Talk:Marvin Minsky essays

What makes mathematics difficult to learn?

Yes, but...

These are all great ideas, and powerful ones. However, if the OLPC project is to succeed on a general level, it has to have something to offer the average teacher who suddenly gets a shipment of these. Thus, it needs to have some response to the following challenges:

• Why should I change what I'm doing? (Anecdotes and disparagement of traditional practices are not enough. The best way to convince people is to get them as close as possible to actually participating. Watching or reading a concrete and detailed account of how it works are acceptable substitutes.)

• How can I apply this in my classroom? Many of these ideas are much easier to apply in one-on-one situations than in a classroom of 30 or more students

• How can I do this step-by-step? OLPC has a philosophy of leapfrogging some educational hurdles, as developing countries leapfrog wired infrastructure by jumping to wireless technology. But in some cases, this leads to faddish pedagogy; a few overambitious failures can discredit an idea, even if the failure can be traced to lack of planning or some other extraneous factor. Wise educational administrators thus have a suspicion of ideas which are pitched as being so revolutionary that they cannot be implemented in an evolutionary manner.

• How can I overcome resistance to these ideas? Many teachers and, yes, even students will initially resist change. Generally speaking, the younger you start and the smaller the group, the easier it is. Still, the main answer to this question is a bit of patience: do not expect instant results, especially when applying these improvements to larger and/or older groups. A countrywide implementation definitely counts as "larger".

None of these questions are easy to answer: they all involve sustained effort. Thus, another question arises:

• How do we, as a project, motivate and sustain the necessary effort? Open-source principles are great, and definitely have a lower critical mass to maintain progress than many other business models. However, the hardest thing to do in an open-source fashion is integration, and the questions above demand integrated answers. I think that in order to gain enough real-world users to have a winning critical mass, OLPC cannot disdain traditional educational models. That means finding/developing integrated TEXTBOOKS and even some minimal support for drillware/quizware. Don't abandon your principles - but don't be so perfectionist that you abandon your principals, either.

Homunq 15:37, 28 February 2008 (EST)

I don't think that OLPC (or Marvin) is distaining of traditional education. (In Peru, we are working closely with the ministry of education to complement and augment traditional methods with the laptops. That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to inspire the teachers (and children) to do more. What is missing in my mind is not so much integration as much as a means to share the successes (and failures). --Walter 15:43, 28 February 2008 (EST)