TAD Consortium April 2000 Information Update 4
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CONTENTS
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NEWS/TRENDS
--- More Business Travellers Booking
Online
--- Internet Improves Kids' Attitude
to School
--- European Internet Grows More
Independent
PROFILED ORGANIZATIONS
--- Readucate
--- SchoolNet-Namibia!
ONLINE RESOURCES
--- European Governments on-line
--- Freeworksheets.com
--- Article on JIT Instructional Design
--- Home page on the G8
Education Ministers' Meeting and Forum
--- Is training really this low priority?
--- Internet's Affect On Kid's Lives
--- Science: Thinking Fountain
--- Report on Distance Education in Africa
ARTICLES
--- Foes of "New
Economy" Gaining Voice
---
New Delhi physicist Sugata Mitra has a radical proposal for bringing his country's next
generation into the Info Age
--- It's Better Than It Sounds
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NEWS/TRENDS
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Taken from NUA Internet Surveys April 3rd 2000
Published By: Nua Limited Volume 5 No. 13
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Greenfield Online: More Business
Travellers Booking Online
Business travel bookings online have doubled in the past six months, according to Greenfield Online.About 28 percent of business travellers (or their assistants) now make airline reservations over the Internet, as opposed to the 33 percent who book on the telephone.
The survey also found that the Palm Pilot is the most popular personal digital assistant (PDA) with business travellers. 78 percent use the Palm Pilot, 22 percent use Windows CE, 9 percent use Visor, 4 percent use Psion and 7 percent use other devices.For the "Executives in Motion II" study, Greenfield interviewed 811 business travellers in January.<http://www.greenfield.com/pages/go_article.asp?aid=1261>
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Taken from NUA Internet Surveys April 3rd 2000
Published By: Nua Limited Volume 5 No. 13
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National School Boards Foundation: Internet Improves Kids' Attitude to School
The Internet is a positive force in children's education, according to the findings of a new survey from the US National School Boards Foundation and Children's Television Workshop.Over 40 percent of 9-17 year old schoolgoers say the Internet has improved their attitude to attending school.
Almost half of children in households that are connected to the Internet go online primarily for schoolwork and 53 percent of adults in these households go online for the same reason.Parents say that using the Internet has not significantly affected their children's other activities. Almost all report that their kids spend the same amount of time reading, playing outdoors and spending time with their families.
One thing has changed: 37 percent of parents say their
children watch less television since they were introduced to the Internet. Parents
continue to be concerned about unsupervised Net access for children. Pornography,
undesirable adults and hateful content top the list of Internet-related parental worries.http://www.nsbf.org/safe-smart/br-overview.htm
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Taken from NUA Internet Surveys April 3rd 2000
Published By: Nua Limited Volume 5 No. 13
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Yankee Group: European Internet Grows More Independent
As the Internet in Europe grows, it is rapidly becoming less dependent on the US, according to a new report from the Yankee Group. About 66 percent of international Internet traffic originating in Europe stayed in Europe in 1999. This represents a major development for Europe, as more than half of the region's Internet traffic went to the US in 1998.
The London-New York Internet traffic route was the busiest in 1999 but the next six busiest routes all began and ended in European cities. Major Internet traffic hubs such as Frankfurt and Amsterdam ran 9 times more traffic to other European cities as to the US.
The increasing number of optical fibre networks has led to even more traffic, rather than oversupply of bandwidth as was initially feared. The report, "The Optical Internet in Europe: Ending the Bottleneck", predicts there will be 190 million European Internet users in 2005.<http://www.yankeegroup.com>
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PROFILED ORGANIZATIONS
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Readucate is a non-governmental, non-profitmaking (Section 18A) literacy and educational organisation. Based on seventy years experience in teaching children and adults of all intellects and races, the Trust was registered in November 1991.
Since then we have trained nearly 500 teachers, prisoners, police, social workers and unemployed how to teach the multi-dimensional Readucate approach to reading to children and adults. We are operating in six provinces and six prisons. Many teachers do not know how to teach reading nor how to integrate reading throughout the curriculum. Principals and teachers in rural areas are particularly anxious to improve their skills and their schools to stop the expensive drift of learners to town schools which parents perceive to be "better".Initial 8-day courses enable Instructors to start teaching on the 9th day, but they continue with distance education which culiminates in a final Readucator examination after at least a year of successful implementation. Standards are high with 70% being the Readucate pass mark, as well as for Damelin Grade 7 English (ABET level 3) which is part of the Readucate course.
