Tinc una feina dura de fer. Quan he vist el perfil d'aquest públic amb les seves connotacions i disseny, en totes les seves formes, i amb tantíssima gent que treballa en xarxes col·laboratives... us volia dir, volia elaborar un argument per a l’educació primària en un context molt específic. Per fer-ho en 20 minuts, vull centrar-me en quatre idees: és com quatre peces d’un trencaclosques. I si aconsegueixo fer-ho, potser podreu tornar amb una idea que podríeu aprofitar i potser ajudar-me a fer la meva feina. La primera peça del trencaclosques és la llunyania
I have a tough job to do. You know, when I looked at the profile of the audience here, with their connotations and design, in all its forms, and with so much and so many people working on collaborative and networks, and so on, that I wanted to tell you, I wanted to build an argument for primary education in a very specific context. In order to do that in 20 minutes, I have to bring out four ideas -- it's like four pieces of a puzzle. And if I succeed in doing that, maybe you would go back with the thought that you could build on, and perhaps help me do my work. The first piece of the puzzle is remoteness
i la qualitat de l’educació. Per llunyania, em refereixo a dues o tres coses diferents. "Llunyania" en el sentit normal significa que a mesura que anem més i més lluny d'un centre urbà, arribem a zones més remotes. Què passa amb l’educació? El segon, o un altre tipus d’allunyament és: dins les grans àrees metropolitanes de tot el món, tenim llocs com barris baixos, barraques o zones més pobres, allunyades socialment i econòmica de la resta de la ciutat, i som "nosaltres" i "ells". Què passa amb l’educació en aquest context? Per tant, quedeu-vos amb ambdues idees de llunyania. Vam fer una suposició: que les escoles d’àrees remotes
and the quality of education. Now, by remoteness, I mean two or three different kinds of things. Of course, remoteness in its normal sense, which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center, you get to remoter areas. What happens to education? The second, or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world, you have pockets, like slums, or shantytowns, or poorer areas, which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city, so it's us and them. What happens to education in that context? So keep both of those ideas of remoteness. We made a guess. The guess was that schools in remote areas
no tenen professors prou bons. I si en tenen, no poden retenir-los. No tenen una infraestructura prou bona. I si tenen infraestructura, tenen problemes per mantenir-la. Jo volia comprovar si això era cert. Així, l’any passat vam contractar un cotxe, vam buscar a Google, vam trobar una ruta cap al nord de l’Índia des de Nova Delhi que no creués per cap gran ciutat ni cap gran centre metropolità. Vam recórrer uns 300 quilòmetres i, allà on trobàvem una escola, els fèiem un conjunt de proves estàndard Vam agafar els resultats i els vam representar en una gràfica. La gràfica era interessant, però cal analitzar-la amb detall. Es tracta d’una mostra molt petita; no s’hauria de generalitzar. Però era força evident, força clar, que en aquest recorregut que havia fet, com més remota era l'escola, pitjor eren els resultats. Això podia semblar bastant concloent. i vaig intentar correlacionar-ho amb la infraestructura, o la disponibilitat d’electricitat i aspectes similars. Sorprenentment, no es correlacionava.
do not have good enough teachers. If they do have, they cannot retain those teachers. They do not have good enough infrastructure. And if they had some infrastructure, they have difficulty maintaining it. But I wanted to check if this is true. So what I did last year was we hired a car, looked up on Google, found a route into northern India from New Delhi which, you know, which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers. Drove out about 300 kilometers, and wherever we found a school, administered a set of standard tests, and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph. The graph was interesting, although you need to consider it carefully. I mean, this is a very small sample; you should not generalize from it. But it was quite obvious, quite clear, that for this particular route that I had taken, the remoter the school was, the worse its results seemed to be. That seemed a little damning, and I tried to correlate it with things like infrastructure, or with the availability of electricity, and things like that. To my surprise, it did not correlate.
