Thursday Mar 13, 2008
As you saw from my last post, Sun held its annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference (WWERC) two weeks ago. (Check out some of the coverage in the blogosphere, especially some of the blogs from our Sun Campus Ambassadors.) As I was preparing for my presentation
at the conference, I rediscovered Revolutionary Wealth, a book by two of my favorite authors, Heidi and
Alvin Toffler. Back in the early 1980s, Alvin Toffler first coined the concept of "prosumers": the idea that consumers become involved in the production process. As prescient
as Toffler was, I'm sure even he couldn't have imagined how
open source, community development and social networking technologies make "prosumption" possible on an unprecedented scale. (It irks
me that Donald Tapscott, who wrote Wikinomics, claims to have coined this term and concept, but I digress.)
Anyway, the Tofflers have written a beautiful chapter about
education that everyone should read. Here's an excerpt:
"Mass
education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither
the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural
education—indeed , all education—has to be totally
reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for
customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups
and even individuals."
We are approaching a time when we will be
able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer
connected in some way to the outside world. A time when children, given
the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the
Internet. A time when multiplayer gamers can advance their own learning
through distant online mentors.
This time isn't in the future. It's here now. At the ERC last week, I sawit. Aaron Walsh, director of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, showed a demo of a virtual world in which students can meet at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and explore the pyramids instead of just reading about them. They can walk through the tombs, look around, and even fly through the air to see things up close that they couldn't necessarily see in the real world.
The creators of this lesson have figured out how to bring multiple digital media sources together in the same virtual world, thus creating an even more interesting way to learn by accident and discovery instead of rote memorization and regurgitation. This new way of bring the virtual world to the real world—and real worlds to the virtual—may be one of the best examples so far of providing the personalized and individualized learning that the Tofflers talk about in their book.
Organizations like the New Media Consortium are exploring ways to use these new technologies to advance learning. On February 24, NMC announced a $250,000 two-year
collaboration with Sun to launch the Open Virtual Worlds
Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work,
and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range
of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content,
and objects, and use them to extend Sun's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland platforms. It's an exciting time to be involved in education, that's for sure.
Wednesday Feb 20, 2008
Sun
has long held that today's student is tomorrow's developer—and in
many cases, today's developer as well. We've put our money where our
mouth is by giving away our software, including the training that
goes with it, to student developers at no charge. More about that in
a moment.
We
understand that such tools and training are an important piece—but
just one piece—of an overall academic program. The field of
computer science isn't about tools alone. Tools change. Languages
change. Java didn't exist 15 years ago. Does that make a Computer
Science degree granted before 1995 invalid? Of course not. So it's
good that Microsoft is making a
first small step
at making their developer tools available to college students at a
subset of universities around the world (although it's too bad that
high school students still have to go through their teachers to get
these tools). It's a good thing, because it better equips students to
compare proprietary development tools with open source alternatives.
It may even result in the improvement of open source development
tools.
But
for the rest of the world—including high school students—Sun is
more than happy to provide our robust set of tools and training for
no cost. We've been offering our Free
and Open Source tools
to developers, including all student developers, for quite
some time now. Our Academic
Developer Program
gives student developers free
downloads
of Sun developer tools like NetBeans, Java Studio Creator, Sun Studio
and Sun's most innovative and popular software products for academic
use. Of particular interest to a generation brought up with video
games, we recently even open sourced the Project
Darkstar environment
for creating massively scalable online games, as well as the Project
Wonderland
toolkit for creating 3D virtual worlds.
We've
been sharing our source code for years. Sun open sourced over 10
million lines of code in 2005 with the OpenSolaris
project. (The Solaris
Operating System
is also supported on over 900 x86
and SPARC platforms.) The
OpenSPARC
project is making the hardware source code of the recently announced
UltraSPARC T1 processor available under an Open Source license. Those
are just a few of the many projects
to which Sun contributes. And of course there's Java,
invented by Sun in 1995. Java has become the essential ingredient of
the digital experience for hundreds of millions of people in all
walks of life, all over the planet. Sun recently released the source
code for Java
Platform Standard Edition,
Java
Platform Micro Edition
and Java
Platform Enterprise Edition
under open source licenses.
Of
course, simply providing tools is not enough. You have to provide
training, too. Through the Sun
Academic Initiative,
schools become authorized to deliver training on Sun technologies to
their faculty, staff, and students. The Sun Academic Initiative also
offers non-profit academic institutions access to free Web-based
training and curricula, including courses in the latest Java and
Solaris technologies. The initiative gives students at more than
3,000 institutions around the world a competitive edge as they enter
the workforce.
