Two evaluators recently returned to OLE Nepal's office after two weeks at Nepal's pilot schools. They are working on an early qualitative evaluation based on interviews with teachers, parents, and kids participating in the pilots. I have found the insights and feedback they brought back incredibly useful. This article will focus on one particularly consistent piece of feedback from the teachers: They want built-in lesson plans for activities on the XO and they want it explicitly defined in the lesson plans which learning objectives in Nepal's National Curriculum the activities satisfy.
The Nepali NGO I work for, OLE Nepal, has put a lot of work into developing mathematics and English activities that are both constructionist and match Nepal's national curriculum. Still, there is much we have to do in order to scale constructionism from a few pilot schools to the national level.
Why is this Important?
Teachers can make or break any attempt at educational reform and OLPC will not be an exception. Duh! We have to do everything we can to support and encourage them. Don't get me wrong, there are many fantastic learning activities on the XO such as EToys, Scratch, Measure, etc. But out of the box none of them - with the exception of the MaMaMedia activities - comes with built-in lesson plans and correlations to country XYZ's national curriculum. Please note that MaMaMedia has done a great job of integrating lesson plans into their activities.
When you look at the XO, you see a lot of attractive activity icons but no logical path or next step. This is great for discovery but problematic for a teacher trying to include the XO into regular classroom instruction. OLE Nepal's development team tried to make this easier by grouping the E-Paath activities by subject and by grade. We also added a help icon to each E-Paath activity that clearly explains the purpose of the activity and which objectives it satisfies in the national curriculum.
This still isn't enough. Teachers are usually excited when they first see EPaath but then daunted by the work of integrating it into the classroom. We have looked at building lesson plans and other supplementary materials into our activities but this has turned out to be more technically challenging than we thought it would be.
No One True Activity Programming Platform
We chose EToys as our development platform, because it 1) has a graphical development environment 2) is fully extensible in powerful Squeak-Smalltalk and 3) can access the XO's underlying hardware and Sugar's presence service. Bert Freudenberg has put in an incredible amount of work to make point #3 possible. Unfortunately, Etoys are not the ideal tool for linking and embedding different types of content such as pdf's, flash animations, and python activities. Lesson plans together with activities and supplementary reading materials quickly grow into something much bigger, full-blown courses.
As much as I love EToys, I do not see it or any other programming tool emerging as the standard programming platform for activities on the XO. Since the beginning of Sugar, many have championed python together with pygame but it lacks a graphical editing environment which makes it far less productive than EToys or Flash for designing graphics heavy activities. Flash is neither open-source nor can it access the XO hardware but a lot of people know it and a large # of open-source educational software packages use it heavily, such as the excellent eShiksha and Nortel LearnIT.
For the foreseeable future creating courses for the XO means stringing together activities written in Squeak, Python, and Flash.
HTML is the Answer
So how can we best link and embed different kinds of content into a compelling courses? The answer is literally staring you right in the face. Good old, boring HTML won't be the subject of any new computer science doctoral dissertations but it is the right tool for this job.
I have a lot of ideas on how HTML and particularly Moodle can be used to create compelling courses that empower teachers but that will be the subject of my next post.
I did a video showing the E-paath activity for non xo, or
G1G1 fearful users. Warning. This activity is big (105.45 MB)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zLAYgjx5J0
Pato Acevedo
Keep on, bro!
HTML on a CD, no nonsense about internet, mesh, etc.
Train teachers that same way.
The medium is the message!
Oh, we still can make this thing work.
You are standing in a large hall full of educational emptiness.
You can either click on http://www.inform-fiction.org or read Natural Language, Semantic Analysis and Interactive Fiction: http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Documents/WhitePaper.pdf
If one of the links have been clicked the player has won the game.
@Andreas,
Interactive Fiction is very much like what I had in mind.
I haven't a clue what this means:
"You are standing in a large hall full of educational emptiness."
Pls enlighten me.
HTML can be made active with Javascript. In itself not that bad as a programming language.
However, you would not want that to access hardware directly. Javascript is not intended for that.
Winter
I think Andreas is harking back to Zork - "You're standing in a low-ceilinged room. There is a distant sound of dripping water. On the floor is a rusty sword and a gold ring" - one of the early text-based maze quest games.
A directly education-oriented effort in the same genre is/was Cyberion City of which I was a "citizen" for some time. Cyberion City was a multi-player environment which differentiates it from Zork and, of course, required a telecom connection.
It's an interesting idea and holds potential I think but to the best of my knowledge no one's translated that potential into an effective learning tool by demonstrating results.
@Bryan
Basically every classical text adventure starts with being lost at a remote place not knowing who you are and where you are. My sentence refers to that.
Up to my knowledge Informal Fiction has never been used for teaching. But it could be a good middle ground between easy to write, but very static HTML pages and animated, but time consuming tools like Etoys.
And there *is* the Frotz text-adventure engine activity...
Packaging education as an Adventure game is an interesting concept, though it seems a stretch:
"You are in a room full of numbers and operators.
There appears to be order here but it is hard to discern."
