Last year Amy put her PhD in neuroscience to good use when she wrote the article debunking Baby Einstein. I, too, aired my thoughts in an article titled buy now, pay forever: the business of tech toys. Today, a blog from open source community member Stormy Peters teaches that we may have it all wrong when it comes to rewards and motivation.
Adlerian psychology teaches that every human being has the goal of belonging, of making a place in his or her world. Discouraged children, who find themselves unable to accomplish this goal on the socially useful side of life through cooperation and contribution, may develop mistaken goals in their struggle to belong. But what is it that encourages or discourages a child? One theory is that praise, which represents a form of judgement, orders the child within an external locus of power, making them helpless or powerless when praise is witheld, whereas responses or natural consequences that relate to a self-centered view—doing things for their own sake— help the child develop an authentic and independent sense of self. What does this have to do with technology?
As I reported in our own family's on-going XO Laptop experiment, the rewards of learning can be both immediate and self-evident, if only the game is not too deeply buried under layers of flashy but meaningless praise. We are struggling against a consumeristic tide that bombards our daughter with unrealistic promises of happiness and prestige/social status, but we are also winning a few battles here and there as the intrinsic rewards of authentic accomplishment push aside the TV clutter for another day.
If the Adlerian hypothesis is correct, that children really want is to belong and to be significant, then how do external rewards help or hurt the child as they grow into adulthood? A dependence on external rewards for a sense of self leads to a profound feeling of emptiness, which is chronicled in the excellent book The Price Of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. So without telling anybody how to be a better parent, let me just suggest that you look at social software and tech gadgets from a new perspective: what is the reward and who defines it? The more external and the more arbitrary the reward, the more the reward may diminish (to the point of extinction) intrinsic motivation. Conversely, the more ways a child can find some intrinsic reward in the activity (even if it's the reward of decorating rather than programming a laptop), the more the child builds an intrinsic sense of belonging and significance.
Happy Valentine's Day!
Ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are just some of the forces of nature that can wreak havoc on the lives of untold thousands in a period of seconds, minutes, days, or months. As global temperatures rise and as a growing human population expands into more and more areas less and less suited for either habitation or rescue, the average person in the world (one of 6+ billion) faces an increasing likelyhood that he or she will face a real disaster that seriously disrupts possible response.
Consider the plight of Sri Lanka, which was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. According to a BBC eyewitness reporter:
There are no kind of emergency services here, there are no helicopters thumping through the sky to come to save people. It is a do-it-yourself rescue.
The final tally reported more than 40,000 dead and a staggering 2.5 million displaced. And from the report's summary: "Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars, and even a train with 1,700 passengers." Whatever infrastructure may have existed prior to the tsunami, it was completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of human need and the destructive power of the disaster. Within hours, open-source software developers created the Sahana project, and within days, their home-grown solution was doing more to help the Sri Lankan people than first-world conventional software packages did in far less extreme circumstances. And now it is doing even more, with the One Laptop Per Child hardware platform.
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"...Nobody is in the room. The professor is just another open browser window, 1 of 10."
--UNC graduate student on the distracted classroom experience
Anyone...Hawley-
Smoot tariff act?
I was a talented teacher, but let's face it, when you are trying to convince 16-year-olds that they really are interested in learning chemistry at 8:30 in the morning, it helps to have a captive audience.
Now teachers face new pressures: competing for their students' attention inside the classroom, and presenting material in a way that resembles the variety of mass media that teens consume on average more than 40 hours a week.
... Read moreOur family took a roadtrip from North Carolina to South Carolina in the past month. We all agreed that my daughter could not ask "Are we there yet?" more than five times, and we decided to bring along one of our XO laptops to give her a fighting chance. (We've never had an in-car video system.) After her first "Are we there yet?" question, we suggested she might want to boot up the XO, and she did.
... Read moreAt first glance, Re-Mission comes across as a stylishly produced, anime-influenced video game. But the targets in question are cancer cells, which the character Roxxi the nanobot blasts with the Chemoblaster, the Radiation Gun, and the Antibiotic Rocket.
Re-Mission is specifically designed as a health improvement intervention for teens and young adults who have cancer. Game producers at HopeLab start with a desired health outcome, and then reverse engineer a game that encourages positive behaviors, adding motivation and fun into something as scary as a kid's battle against cancer.
