Thread:Feedback thoughts and suggestions on the high-level logic model (6)

Terminology
We need to provide a semantic mapping, or if you prefer, translation, between Commonwealth English terms and what is used elsewhere.

I believe that we agree on pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary. The confusion seems to be on graduate and post-graduate degrees and study. Some use these terms to mean anything past the BA or BS, while some seem to confuse them with post-doc.

Impact
I would extend Impact to include


 * the ability of graduates of these programs to get jobs
 * the ability of society to solve problems, including at least economic growth, strengthening civil society, human rights, the Millennium Development Goals...
 * the development of tools and techniques of collaboration over the Internet, leading to advances in multidisciplinary problem-solving, to many more multinational small businesses, and to a new kind of grassroots international NGO

and doubtless much more.

Knowledge and Resources
A great deal of research on computers in education, going back to the 1960s, is roundly ignored in educational practice. Some leading examples


 * Omar Khayyam Moore's Edison Talking Typewriter (plus human assistant) for teaching two-year-olds to read and write


 * Ken Iverson's APL used as a first-grade arithmetic language on IBM Selectric terminals, as described in his book Arithmetic, followed by his books on algebra and calculus with computer support


 * Seymour Papert's Logo and Turtle Art, as described in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas


 * Alan Kay's Smalltalk work, extending from Xerox PARC to the present Squeakland

It should be noted that Turtle Art and Smalltalk are both included in the OLPC XO Sugar education software, and are thus available to more than two million children today.

These examples are derived from elementary education, but they require us to ask what level of preparation for college-level work is possible in the future.

We should find out why so little of this research has been put to use, and determine whether the same obstacles apply to OER. The initial evidence from OLPC is that they can be completely bypassed under favorable circumstances.

Much more research is required. We have very little idea of the ways in which a computer acts as a mental amplifier in education, even though we have vast information on ways it assists engineering, politics, and other areas of endeavor. We have even less information on the effects of computers on collaboration in education, in spite of the application of substantial resources to this question, notably in Doug Engelbart's work on Enhancing Collective Intelligence at SRI in the 1960s, and the resulting Smalltalk/Dynabook group at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.

ICT Infrastructure
It is vital to address the needs for renewable electric power and for broadband Internet connections worldwide. We need to investigate


 * Solar
 * Wind
 * Microhydro
 * Biofuels (NOT corn ethanol)
 * Animal
 * Child

power, for every inhabited combination of terrain, climate, and ecology on the planet where would-be college students live, which is co-extensive with the locations where elementary-school students live.

The most important broadband lack right know is in Africa, western China and some other parts of Asia, and various island nations. All of the continental countries have fiber optic cables (some quite recent, as in Africa) or plans to get connected to their neighbors quite soon, and all of them are building out their networks as fast as they know how and can afford. WiMax systems now in early stages of rollout promise coverage of 90-95% of populations (depending on terrain and population densities) at about $10 per person. The remainder of the population may need to rely on satellite dishes or some form of enhanced Wide Area Sneakernet, that is on carrying flash drives, CDs and DVDs from place to place by whatever transportation services are available. In the most extreme cases, documented by Gordon Mortenson in Three Cups of Tea and in Stones into Schools, Sneakernet now means travel by horseback or even on foot.

One Laptop Per Child addresses this last problem through local mesh networking and school servers, so that students in an area cut off from the Internet can share a fairly capacious content server, and communicate directly with each other from house to house and sometimes from village to village. OERu students should be able to tap into the same networks.