"The hole in the wall"

I learnt to use paint, calculator, see various places through the Internet, solve puzzles, play games, listen interesting sounds and songs. (T.R. Ravi, age 12, Kalludevanahalli kiosk, Karnataka, India)

Back at the dawn of time (well, 1993) Seymour Papert* named the computer the “children’s machine”. India’s “hole in the wall” experiment goes a long way toward showing just how easily children understand how to use computers.

Read here about the extraordinary experiment taking place all over India. Hundreds of impoverished children are able to go on-line every day at computer kiosks installed in slums and rural areas. Who takes up the opportunity, what they choose to do, and how they figure it out, makes this a fascinating social experiment.

The typical user is described as:

Poor, going to school but not interested. Does not attend school regularly. Is like an urchin, with torn clothes, no slippers, out of the house most of the time. Interested in playing cricket, marbles and more cricket. Totally indifferent to what is happening around him or her; lives each day as it comes.

Nevertheless, they take to the computer intuitively and crowd around the kiosks to:

…read news headlines, befriend cartoon figures, draw with digital paintbrushes and explore the possibilities of cyberspace.

As they explore, they invent names for the new images they see.

For more on this story go to PBS Frontline

*THE CHILDREN’S MACHINE
Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
by Seymour Papert, 1993

Creativity: Part 2

A child was working diligently on a drawing in art class. The teacher asked what the drawing was. The girl replied, “I’m drawing God.” The teacher paused and said, “But no one knows what God looks like.” Without missing a beat, or looking up from her drawing, the girl replied, “They will in a minute.”

This is just one of the stories that Ken Robinson tells when he speaks of children’s creativity and willingness to take risks. Robinson used to live in Stratford-on-Avon and in another anecdote he imagines the seven year old Shakepeare in English class, and as a child being sent to bed. And his comments on academics and university professors are hilarious.

Last week I started re-reading Out of Our Minds, his extraordinary book on the nature and importance of creativity. And today a visitor to my office gave me this link to a presentation Robinson made earlier this year at the TED conference in Monterey, California.

“Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status”- one assertion from this truly stimulating and very funny talk. Robinson is witty, provocative and deadly serious. We can hear and see for ourselves – click below and watch on-line, or download the audio or video podcast. Highly recommended.

>>>Ken Robinson at TED Talks

Creativity: Part 1

Creative Societies need Creative People.

If the thinkers and business people like Daniel Pink and Tom Peters have it right then the key attributes for success in the future are the ability to learn and relearn, and the ability to be inventive. Pink even goes so far as to say: “The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.” – from A Whole New Mind

Creativity, it seems, is not just for artists starving in garrets but for everyone. Being creative, in this theory, is not so much being artists as living like artists – on the edge of what we don’t know and able to think and act with ingenuity and resilience in the face of changing circumstances and new opportunities.

 

Choice

Would you rather have supper in a castle, breakfast in a balloon, or tea on the river?
John Burningham

We do best, and engage most readily in, that which we experience as freely chosen.
Margaret Donalson

At PDS we build in options for students wherever we can. Making constructive choices and managing time well are important skills for learning and life, and we start this early. Even the youngest children have the opportunity to manage aspects of their lives in school and make choices. In many of the younger grades, the day begins with “choice time,” when children are allowed to choose an activity for the start of their day. In the Middle School there are electives, and, of course, this continues into 7^th grade and beyond with the richness and variety of the Central Studies Electives program. It is our task as educators to design these electives to meet the needs of learners so that they may focus their time and energy and have the opportunity to develop interests and passions.

The second quotation above is from a wonderful book – Children’s Minds - by the Scottish psychologist Margaret Donaldson. It has been many years since I read Children’s Minds, but that sentence has stayed with me. And of course it is the word – experience – that provides the key. The task of the school is to design the program and create the environment within which the children choose. It is all about how we support and engage students so they invest their time, energy, intellect and imagination in meaningful ways.

Donaldson’s work was essentially a respectful critique of Jean Piaget’s research into the development of intelligence. Piaget developed a theoretical framework based on the concept of age and developmental stages. Children, he posited, moved from the early infant sensory motor stage, to the pre-operational period (approximately age 2-7), to the period of concrete operations (approximately 7-11) and finally toward the adult stage of formal operations and abstract thinking. Piaget saw intelligence and reasoning as moving through these essential growth stages. His research involved close observation of children as they worked through problems of logical reasoning.

Donaldson’s research led her to be critical of some of Piaget’s conclusions. She found that he underestimated children’s ability to think through higher level intelligence tasks. Her work with young children took the social context into account, and she found that when children’s intentions were engaged they were able to function at levels hitherto regarded as developmentally impossible.

Donaldson argued that we do not learn by first mastering an abstract set of skills. Rather, she contended, children learn when the context is meaningful and the learning intrinsically rewarding. We get better at something through persistence, trial and error, and not necessarily in an ordered sequence of acquired skills. The best example of this that I can think of is watching children using technology. They don’t sit down and read the manual, but – if they are interested in the task – they start with the trial and error of pressing the buttons.

When it really comes to guided choices, however, the children’s author-illustrator John Burningham provides the best options. “Would you rather have supper in a castle, breakfast in a balloon, or tea on the river?”

The whole book is a series of bizarre and wonderful alternatives that range from silly to gruesome – just perfect for many growing minds. “Would you rather…an elephant drank your bath water, an eagle stole your dinner, a pig tried on your clothes, or a hippo slept in your bed.” Now there is a real set of compelling choices.

I have just bought a copy of Would You Rather. If you would like to borrow it, just drop by.

With the Kindergarten – from Patterns to Pixies

The kindergarten invited me to their classrooms to see their Pattern Museum. It was wonderful to see their hard work and ingenuity on display. They had found patterns everywhere and created many more of their own.
And then – they visited me in my office disguised as fairy-angel-princesses, assorted ghouls, Supermen, a skeleton and a railroad crossing.

Welcome to my blog

Blog -a modern portmanteau* word

breakfast plus lunch= brunch
smoke plus fog = smog
web plus log = blog

Humpty Dumpty explains it all to Alice:

“Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word…
…Well then, ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you).”

From Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

*Portmanteau – from French “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (a coat or cover) – a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic fusing of two words and their meanings into one.