Anyone who is literate can become a Readucate Instructor. Many teachers in rural areas are teaching fulltime at schools and running Readucte Centres after hours to remediate children in need of improved reading skills and upgrade literacy amongst adults. As far as the Dept of Agriculture is concerned, they may consider sponsoring literate young people to become Readucate Instructors who could teach illiterate farmworkers, thus improving productivity.
For more information contact Edna Freinkel at ostro@mweb.co.za
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Taken from WorLD E- Newsletter-- April 2000
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Welcome to SchoolNet-Namibia!
http://www.natmus.cul.na/schoolnet/index.html
SchoolNet Namibia was launched just recently. Check out what they?ve been up to at their website.
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ONLINE RESOURCES
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From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2000. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
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European Governments on-line
http://europa.eu.int/abc/governments/index_en.html
Newly redesigned, this site from Europa, the European
Union's server, offers fast and easy access to the main governmental Websites of European
nations. For the fifteen EU member states, the site provides annotated links to the
executive branch, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and sometimes other important national
civil service sites, as well as several unannotated links to other governmental bodies.
Languages used at non-anglophone countries's sites are noted. For each of the non-EU
nations, one annotated link is offered, generally to the main governmental server,
executive branch, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs. [MD]
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Taken from Math Goodies Newsletter -April Issue
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http://www.mathgoodies.com/advertise/redirect.exe/459?ACCOUNT=Free_WS&BANNER=Newsletter
Print or download thousands of free educational worksheets. The thematic units are especially popular. Also download 250+ free software programs. Subjects include: math, science, phonics, social studies, language arts and more.
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You can download Sivasailam "Thiagi" Thiagarajan's article on JIT Instructional Design for free from his Web-site at www.thiagi.com
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The Japanese Ministry of Education has put
up a home page on the
G8 Education Ministers' Meeting and Forum
http://www.monbu.go.jp/g8/eng/e_index.htm
Its report is already posted, and it
promotes international distance learning, ICT and so forth.
http://www.monbu.go.jp/g8/eng/e_h1.htm
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Taken from LearningWire #95
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Is training really this low priority?
A research report in 't' magazine aimed at the training and enterprise sector reveals very low levels of training in many organisation with several staff receiving no additional instruction or skill for periods of many years. Leslie Rae asks: can this be true?
http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=14663&d=1
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Taken from Media Workshop Edu-Tech News Digest -- April 3, 2000
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INTERNET'S AFFECT ON KID'S LIVES
"Safe and Smart: Research and Guidelines for Children's Use of the Internet" Shelley Pasnik, EDC/Center for Children and Technology Published by the National School Boards Foundation
http://www.nsbf.org/safe-smart/full-report.htm
March 29, 2000
"Is it possible for schools to protect students from inappropriate content without denying them access to engaging and valuable educational content?" is just one question on the minds of parents and teachers at this stage of technology. To provide a snapshot of Internet usage at home, the National School Boards Association Foundation surveyed 1,735 parents and 601 children (aged 9-17), asking them about the role of the Internet in their daily lives. Overall, educational use ranked high on the list, with most parents saying that they buy computers for their children's education, and children reporting that use of the Internet has improved their outlook on school and homework. Girls and boys seem to spend an equal amount of time using computers and the Internet, but the usage looks very different. In general, girls tend to use the computer for schoolwork, email, and chat rooms, while boys gravitate towards games and entertainment. The report makes recommendations for school leaders on how to engage teachers, parents and children in a dialogue via the Internet, and guidelines on promoting "safe and smart" Internet usage by kids.
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Taken from Education Planet Newsletter
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http://www.smm.org/sln/tf/nav/thinkingfountain.html
Need some fresh ideas for your students? Come to the Thinking Fountain and explore. The current topic is molds. Find out how to grow your own and then look at pictures of molds grown by other students. You can even send in your own pictures! Want something different? Just click on an item in the Thinking Fountain picture to go to a related book or activity page. There are also cross-reference links at the bottom of each Thinking Fountain page. Teachers and parents can make use of the "A to Z " all inclusive guide or look at the "Theme Clusters" to find information to fit their curriculum. The "Mind Map" pages show you how the current topic is related to other subjects, sometimes in surprising ways. Want to post a comment or see what comments others have posted? Check out the "Add Your Idea" section. This site is brought to you by the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Science Learning Network.
