3 TED talks on education

This blog post summarizes the content of three interesting TED talks on education:

• Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover


• Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums


• Sugata Mitra: How kids teach themselves

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover

Meyer argues that math textbooks prevent mathematical thinking and creativity by offering everything in small steps.

It is cool to see how he rewrites textbook exercises to make them more compelling and instructive.



Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums

In slums, education has to be pull, not push (as in mandatory, forced), because it competes with easy sources of money such as drug trafficking. Payoff has to be quick, what you learn has to make you productive immediately. In the industrialized world, education payoff and productivity are often postponed for years. In the developing world, there is a shortage of teachers, thus it becomes important to support peer teaching. One of the most important technologies is the cell phone. It should thus be used to support education.



Sugata Mitra: How kids teach themselves

Mitra did a “hole in the wall” experiment: He put a computer in a rural Indian area (accessed via a hole in a wall), left for 3 months and came back. The computer did not even have internet access, just a few CDs. When he came back, he talked to two children (8 and 12 years old) who played a game on the computer. They told him: “We need a faster processor and a better mouse”. Mitra, surprised: “How did you find that out?”. The children: “It was on the CDs”. Mitra: “How did you understand all this?” (the CDs were in English, but there was no English spoken in this area). Children: “Well, you left this machine which only talked English, so we had to learn English.” The children used 200 English words, not only with the computer, but also in their day to day conversations.



In later incarnations of this experiment, the first thing children did was to look for a web site that taught them the English alphabet. The overall result was that a computer enabled all children to teach themselves (regardless of any measurable factor such as economic wellfare, etc.). It had to happen in groups: Usually one child operated the computer and was surrounded by 3 children who advised. These children were again surrounded by 16 children who also advised, often incorrectly. The first 4 children had the same level of expertise and all children would pass a test on the topic learned via the computer. Adult intervention was not important. All these factors combined make this kind of education very affordable.

The power of sweating the small stuff

Recommended: Rory Sutherland’s talk “Sweat the small stuff”.  He posits that small things and encouragements are often more conducive to changing people’s behaviors than large projects and threats. As an example, Sutherland cites traffic signs that display your current car speed together with a smiley or a “frownie” (depending on whether your are within the speed limit). These are actually more efficient at preventing traffic accidents than speed cameras (which come with the threat of real punishment).



Unfortunately, powerful people often have large budgets and favor grand strategies. Instead, he would prefer powerful people with little money which would have to sweat the small stuff. He describes the four quadrants of a coordinate system with the axes “cost” and “effect”:

• costs much, has a big effect: strategy


• costs much, has a small effect: consultancy (partially tongue-in-cheek). He also mentions mergers which often change little for both employees and customers of companies.


• costs little, has a small effect: trivia


• costs little, has a big effect: these are things that usually escape politics and companies. He suggests inventing a word for this category and hiring “chief detail officers” (with small budgets) that are responsible for it.

Can gaming make a better world?

Jane McGonigal certainly seems to think so. She argues that gaming is becoming increasingly wide-spread and that gamers exhibit the following positive traits while gaming:

• Urgent optimism: in a game, every problem can be solved. Conversely, solving problems in reality can be impossible and frustrating.


• Social fabric: gamers must form a team to solve a problem. One is forced to socialize, which is also the reason for multi-player games being so appealing.


• Blissful productivity: Gamers put in a lot of time and work quite hard to achieve their goals. Compare this to universities where students frequently complain about a lack of motivation.


• Epic meaning: McGonigal mentions the “World of Warcraft wiki” being the second largest wiki after Wikipedia. I’m not sure what her point is here. It seems related to the previous point, because without the meaning that games provide, gamers would not be motivated.

She then presents three games that helped to shape participants’ behavior in the real world:

• World without oil: simulates an oil crisis. Participants apply oil-saving habits that they have acquired in the game to the real world.


• Superstruct: Ups the stakes by simulating a reality where a computer predicts that humanity only has 23 years to go.


