as an education project rather than a technology project. Third, it's an incredibly ambitious project which attempts to make use of decades of educational technology research. It's about time we did something like this. Those people who criticise it (for example that the laptops are too expensive just now) should hold their tongues until they have accomplished something on this scale.

 

For a short period of time starting Nov 12th, you can buy one and donate one for $400. Or you can just donate one if you prefer. I persuaded my head of department that we should buy one/donate one for use with my Interaction Design classes. Also, as the software development is open source, I am going to get my students to create software for projects. Wouldn't it be fantastic to spend your 9 month degree project working on educational software, which (if it were good enough) would be used by classes of children on the other side of the world?

If you work in a school or a university, please consider buying/donating one.