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You can now find the report that I just completed for JICA on Distance Education in Africa on my web site at
http://homestead.juno.com/bfillip/files/DEAfrica.doc.
Comments would be most appreciated.
Regards,
Barbara Fillip, Ph.D.
Researcher/Consultant
bfillip@juno.com
http://homestead.juno.com/bfillip/index.html
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ARTICLES
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Foes of "New Economy" Gaining Voice
By Gary Chapman
Copyright 2000, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved
The baby boomers running and profiting from the "new economy" grew up in, and were shaped by, the countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s. Indeed, the personal computer itself was once viewed as a "liberation" from the boring, gray and tightly controlled kind of computing imposed by large corporations and their mainframes.
Several notable pioneers of the PC era started out as hippies, commune residents, meditation instructors and even campus radicals. But few if any of these now middle-aged men understand that there's a new culture emerging that's counter to what they've built.
The "dot-com" economy, as it rapidly matures, is setting itself up as a big fat target for rebellion, dissent and possibly even sabotage. The conditions are beginning to resemble what led to the blow-up of the '60s, and if this happens again, it will be, to put it mildly, supremely ironic.
After shamelessly absorbing the rhetorical terms "revolutionary," "cool," "transformational" and all the rest, the new establishment of the new economy may be in for a dose of the real thing.There are tremors faintly tangible across the country these days.Over the last few weeks, for example, the South of Market area in San Francisco has been plastered with signs, put up by an anonymous guerrilla propaganda group, that ridicule and satirize the neighborhood's Internet-based companies.
The "KilltheDot" campaign has created slogans that are mostly obscene and therefore can't be repeated here, but which skewer the pretensions and silliness of "dot-com" services. The signs have proliferated around the country through the Internet and are beginning to show up in other urban technology centers.
Last year, we had the images of the "Battle in Seattle," the protests over the World Trade Organization. Those events may be repeated in a few weeks in Washington, D.C., in demonstrations against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. On April 14, there will be national teach-ins on globalization in Washington, with scheduled protests by many of the same groups that were in Seattle.
In recent weeks, 1,500 people marched in protest in Boston against biotechnology and genetically altered foods. And 3,000 trade unionists marched in downtown Los Angeles for higher wages and better working conditions. Students at UCLA and other colleges are building organizations to fight sweatshops in L.A. and overseas.
"There's more and more sense from our donor constituency that money isn't everything, that this has gotten out of hand," says Catherine Suitor, director of development for the Liberty Hill Foundation in Santa Monica.
Liberty Hill has sponsored donor events that address such issues as "Raising Socially Responsible Children," and the turnout has been huge, Suitor says.Most of the activism in working-class neighborhoods and on college campuses is about inequality. "It's more than just the new technology," Suitor says. "It's more about the divide created by the new economy." She attributed the new restlessness to "anger at corporate power."
Jon Katz, a media critic and author of the new book "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho" (Villard Books, 2000), agrees. "What you're seeing shape up is the first big political battle of the 21st century, between individualism and corporatism," Katz says.
Katz follows the growing numbers of young computer mavens who are loosely allied as proponents of open source software, free expression, an open Internet and radical individualism.
These are the young people who are increasingly challenging corporations that are trying to lock down the Internet and secure it for commerce. The mounting wars over intellectual property and network security are just the beginning, Katz says.
"Corporatism is a new phenomenon, and not the same as capitalism or corporations," he says. "It means bigness, controlling markets, mass marketing. Companies are now bigger than ever before. They've acquired most of our mainstream culture, and now they're moving on to the Internet.
"There's a general sense of helplessness and anger," he added. "It used to be you could be an individual and coexist with large corporations, but now you can't. It's the Wal-Marting of America."
Because of the homogenization of mass culture, Katz says, "the place individuals are turning to is the Internet." That's where the battle is being waged by young, smart, computer-savvy free-thinkers."These kids are the freest people on Earth. And they're mad." They don't want to see "their" Internet absorbed into mass market culture, and they don't want to see a corporate logo on every Web page. They're contemptuous of how conventional political parties are dependent on high-tech money.The critical factor is that a lot of these young people can outwit the technologists of the government and private sector and build systems that are always one step ahead of powerful interests."These kids are ready to go, ready to rally around a leader," Katz says. "They're not going to go as easily as journalists did, when their media were bought up."