• Evoke: A game designed to elicit social innovations from participants.

McGonigal concludes that games can be used to solve real-world problems. This position is based on a few assumptions, some of which I partially disagree with:

• There is not enough problem-solving in the world. Not true. The problem is that there is too much optimization, but it all happens locally and/or at the wrong place (investment bankers maximizing their profits, politicians looking for votes, etc.). Many people try to “save the world”, but it often involves fighting someone else and increasing conflict (of which there is already too much). So my guess is that most of the (industrialized) world would profit from people taking it easier and letting the big picture seep in.


• Analysis is the best tool to solve the world’s problems. Many hard problems are based on emotions: wars, discrimination, racism, obesity, etc. Rational thought is often the wrong tool to solve these problems. Otherwise, rational people would not be obese or alcoholics. On the other hand, the social component of games can be used to influence people on a more emotional level. Compare this to how having more black role models on TV and in the movies must help with reducing racism. Some of the older Hollywood movies were atrocious in this regard... Visualizing something is a powerful first step towards making it a reality.


• Everyone’s contributions are similar. Expert contributions have a different quality from grass root ideas how everyone can contribute. The “global extinction awareness system” game seems to factor in expert knowledge, but fully integrating such knowledge into game play seems quite challenging to me.

I think that for real-world problem solving, the current games are a start, but they have to become more sophisticated. Instead, I would interpret McGonigal’s arguments differently: She makes a compelling case for using games for education. Game technology could help to transfer experience (via a simulation) and not just dry knowledge. Everything would have a lot more meaning. You could, for example, walk through ancient Rome instead of only reading about it. Peer teaching is desirable, not common in classrooms, and can be the result of the above mentioned social component of games. Another example are foreign languages. To me, learning a foreign language only made sense after I went to a country where it was spoken and experienced it in action. Accordingly, game technology can provide immersive language learning.

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

This is a great talk on how modern ideas about success put us under a lot of stress. Many of the points the speaker makes is how chance and fortune relativize many of our unforgiving ideals:

• “Everyone can do anything” has to take into account that while some people do become very successful, it is also highly improbable that you will be one of them. The current prevalence of this idea is directly correlated to equally prevalent low self-esteem.
  
  


• “You are responsible for yourself” puts many people on a constant emotional roller coaster because they own their successes as well as their failures.


• In middle age England, poor people were considered “unfortunate” (=fortune played a role) whereas nowadays, they are often called “losers”, with far more (negative) personal connotations.


• Great quote: “A snob is anyone who takes a small part of you and uses it to come to a complete vision of who you are.”


• The answer to the question “what do you do” will often determine how much you are respected. So it is no surprise that people take career choices very seriously.
  
  

Incentives are bad for performance

The talk “The surprising science of motivation” by Dan Pink makes a great case that incentives lead to worse performance for any moderately complicated task. Instead of this (extrinsic) motivation, Pink suggests to encourage intrinsic motivation via: autonomy, mastery (get better at what you do), purpose.



This is similar to the findings reported in the article “Praise Children for Effort, Not Intelligence, Study Says”:

“Praising children's intelligence, far from boosting their self-esteem, encourages them to embrace self-defeating behaviors such as worrying about failure and avoiding risks,” said Dr. Dweck, lead author of the study. “However, when children are taught the value of concentrating, strategizing and working hard when dealing with academic challenges, this encourages them to sustain their motivation, performance and self-esteem.”

Praise of intelligence makes talent and success seem like magic, leading to a defeatist attitude when failing. Praise of effort gives you the feeling that things are fixable.

A projected user interface for portable devices

Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry: Unveiling the “Sixth Sense,” game-changing wearable tech

A nice demo of a device that uses a projector and image recognition to project its user interface onto external objects. This is an interesting contribution to exploring the extremes of immersive user interface on one hand and external user interfaces on the other hand.

Update: More user interface ideas:

David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think