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.)

• 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 evoltionary manner)

None of these are easy questions 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.)

Homunq 15:37, 28 February 2008 (EST)