He predicted that soon, perhaps within a couple of years, there will be a political candidate who will emerge from this constituency. "That person will be surprised at how much anger there is out there about corporate power.""When the war in Vietnam ended, the boomers gave up on revolution and went back to work," Katz says. In fact, they just adopted the terms of that era for advertising. "But these kids are real revolutionaries. They cannot be stopped. They're our last hope," he concluded
Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
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NOTE: This article is from a Businessweek Online
Daily Briefing, dated March 2, 2000.
An Indian physicist puts a PC w/ a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums
and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital
divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.
Edited by Paul Judge
Sugata Mitra has a PhD in physics and heads research efforts at New Delhi's NIIT, a fast-growing software and education company with sales of more than $200 million and a market cap over $2 billion. But Mitra's passion is computer-based education, specifically for India's poor. He believes that children, even terribly poor kids with little education, can quickly teach themselves the rudiments of computer literacy. The key, he contends, is for teachers and other adults to give them free rein, so their natural curiosity takes over and they teach themselves. He calls the concept "minimally invasive education."
To test his ideas, Mitra 13 months ago launched something he calls "the hole in the wall experiment." He took a PC connected to a high-speed data connection and imbedded it in a concrete wall next to NIIT's headquarters in the south end of New Delhi. The wall separates the company's grounds from a garbage-strewn empty lot used by the poor as a public bathroom. Mitra simply left the computer on, connected to the Internet, and allowed any passerby to play with it. He monitored activity on the PC using a remote computer and a video camera mounted in a nearby tree.
What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.
The physicist has since installed a computer in a rural neighborhood with similar results. He's convinced that 500 million children could achieve basic computer literacy over the next five years, if the Indian government put 100,000 Net-connected PCs in schools and trained teachers in some basic "noninvasive" teaching techniques for guiding children in using them. Total investment required, he figures Around $2 billion.
On Feb. 25, BW Online Contributing Editor Thane Peterson sat down with Mitra, a stocky 48-year-old with a mustache and a mop of graying black hair, in his tiny, triangular office at NIIT's R&D center on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in the south part of New Delhi. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.
Q: What gave you the idea of giving slum kids access to the Internet?
A: It was a social observation rather than a scientific one. Any parent who had given his child a computer would invariably remark to me about it. I could hardly ever find an exception. Within a very short period of time, the parent would be claiming that the child was a genius with a computer. When I poked a little further, I invariably found that the child was doing things with the computer that the parent didn't understand.
I asked myself whether the child was really doing something exceptional or if what we were seeing was adult incomprehension. If the adult was simply underestimating the child's ability to cope with a computer, then that should happen with any child. And I asked myself, "Why then would we want to use the same teaching methods for children as we use for teaching adults?"
At first, I tested my ideas with children who were easily available -- children at the company here, whose parents are in our executive group …Then we tried this "hole in the wall" concept, where we put a high-powered Pentium computer with a fast Internet connection into a wall and let [slum] children have access to it with no explanation whatsoever. To be very brief on what happened, the results have been uniform every time we've done this experiment. You get base level computer literacy almost instantly. By computer literacy, I mean what we adults define as computer literacy The ability to use the mouse, to point, to drag, to drop, to copy, and to browse the Internet.
The children create their own metaphors to do this. To give you an idea of what I mean, a journalist came up to one of these kids and asked him, "How do you know so much about computers?" The answer seemed very strange to her because the kid said, "What's a computer?" The terminology is not as important as the metaphor. If they've got the idea of how a mouse works and that the Internet is [like a wall they can paint on], who cares if they know that a computer is called a computer and a mouse is called a mouse? In most of our classes here at NIIT, we spend time teaching people the terminology and such. That seems irrelevant to me with these children.
But we also found that they would tend to plateau out. They would surf the Web -- Disney.com is very popular with them because they like games. And they would use [Microsoft] Paint. It's very, very popular with all of them. Because these are deprived children who do not have easy access to paper and paint. Every child likes to paint, so they would do it with that program. However, that's all they could do. So I intervened, and I played an MP3 [digital-music file] for them. They were astonished to hear music come out of the computer for the first time. They said, "Oh, does it work like a TV or radio?" I said, in keeping with my approach, "Well, I know how to get there but I don't know how it works." Then I [left].