Re-Mission helps teens fight cancer
HopeLab Vice President Ellen LaPointe spoke at the Sandbox Summit conference on Tuesday, and I was amazed to learn that the game producers actually test the effectiveness of their games through controlled clinical research studies. HopeLab followed 374 kids with cancer, at 34 hospitals in several countries, playing the game in English, Spanish, and French. The kids who played Re-Mission showed measurable improvements in their attitude (sense of self-efficacy) and healthy behavior (taking medications as prescribed).
It's interesting to see a nonprofit with a health-improvement mission embrace video games in this new way. It is crucial that Re-Mission looks as well-designed as any game out there on the market. Deborah Manchester of the kids' science Web site Zula, another panelist at the Sandbox Summit, said that one pitfall of educational media is that we can get stuck in a rut trying to put the same boring content into a digital format. Re-Mission shows what can be accomplished when designers break out of that box to create a product based on what kids and teens really enjoy playing.
What's next for HopeLab? Ruckus Nation, whose underlying goal is to look for new solutions to childhood obesity. Students from all over the world entered Ruckus Nation's online competition for new product designs that are cool and fun enough to get kids moving.
HopeLabs will support the development and testing of winning products, providing a real opportunity for kids to not only win a contest, but to see their innovative ideas come to life.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
Two weeks I wrote about how the XO laptop endowed a 9-year-old boy with seemingly magical powers (of intellectual curiosity and competence), and I wondered aloud whether my 8-year-old daughter would fare as well. On the one hand, she does like gadget gifts such as The Littlest Petshop. On the other hand, many such gadgets wind up as nothing more than a surface waiting to be decorated with stickers or glitter glue. Would her reaction to the XO validate or repudiate Negroponte's hypothesis that his project is an education project, not a laptop project? It seemed to work pretty well for Rufus.
We decided to open the laptops on Christmas Eve--the two I bought via the Give One Get One program, plus a third I bought from a co-worker who had Given One but did not want to Get One. Go figure. My first happy surprise was that the XO logo was different on all three. This made it possible to identify which was whose without stickers.
After booting them up, we all had to learn the Sugar interface. My second surprise was that it was not quite obvious to me how these XOs would network. Two of them were quite happy to mesh with one another. The third (which I'd opened earlier) was all happy about our Netgear wireless router and could not be bothered with the mesh network. How the heck was I going to get the two that were networked together to network to me?
I confess: I had to go to the Web to read some documentation about the theory and practice of the Sugar interface and network connectivity. This gave me my third (and happy) surprise: it was quite obvious once you grokked it, and it also meant that these laptops are not quite as promiscuous with their connectivity as first I had feared. I knew that the Sugar interface was based around activities, but I didn't understand until reading the documentation that the activity was the thing you shared, not a network connection or hardware resource. When my daughter started a chat, she could go to her neighborhood, and when mousing over her own chat application, she could decide to invite others she had marked as friends. With this two-level acceptance policy (first, she has to find and mark a friend; second, the only activities that are shared are the ones you choose to share with a friend), the XO is far less of a security risk than first I feared. Nevertheless, I wanted to really make sure I understood the features and the limits of XO networking so I hopped on #olpc-help and verified that my network bifurcation was a known limitation (possibly to be fixed with update.1 in mid-January).
But the real fun began after we started to explore the XO's games. I told her to open Pippy and we played the "guess the number" game. In Pippy, the source code appears on the top half of the screen, and the interaction window (where you enter your name and guess the number) appears on the bottom half. She played the game three times, averaging about 7 guesses per try, and then said "I want to play another game." I suggested she try playing a different game by modifying the parameters to guess a number between 1 and 1,000,000, instead of between 1 and 100. She looked at me with wide eyes. I explained that on the top was a program, the program of the game, and that if she changed a single number in two places, she could change the game itself. She went from a look of "no way" to a look of "OK! What are we waiting for!" in about 200 milliseconds. She started to enter a million, decided that was just a little too large, and changed it to 1,000. She hit "run" and sure enough, the prompt asked for a guess between 1 and 1,000. She looked at me excitedly. I told her to guess, and after 11 guesses, she got it. She looked at me again, somewhat amazed. I told her she had just programmed the computer. I might as well have told her we were going to spend a week in Cinderella's castle--she jumped up, shrieked, and yelled "HEY MOMMY! GUESS WHAT!? I JUST PROGRAMMED THE COMPUTER!"
