Just as videophones have not taken off in industrialized nations, video chat is not a killer app. I have used teleconferencing as a business tool, and it will have a place in the XO program. But what we really need is quite different.
<br><br>There have been computers in schools for 30 years. But they have never been integrated into the curriculum, because it was impossible to make an assumption about how much computer time students would get, and it was impossible to make an assumption about what software would be available. Now we can create textbooks containing interactive models of phenomena. We can give children real-world datasets to analyze. We will have powerful data acquisition capabilities using the camera (including microscopy), and using the sound input port as a high-speed A/D converter feeding a digital oscilloscope, and so on.
<br><br>This gives us an opportunity and a responsibility to look at the curriculum anew. The time-honored divisions of subjects and sequences of ideas that made sense for paper-and-pencil learning do not necessarily make sense when the computer can do the heavy lifting. Just as one example, trigonometry used to be a semester course, and no doubt still is in many places. That probably made sense when surveyors in training had to learn to solve dozens of triangles a day with no greater aid than a book of function and log tables, but it is absurd in the age of scientific calculators and computers. The essential mathematical content of trigonometry can be reduced to two or three pages, including proofs. (It's not my opinion. Saunders Mac Lane complained about trig in Mathematics: Form and Function, after reducing it to less than three pages.)
<br><br>Calculus is still treated as a high-level high school subject, but primary school children can grasp the notion of the direction of a curve: just put a ruler up to any convex object. They can equally grasp the concept of the area under an arbitrary curve. Draw it on paper, cut it out, and weigh it. Leave the formulas and the proofs for later. When we have the basic ideas in place, we can use them for many purposes. Then when the students get to the calculations and proofs, they know what it's all about, and will grasp it much more readily.
<br><br>The Internet gives unequalled opportunities for language learning through online literature, songs, movies, mailing lists, chat rooms, voice broadcasts, Voice over IP, and video conferencing. We really have no idea how to take full advantage of all this.
<br><br>There is much more of this sort of thing. I think we need a separate list to discuss it properly.<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/16/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Yoshiki Ohshima</b> <<a href="mailto:yoshiki@squeakland.org">
yoshiki@squeakland.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hello, Elijah,<br><br>> > <a href="http://squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2007-August/003717.html">
http://squeakland.org/pipermail/squeakland/2007-August/003717.html</a><br>> ><br>> > This discussion might make you think that claiming a video chat app as<br>> > "the killer app" is not a very compelling pitch as an educational
<br>> > project...<br>><br>> video chat alone, not so useful.<br>><br>> video chat combined with lots of other practical collaborative tools?<br>> pretty great, pretty humanizing, very supportive of lots of other
<br>> activities.<br><br> Thank you for the comment. While XO will have (if it is successful)<br>a lot of off-school and recess time, the primary use case I thought<br>should be the at school (even it is under tree). The video chat
<br>wouldn't match the latter very well. I don't say it is useless, but<br>cannot be the "killer app", and we shouldn't think so.<br><br> If I understand correctly, the position of the OLPC is that making
<br>curriculum and organized materials are primarily the responsibility of<br>the client governments. However, we, the software developers, should<br>think about making software tools for developing these materials (yes,
<br>that should be possible on XO), rather than simples games that are<br>only useful for 5 minutes each.<br><br>-- Yoshiki<br>_______________________________________________<br>Sugar mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Sugar@lists.laptop.org">
Sugar@lists.laptop.org</a><br><a href="http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar">http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Edward Cherlin<br>Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
<br><a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury</a><br>WIRE AFRICA http//www.wireafrica.org/<br><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/cherlin">http://www.linkedin.com/in/cherlin
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