As I would have expected, seven days later they could have taught me a few things about MP3. They had discovered what MP3 was, downloaded free players, and were playing their favorite songs. As usual, they didn't know what any of it was called. But they would say, "if you take this little box, and you drag this file into this box, it plays music." They had found out where all the Hindi music was on the Web and had pulled it out.
Q: What does it mean? What does it say for the potential of these slum kids? After all, being able to download music isn't enough to get them a job.
A: I don't wish to claim that this shows anything more or less than what it has shown, which is that curious kids in groups can train themselves to operate a computer at a basic level. In doing so, they also can get a generally good idea about the nature of browsing and the nature of the Internet ... And, therefore, if they view these things as worth learning, no formal infrastructure is needed [to teach them].
Now, that's a big deal, because everyone agrees that today's children must be computer-literate. If computer literacy is defined as turning a computer on and off and doing the basic functions, then this method allows that kind of computer literacy to be achieved with no formal instruction. Therefore any formal instruction for that kind of education is a waste of time and money. You can use that time and money to have a teacher teach something else that children cannot learn on their own.
Q: What else have you learned?
A: Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, "What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?" He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, "Look here guys. I have a little problem for you." They read the questions and said they didn't understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, "Here's a terminal. I'll give you two hours to find the answers."
Then I did my usual thing I closed the door and went off somewhere else.
They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn't mean much. But I said to him, "Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject." So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, "They don't know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn't know."
That's not a wow for the children, it's a wow for the Internet. It shows you what it's capable of. The slum children don't have physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is not what's important. What is important is infrastructure and access ... The teacher's job is very simple. It's to help the children ask the right questions.
Q: Are you saying that if we put computers in all the slums, slum kids could become literate on their own?
A: I'm saying that, in situations where we cannot intervene very frequently, you can multiply the effectiveness of 10 teachers by 100 - or 1,000 - fold if you give children access to the Internet.
Q: This is your concept of minimally invasive education?
A: Yes. It started out as a joke but I've kept using the term ... This is a system of education where you assume that children know how to put two and two together on their own. So you stand aside and intervene only if you see them going in a direction that might lead into a blind alley. That's just so that you don't waste time ... That would create teachers who are experts at composing questions.
Q: What are the business applications of all this?
A: I get asked this question all the time. It's kind of ironic that a company that makes [a big chunk of its sales from running computer-training institutes] should invent a method where no teacher is required. The answer is that just because a method is economically viable, doesn't mean you shouldn't look for alternatives. A good business is one which provides more and more for less and less. The cost of your goods and services should spiral downwards.
The second point is that we are going to have an e-commerce boom. But what happens when an Indian businessman puts his shop up on the Web? Where's he going to get customers from? If someone lets me do this experiment for five years, with 100,000 kiosks, I reckon that I could get 500 million children computer-literate. It would cost $2 billion. But if you had to pay to educate the same children using traditional methods, it would cost twice as much.
Q: If this were to become a business, would it require government funding?
A: Advertisers like Coca-Cola might be interested. But it would absolutely have to have government funding. I can't think of a company that would put $2 billion into this. The governments will have to realize that the problem of the haves and have-nots is about to [become] the problem of the knows and knows-not. Do we want to create another great big divide where the problem of illiteracy will come back in another context? In a very short period of time, adults who do not know how to deal with a [computer] mouse will have a very difficult time dealing with almost everything in life.
Q: But most of the information on the Internet is in English and the people you're talking about don't speak English.
A: We had some very surprising results there. We all have great misconceptions about what these children know and don't know. At first, I made a Hindi interface for the kids, which gave them links for hooking up with Web sites in their own language. I thought it would be a great hit. uess what they did with it? They shut it down and went back to Internet Explorer. I realized that they may not understand the dictionary meaning of [English] words, but they have an operational understanding. They know what that word does. They don't know how to pronounce F-I-L-E, but they know that within it are options of saving and opening up files ...The fact that the Internet is in English will not stop them from accessing it.