Needless to say there was much excitement. She tried other modifications, including a version of the game she could win every time on the first try. She got her syntax errors, run-time errors, all the other scrapes and bruises one gets on the way to learning how to program, but she was excited, elated, and became confident! The little scorekeeper in me said:
Negraponte: 1, Doubt: 0.
I had to report this success to the #olpc-help newsgroup, which brought forth some cheers and hoopla. A person logged in as cjb asked "Are you the Michael Tiemann?" I explained that while there are a few, yes, I was the guy who wrote GNU C++. He responded that he was the author of Pippy—how cool is that? The author of the very program was reading the mailing list on Christmas Day!
So far, everything, and I mean everything about the XO has exceeded my expectations: the build quality, the software functionality, and most importantly, the positive effect it has had on my daughter's curiosity and confidence about computers. What a great gift!
You won't read this in the glossy ads of a pregnancy magazine, but motherhood often leaves women feeling burned out, disappointed at times, and confused about who they are anymore.
As a writer on this topic, one of my major conclusions is that it's not our reality that is necessarily so difficult, but rather the gap between our expectations and reality that drives us crazy.
BabyPlus ad from Fit Pregnancy magazine
What creates this gap? It begins with the romanticization of motherhood, the buildup to the "big day" of childbirth, like the idealization of a wedding as opposed to the reality of a marriage. Mothers-to-be are marketed to like crazy, and I am concerned that high-tech gadgets have a particular role in this problem. The marketing of gadgets raises the bar of expectation even higher, and gadgets tend to promise new parents an unrealistic level of control and certainty.
Take the BabyPlus "prenatal education system." Hey, I guess a regular baby isn't good enough any more. You need to produce a baby PLUS. This little pod is the latest gadget that a pregnant woman is supposed to strap to her belly to give her fetus a jump-start on academic achievement. The device "introduces patterns of sound to the unborn child in only the language he or she understands - the maternal heartbeat." The promised benefits include better sleep, better nursing, more self-soothing...right up to improved school readiness.
Now I can't say whether this program has any effect or not, but the marketing really bothers me.
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Teachers have an unlimited supply of interesting ideas for classroom projects, but have often been limited to the resources they could afford to contribute from their own pocketbooks.
Seven years ago, a history teacher in the Bronx started a Web site that directly connected teachers and donors to fund classroom projects. This week DonorsChoose announced that its program has expanded to include every public school in America.
This "open source" approach to supporting public schools encourages teachers to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Their proposals compete in the marketplace of ideas to attract support. Everyday citizens are invited to become philanthropists who can make a big difference by pooling their contributions, from $10 on up.
As a donor, I found that my experience on DonorsChoose channels reminded me of the thrill of an eBay purchase. But instead of making an impulse buy for something that I didn't really need, I was making a contribution to a worthy cause. In return, my family has received wonderful thank-you packets from teachers and students that include letters and photos of the projects we funded.
... Read moreI woke up Monday to the announcement that starting September 24, the XO laptop (famous as the little laptop that could) will be made available to buyers in so-called first-world countries, in quantities less than 100,000 units. In fact, for less than $400 you can give one and receive another--an excellent solution to an age-old moral dilemma.
... Read moreWhen I was a high school student, I hated writing term papers. I thought the whole enterprise of collecting information was tedious and boring. I remember visiting the local college library to look for information for a term paper I was writing about Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was a struggle to find the five required references. I remember looking up books in the card catalog, then hunting them down on the shelves, and scouring each one for relevant information that I wrote down on index cards. Some books were missing, some were out of place. It took hours to gather enough information to begin even writing a paper.
Then there was the task of transforming these pieces of information into a coherent narrative, typed on an electric typewriter.
Boy do I feel old. But more to the point, it's ironic that I became a writer in the long run. It turns out that I love to do research, but only when I can get to the information I need as quickly as possible.
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