Embedding young learners into the information society

Embedding young learners into the information society Christophe Guéret (@cgueret)and, among others, Victor de Boer, Stefan Schlobach, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Anna Bon OCLC meeting Leiden, December 6, 2012 1/56

What are we going to talk about? The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) The learning environment “Sugar” Data management issues within Sugar 2/56

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)Based on the slides from Walter Bender (walter@sugarlabs.org)

The numbers2,000,000+ children with XOs1,000,000,000 children w/o XO$200 price and falling0 deployment running Windows150+ language projects40+ countries500+ Sugar activities

Our challenge: giving every child anopportunity to learn

OLPC Antarctica

Our mission Develop (and deploy) a low-cost laptop in order to revolutionize how we educate the worlds children

Origins: Senegal in 1983

Going to scale

Price is only one factor

Very local collaboration

A culture The context of human development is always a culture and not an isolated technology. —Seymour Papert

Why do we care about learning? Education is a fundumental human right and a key to human social and economic development.

What motivates learning? Not carrots or sticks, but rather: autonomy, mastery, and a sense of purpose.

Is a laptop a good tool for learning? A laptop makes learning more flexible: Children learn by teaching and actively helping each other; the teacher is free to focus expertise where it is needed.

OLPC principles Child ownership Young ages Saturation Connection Free Software (Libre)

Additional requirements Integration into studies Teacher training Community outreach and engagement Core team which can appropriate the project

How is the XO used for learning? Learning is a verb: ergo, the OLPC strategy includes engaging the learner in design, problem solving, collaborative work, integration of technology and creativity, interdisciplinary work, decision making and learning outside the classroom.

How is the XO used for learning? Children engage in project-based learning: a research topic, theme, issue or challenge that allows children to think critically, collaborate with peers, teachers and the community to express and form opinions.

What about evaluation? Educational communities have come to understand that standardized tests—while important to stakeholders—is not the only dimension for measuring impact.

What about evaluation? Other factors such as problem-solving ability, critical thinking, use of multiple sources of information, reflection and communication skills using multiple media, team and individual work, and self development are the new dimensions to measure impact.

An example from Uruguay

Solving problems

What is next for OLPC? XO 4.0 2 Watts Sunlight readable display Webcam Touch-enabled (Q4 2012) Accelerometer Light sensor Microphone User-defined sensors

SugarBased on the slides from Walter Bender and Bernie Innocenti (walter@sugarlabs.org, bernie@sugarlabs.org)

What is Sugar? Sugar is a software for learning that promotes creativity, collaboration, reflection, and critical thinking. The first user interface based on both cognitive and social constructivism.

Learning to read

Reading ebooks eBook server!

Learning to count with an Abacus

Everyone is a teacher and alearner

Regardless of age

ActivitiesA Sugar Activity combines the old concepts of“document” and “application” into a single object.Activities can be easily shared between neighbouringcomputers.

“View Source” button

Easy to change def _calculate_position(self, radius, icon_size, index, count): width, height = self.box.get_allocation() angle = index * (2 * math.pi / count) - math.pi / 2 x = radius * math.cos(angle) + (width - icon_size) / 2 y = radius * math.sin(angle) + (height - icon_size - style.GRID_CELL_SIZE) / 2 return x, y def _calculate_position(self, radius, icon_size, index, count): width, height = self.box.get_allocation() angle = index * (math.pi / (6 + index / 12)) - math.pi / 2 radius = ((radius - _MIN_RADIUS) * (index * 1.1) / count) + _MIN_RADIUS x = radius * math.cos(angle) + (width - icon_size) / 2 y = radius * math.sin(angle) + (height - icon_size - style.GRID_CELL_SIZE) / 2 return x, y

Network centricInterface

Collaboration No Internet needed Peer-to-peer learning 1-click sharing

Easy activity sharing No Internet needed Peer-to-peer learning 1-click sharing

Journal Full-text search Auto-saved work Assessment tool Place of reflection “Portfolio”

Sugar on an XO... or anything else

Connecting the XO to the data World

Data production/consumptionData? What data? Content of the Journal Social interactions External data useful for teaching …All best stored locally on the XO and served from it Mainly used in mesh contexts 1-1 mapping between the device and a user

Data sharing capabilities Essentially synchronous: an activity need to be sharedat the same time No remote access to internal data Limited internal data sharing across activities Limited internal model for storing data

Data consumption capabilities Web browser and activities with off-line data dumps Data fetched has to be fitted into a Journal entry or in acustom, sandboxed, solution

More flexibility with SemanticXO Linked-Data based data management stack Everything stored as triples Use SPARQL for all data manipulations Provide activity developers with an API to Store graphs with labelled edges Copy locally structured data fetched from the Web Share graphs with other SemanticXO enabled devices All operations are done either locally or remotely

Example: Hello world!from semanticxo import graphstoregraph_store = graphstore.get_instance()graph = graph_store.create_graph()msg = graph.create_resource(category=Hello)msg.add("message", "Hello world")graph.add_share(util.public_uri())graph_store.persist_graph(graph) 50/56

Example: Spam the class room!from semanticxo import graphstore, addressbookfrom semanticxo.graphstore import GraphStoregs = graphstore.get_instance()graph = gs.create_graph()msg = graph.create_resource(category=Hello)msg.add("message", "Spam!")contacts = addressbook.get_neighbours()for host in contacts.itervalues(): remote_gs = GraphStore(hostname=host) remote_gs.persist(graph) 51/56

Status SemanticXO is usable and used Alternative Journal back-end 3 sample activities Tested on a couple of XOs in a mesh Some limitations Wont scale much in its current state Impossible to de-reference resources 52/56

Idea: data sharing for libraries Combine digital management with physical libraries List of books to borrow, ratings, quotes, ... 53/56

The de-referencing issue Edges of the graphs are attached to node with URIs Two ways to get the data: ? ? Send a SPARQL query ? Access the URI asking for RDF None of existing solution is really fit => work on the project “WikiReg” 54/56

WikiRegResearch supported by VeriSign Inc.Entity registry for poorly connected environmentsTarget functionalities Work on-line and off-line Use very few resources Every node can contribute to describing any resource 55/56

For more information Blogs https://worldwidesemanticweb.wordpress.com http://semweb4u.wordpress.com/ Mails Christophe.gueret@dans.knaw.nl philippe.cudre-mauroux@unifr.ch 56/56

Embedding young learners into the information society

by Christophe Gueret on Dec 07, 2012

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