They invent their own terminology for what's going on. For example, they call the pointer of the mouse sui, which is Hindi for needle. More interesting is the hourglass that appears when something is happening. Most Indians have never heard of an hourglass. I asked them, "What does that mean?" They said, "It's a damru," which is Hindi for Shiva's drum. [The God] Shiva holds an hourglass - shaped drum in his hand that you can shake from side to side. So they said the sui became a damru when the "thing" [the computer] was doing something.
Q: Of all the things the children did and learned, what did you find the most surprising?
A: One day there was a document file on the desktop of the computer. It was called "untitled.doc" and it said in big colorful letters, "I Love India." I couldn't believe it for the simple reason that there was no keyboard on the computer [only a touch screen]. I asked my main assistant -- a young boy, eight years old, the son of a local betel-nut seller -- and I asked him, "How on earth did you do this?" He showed me the character map inside [Microsoft] Word. So he had gotten into the character map inside Word, and dragged and dropped the letters onto the screen, then increased the point size and painted the letters. I was stunned because I didn't know that the character map existed -- and I have a PhD.
Q So what you're talking about is a different sort of literacy, a sort of functional literacy ...
A: Yes, it's functional literacy. There are two examples I'd like to give you from the recent past. It's already happened in cable TV in India. There are 50 or 60 million cable-TV connections in India at this point in time. The guys who set up the meters, splice the coaxial cables, make the connection to the house, etc., are very similar to these kids. They don't know what they're doing. They only know that if you do these things, you'll get the cable channel. And they've managed to [install] 60 million cable connections so far.
Example No. 2 is the bicycle. I think we have the biggest bicycle-manufacturing industry in the world. The bicycle is ubiquitous here, and it's much the same in Malaysia, China, Africa. But you don't ask how the population became bicycle-literate. They just use it. So what I'd like to see is an India in which a large part [of the population] treats the computer that way.
The other thing is [how the Internet will change when most Indians gain access to it]. We have the analogy of cable TV in India. Originally, it was all in English. It took exactly four years for all the programming to become Hindi. Star TV is now almost all in Hindi. If you go to Bangkok, hey hate it.
Q: You're saying that a lot of Hindi content will appear as more Indians surf the Net?
A: Exactly. Let me go on record as saying it's not a question of what the Internet will do to India. It's a question of what India will do to the Internet ... If rural India goes onto the Internet, there will be an absolute flood of Indian-language content from people trying to sell to them.
Q: Has the Indian or any other government expressed interest in funding such a project?
A: Several government agencies, several state governments, and several world agencies have expressed an interest. Unfortunately, I don't want to name them because I need to get the funds first.
Q: You say that only the children used the computer, not adults. What does this mean for adult education?
A: I'm not even going to suggest that we use this [technique] for adults. The only reaction we got from adults was, "What on earth is this for? Why is there no one here to teach us something? How are we ever going to use this?" I contend that by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers.
There are two points I'd like to make about the adults. One is that the adults asked the children to do things for them. For example, to read their horoscopes on the Hindi news sites. The second thing is the reaction of the women. I would ask them why they didn't use [the computer], and they would say, "I don't have enough brains to understand all this." I would say, "What about your daughters?" And the answer was, "They have lots of brains." So I said, "Do you think I should just remove this thing?" The answer was always, "No, no, no." I asked why not. And they said, "Because it's very good for the children."
Now, if the mothers have realized that, I'm happy. I don't care if they don't come [to use the computer]. Because all we have to do is wait one generation. Not even that. In five years, a 13-year-old is going to be 18 and be an adult.
Q: Where do you go from here?
A: There is one experiment that scares me. These children don't know what e-mail is. If I gave them e-mail, I don't know what would happen. I'll probably try it anyway. But remember the stories one used to hear about people finding lost tribes and introducing them to Coca-Cola? I'm really seriously scared about what would happen if suddenly the whole wide world had access to these kids. I don't know who would talk to them for what purpose.
Jn kolko http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~kolko
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Taken from The Learning MarketSpace, April 1, 2000
Copyright 2000 by Bob Heterick and Carol Twigg.
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Recent announcements by several well-known institutions of higher education that they are forming for-profit subsidiaries to deliver distance education is yet another sign of the transition of higher education to a more market-driven, commercialized existence. This transition has not been caused by advances in technology, but it has certainly been exacerbated as a consequence of them.