Sun
also collaborates with universities throughout the world to bring
open content to market. For example, the Java
Education and Development Initiative (JEDI),
a collaborative project with the University of Philippines, aims to
make high-quality, industry-endorsed IT and computer science course
material available for free.
Sun
collaborated with the University of Kent in the United Kingdom and
Deakin University in Australia to develop BlueJ,
a free Java IDE specifically designed to teach object-oriented
programming with Java. BlueJ recently
celebrated more than 3 million downloads. Project
Greenfoot
is a new development environment aimed at bringing programming into
high schools and university entry courses by making it easy to build
graphical interactive applicaitons such as games and siulations.
Again, it's freely available.
Companies
should not charge students for development tools, training and
community, or make them only available on a limited basis. The
Participation Age calls for inclusion and investment in the next
generations to foster innovation. The open source community and Sun
have been doing this for years. We're glad that other companies, like
Microsoft, are realizing this as well. Free and open source software
is the wave of the future. Kids shouldn't be learning anything
else—certainly not closed, proprietary
technology.
So
maybe Microsoft is taking the first baby steps toward open sourcing
their tools and technology so that developers of all ages can have
access to them. We'd be glad to help.
Monday Oct 29, 2007
My oldest son is 12 and has attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He was diagnosed with that and
a couple of other learning disabilities when he was in kindergarten.
The great news is that through special education resources at our
local public school, he's been able to overcome his disabilities,
with the exception of some fine-motor skills such handwriting (or in
his case, the lack thereof).
Where we live, “middle school” runs
from the sixth grade to the eighth. Given that our
son had not only handwriting challenges but the everyday challenges
that most 10-and-11 year-olds face in getting themselves organized,
we jumped at the chance to put him in our middle school's “Laptop
Program” when he matriculated. The school forced us to buy an
overpriced laptop from a specific company that sells overpriced
products to schools, but we had high hopes that the program itself
would create an organizational paradise in the Hartley home and
overcome my son's handwriting issues.
Paradise was never found.
The laptop program was poorly thought
out. Although every teacher had to maintain a Web site that
documented nightly homework requirements, each teacher had a
different way of doing this. There was no consistency whatsoever.
Some teachers had too much homework and expected us to understand the
intricacies of their specific class Web site. Others barely updated
their sites. Even though the laptop forced upon us included a
calendar tool as part of its software package, the school didn't use
it. So instead of students subscribing to each class calendar and
then getting a single aggregated view of the calendar on their
laptops, we had to search six different Web sites every night to see
what homework was required. To add insult to injury, none of the
software tools used by the school's laptop program really required
the particular overpriced laptop that we'd been required to buy. All
of the software was Web-based. In other words, we could have accessed
it via any laptop running any operating system.
This is not a rant about the school.
What I learned in working with the teachers is that they have no time
or support to manage all of this technology. They work incredibly
long hours in the classroom, so any work they do on the computer has
to happen after hours. They assign too much homework, and don't
understand how to turn a computer into a learning tool, but that's a
subject for a future blog entry.
The point is that the laptop didn't
deliver on Paradise. Sure, it was expensive and booted up and ran
programs and accessed email and the Internet. The problem was that
we, as parents, had placed too much hope on a single tool. A laptop
doesn't teach—teachers do. Learning how to use a word processor is
not learning how to write. Nor is learning how to create a
PowerPoint presentation is not learning how to present or to think or
to persuade. In fact, as a tool, a television with
compelling content can probably teach more than a computer with
access to the Internet and an office automation suite.
This is why I'm so supportive of
Curriki.org. Curriki is an
online environment that's about sharing curriculum created by
teachers and other teaching professionals. It's free. It's global.
It's a community of educators helping other educators with
high-quality teaching resources that may or may not be delivered by
computers, but that will focus on the purpose of education:
learning topics, rather than learning tools. Current offerings on
Curriki range from lesson plans, assessments and media clips to
complete textbooks, all available at no cost. Anyone can join
Curriki. In fact, Curriki and the AARP are
collaborating to encourage retired educators who are subject
matter experts to share their curriculum, review content curricula,
and help train teachers. The focus is the content.
When he was in seventh grade, we
moved our son to a school that had smaller classes. His entire seventh
grade class is now 22 students. They do not allow the use of laptops
in the classroom. Despite that, we've noticed no
adverse impact on my son's academic performance. The lack of computers is, however,
forcing him to improve his handwriting skills.
My son's story is far from
over. We'll see how it develops, but the one thing we've learned so
far is this: The tool is not the teacher.
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