@Andreas,
>Up to my knowledge Informal Fiction has never been used for teaching
You might want to follow this blog article " Soliciting suggestions about Interactive Fiction for education" at http://emshort.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/soliciting-suggestions-about-if-for-education/
which is looking for inputs, experience on using IF in the classroom
I agree Bryan; I have been working with the Commonwealth of Learning's Wikieducator facilitating the Learning4Content workshops in the Pacific. This empowers educators including teachers to create open educational materials collaboratively. It also is an easy way to create local content and then export it to the XS server, using the Collections and IMS Package Export facility (hidden as a beta version bottom of the Collections Help page). In Nauru, we did Wikieducator L4C workshop just before the OLPC trials deployment. Teachers created their example content with the Wikieducator and we exported it to the S, and then used it in the OLPC teacher training! Also, in need of some demonstration content for trials deployments, I took 57 "lesson plans for biology in primary schools" in the Wikieducator and made a collection, and exported the lot to the XS as an IMS package. This resonates so strongly that my head is ringing!!! Furthermore, the teachers in Nauru participate directly in curriculum development, so there is the link you are talking about.
Now, IMS packages are basically HTML "websites" bundled into a zip file, and using CSS. To put on the XS, one simply expands it into the /var/www/html/content folder and add a simple index file (index.html) with links to each html page. Then the XOs browse it directly.
HTML displays much more conveniently and is more user-friendly (child-friendly) than PDF books which have to be resized, pages clicked and are also much larger than the HTML equivalents (at least when one compares PDF export wth IMS on the Wikiedcator).
Of course, the XS needs a searchable electronic library / LMS system and the "customised" Moodle that Martyn etc are working on is awaited keenly. In anticipation, I tried porting the Wikieducator "lesson plans for primary schools" plus some OLPC Oceania teacher training guides, also created on the Wikieducator, to our schoolnet Moodle www.schoolnet.net.sb - you can see how they render. You can also try viewing the Solomons Moodle on an XO via the Internet. You will see some rendering issues - mainly the navigation pane has text overflowing to he content pane.
But this is obviously the way to go.
My contact details at wikieducator.org/User:Leeming Please do contact me if you want to share your ideas on this.
Very interesting article, Bryan! I agree with you. I wish to add some related comments.
I am working with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (www.spc.int) in the OLPC Oceania deployments.
I have also been working with the Commonwealth of Learning, facilitating their Learning4Content workshops in the Pacific. This empowers educators including teachers to create open educational materials collaboratively using the award winning Wikieducator (wikieducator.org). It also is an easy way to create local content and then export it to the XS server, using the Collections and IMS Package Export facility (currently hidden as a beta version bottom of the Collections Help page).
In Nauru (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Nauru), we did a Wikieducator L4C workshop just before the OLPC trials deployment. Teachers created their example content with the Wikieducator and we then exported it to the XS, and then used it in the OLPC teacher training.
Also, in need of some demonstration content for trials deployments, I took some of the large and growing open content, namely about 40 "lesson plans for biology in primary schools" from a Wikieducator “collection” and exported this to the XS as an IMS package. We were able to access relevant open content offline, which is often the preferable solution even when Internet access is available, as it is more efficient and the content can be categorised an presented to suit the local needs.
In the Pacific Islands, curriculum development is a big challenge with each tiny country requiring the capacity and resources for developing and publishing materials. The Wikieducator provides a new and highly scalable solution for curriculum development, and a powerful way of distributing to schools is now opening up with the OLPC school servers. This is much more affordable than ever before.
I am always amazed by the ideas and high-level thinking of teachers brought in from the rural areas for these workshops, and think of what contribution the could make if they were empowered.
The Wikieducator allows a much wider group of educators to contribute to content development. The linkages with official education development are here - for instance, the teachers in Nauru already participate directly in curriculum development. However, curriculum departments need to see the light and embrace this new paradigm, of open education resources and a free curriculum for everyone.
All of this resonates so strongly that my head is ringing!!!
Now, back to your conclusion that HTML is a good way of delivering the content.
This is very easy with IMS packages, which are basically HTML "websites" bundled into a zip file, and using CSS. To put on the XS, one simply expands it into the /var/www/html/content folder and add a simple index file (index.html) with links to each html page. Then the XOs browse it directly.
HTML displays much more conveniently and is more user-friendly (child-friendly) than PDF books which have to be resized, pages clicked and are also much larger than the HTML equivalents (at least when one compares PDF export wth IMS on the Wikieducator).
Of course, the XS needs a searchable electronic library / LMS system and the "customised" Moodle for the XS is awaited keenly. In anticipation, I tried porting the Wikieducator "lesson plans for primary schools" plus some OLPC Oceania teacher training guides, also created on the Wikieducator, to our schoolnet Moodle www.schoolnet.net.sb - you can see how they render. You can also try viewing the Solomons Moodle on an XO via the Internet. You will see some rendering issues - mainly the navigation pane has text overflowing to he content pane.
But this is obviously the way to go.
My contact details at wikieducator.org/User:Leeming Please do contact me if you want to share your ideas on this.