For the past 40 years, generally under the cloak of some form of foundation, universities have begun to create for-profit subsidiaries to handle patent income, develop and operate research parks and generally engage in businesses that avoid the appearance of competition with private enterprise in the local community. This activity has typically been ad hoc and not driven by an conscious policy other than the base instinct that developing additional sources of revenue was somehow "good" for the institution.
During this same time period, we have witnessed significant growth in the fund-raising activities of institutions. Large endowments with significant capital appreciation are a relatively new phenomena in higher education. Particularly with state-assisted institutions, the accumulation of capital or an excess of revenue over expenditure has been a hallmark of this transition. So much so, that many public research institutions have reached the point where state assistance represents a minor (but still important) portion of their operating revenue.
It is not at all uncommon to find the Trustees of those institutions focused on the fund-raising capabilities of candidates during presidential searches. Judging from news reports and anecdotal evidence, the major portion of presidential time is spent in fund-raising as each capital campaign is followed very quickly by a new, and even larger campaign.
It is getting very difficult to tell the players, even with a scorecard. We used to have not-for-profit institutions of higher learning, some of which were privately supported and some of which were publicly supported or at least publicly assisted. Then we witnessed the beginnings of for-profit, commercial entities offering higher education. Now we have closely held subsidiaries of not-for-profit institutions offering for-profit educational opportunities.
This is not intended to be a Jeramiad lamenting the involvement of profit-making entities in higher education, but rather to raise the question of the implications of not-for-profit educational organizations forming for-profit subsidiaries to deliver education. The creation of for-profit subsidiaries to market intellectual property, operate research parks, and now, to deliver education, raises more than a few questions about the general structure of higher education in the United States.
This really shouldn't be too surprising. When we began this publication, we observed that we would track the signals of the transition of higher education from public and/or philanthropic support to a marketplace, competitive enterprise. We have to confess that we didn't think it would come quite so quickly or nearly so boldly.
With the growth of graduate education and a shift in student demographics away from the traditional, resident, 18-22 year old, institutions need to confront their organizational raison d'etre. Just as institutions of higher learning shifted from religious to state support in the mid-1800s, we are witnessing a shift from state to private support to commercialization in the 21st century. Absent a clear understanding and a well thought-out plan on the part of Trustees and legislatures, this shift is likely to remain murky, undirected, and frequently, controversial.
A successful subsidiary delivering distance education will require a level of research and development uncharacteristic of institutions of higher education. One reason frequently proffered for higher education's general failure to invest in research and development of its mainstream instructional delivery function is its not-for-profit status. In this regard, the establishment of for-profit subsidiaries may signal a rational approach to the creation and investment of R&D dollars.
However, there is nothing to suggest that institutions of higher learning possess the skill set, management flexibility, or entrepreneurial reward structure to be successful in the creation and maintenance of customer-attractive, asynchronous learning products. Many institutional administrators naively equate the posting on the web of a course syllabus and some instructor developed notes with the effort required to produce successful distance learning environments. Many faculty, equally naively, assume that to post their lecture notes on the web is to lose control of (and the financial benefit from) valuable intellectual property. Most faculty I know have trouble getting their word processor to work consistently. To think that they will, in their spare time, develop compelling, micro-immersion learning environments for remote learners is naive in the extreme.
Such learning tools will be developed, and some by faculty currently in institutions of higher education. But absent major R&D investments, forgoing the master teacher paradigm in favor of design teams with broad skill sets, and new compensation strategies, it is highly unlikely that our current institutions of higher education will be the developers of such tools--even in a for-profit subsidiary. What seems to be clear is that for-profit is not synonymous with entrepreneurial. To be seriously in the course development and distribution business, institutions of higher learning will need to be entrepreneurial.
While these restructuring attempts by institutions of higher education, no Matter how modest or faltering, at least demonstrate an awareness that the status quo is not likely to be successful in the age of the Net, our reaction is somewhat the same as that attributed to Mark Twain upon first hearing Wagner--it's better than it sounds.
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Telematics for African Development Consortium
P.O. Box 31822
Braamfontein
2017
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: +27 +11 403-2813
Fax: +27 +11 403-2814
neilshel@icon.co.za
www.saide.org.za
* To view an archive of previous updates
visit: www.saide.org.za/tad/archive.htm
* For resources on distance education and technology use in Southern Africa visit: www.saide.org.za/worldbank/Default.htm
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