No es correlacionava amb la mida de les aules. No es correlacionava amb la qualitat de la infraestructura, ni amb els nivells de pobresa. No es correlacionava. Però vaig passar un qüestionari a aquestes escoles, amb una única pregunta per als professors: "T’agradaria traslladar-te a una zona metropolitana urbana?"— El 69% va dir que sí. Com es pot veure a partir d’això, diuen "sí" aquells allunyats una mica de Delhi, i diuen "no" en les zones residencials de Delhi —perquè són zones relativament més riques— i després, a 200 quilòmetres de Delhi, la resposta és constantment que sí. M’imagino que un professor que surt o entra en una aula, cada dia, pensant: “tant de bo estigués en alguna altra escola”, probablement tingui un gran impacte en els resultats. Així doncs, la motivació dels professors i la migració del professorat estan relacionats amb el que passa a les escoles primàries, i no està relacionat amb si els nens tenen prou menjar, i si estan apilats a les aules i aquesta mena de coses. Sembla que és així. Quan agafem l’educació i la tecnologia, trobo en els estudis que
It did not correlate with the size of classrooms. It did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure. It did not correlate with the poverty levels. It did not correlate. But what happened was that when I administered a questionnaire to each of these schools, with one single question for the teachers -- which was, "Would you like to move to an urban, metropolitan area?" -- 69 percent of them said yes. And as you can see from that, they say yes just a little bit out of Delhi, and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of Delhi -- because, you know, those are relatively better off areas -- and then from 200 kilometers out of Delhi, the answer is consistently yes. I would imagine that a teacher who comes or walks into class every day thinking that, I wish I was in some other school, probably has a deep impact on what happens to the results. So it looked as though teacher motivation and teacher migration was a powerfully correlated thing with what was happening in primary schools, as opposed to whether the children have enough to eat, and whether they are packed tightly into classrooms and that sort of thing. It appears that way. When you take education and technology, then I find in the literature that,
coses com pàgines web, entorns col·laboratius —ho heu estat escoltant al matí—, sempre es posa a prova primer a les millors escoles urbanes i, segons crec, decanten el resultat. La literatura —una part d’ella, la literatura científica— culpa constantment la tecnologia educativa de ser exagerada i de baix rendiment. Els professors sempre diuen: “està bé, però és massa cara pel que fa”. Perquè la prova s'ha fet en una escola on els estudiants ja estan aconseguint, un 80% del que podrien fer, S'introdueix una nova super tecnologia, i ara aconsegueixen el 83%. Llavors, el director la mira i diu: “Un 3% per 300.000 dòlars? No val la pena”. Si s’agafés la mateixa tecnologia i es posés a prova en una escola remota, on la puntuació era 30%, i arribés a 40%, seria completament diferent. I el canvi relatiu que faria la tecnologia educativa (TE), seria més gran a la part de baix de la piràmide que a la part superior, però sembla que ho estem fent a l'inrevés. I vaig arribar a la conclusió que la TE hauria d’arribar
you know, things like websites, collaborative environments -- you've been listening to all that in the morning -- it's always piloted first in the best schools, the best urban schools, and, according to me, biases the result. The literature -- one part of it, the scientific literature -- consistently blames ET as being over-hyped and under-performing. The teachers always say, well, it's fine, but it's too expensive for what it does. Because it's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting, let's say, 80 percent of whatever they could do. You put in this new super-duper technology, and now they get 83 percent. So the principal looks at it and says, 3 percent for 300,000 dollars? Forget it. If you took the same technology and piloted it into one of those remote schools, where the score was 30 percent, and, let's say, took that up to 40 percent -- that will be a completely different thing. So the relative change that ET, Educational Technology, would make, would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top, but we seem to be doing it the other way about. So I came to this conclusion that ET should reach
primer als més desfavorits, no a l'inrevés. Finalment, es va plantejar la pregunta, com abordem la percepció del professorat? Quan a un professor li mostrem tecnologia, la primera reacció és: “No es pot substituir un professor per una màquina. És impossible”. No sé per què és impossible, però si, per un moment, si assumim que és impossible — hi ha una cita de Sir Arthur C. Clarke, l’escriptor de ciència-ficció que vaig conèixer a Colombo, i em va dir una cosa que soluciona completament aquest problema: "un "profe" que pot substituir-se per una màquina, ha de ser substituït." Així que es posa el professor en un bon embolic, fa pensar. Jo proposo que una educació primària alternativa, entenem "alternativa" com vulguem, cal on no existeixin escoles, on les escoles no són bones, o no hi ha professors o els professors no són bons, pel que sigui. Si viviu en una part del món on no s’aplica res d’això, llavors no necessiteu una educació alternativa. No he trobat enlloc, tret d'un cas. No diré on, i la gent deia: “no tenim aquest problema, perquè tenim els professors perfectes i les escoles perfectes”. Existeixen llocs així, i mai no he sentit això enlloc més. Parlaré sobre els nens i l'autoorganització
the underprivileged first, not the other way about. And finally came the question of, how do you tackle teacher perception? Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine -- it's impossible. I don't know why it's impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it's impossible -- I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem. He said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine, should be. So, you know, it puts the teacher into a tough bind, you have to think. Anyway, so I'm proposing that an alternative primary education, whatever alternative you want, is required where schools don't exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough, for whatever reason. If you happen to live in a part of the world where none of this applies, then you don't need an alternative education. So far I haven't come across such an area, except for one case. I won't name the area, but somewhere in the world people said, we don't have this problem, because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools. There are such areas, but -- anyway, I'd never heard that anywhere else. I'm going to talk about children and self-organization,
i un conjunt d’experiments que em van dur fins aquesta idea de com podria ser una educació alternativa. Són experiments anomenats “forat a la paret”. Us explico ràpidament. Són un conjunt d’experiments. El primer va ser a Nova Delhi l'any 1999. I el que vam fer era bastant senzill. Tenia una oficina en aquells dies prop d'un suburbi, una barriada urbana, hi havia un mur divisori entre el despatx i la barriada urbana. Vam fer un forat en aquest mur —d'aquí ve el nom de “forat a la paret”— i vam col·locar un PC potent en el forat, com incrustat a la paret perquè el monitor quedés fora a l'altre costat, també un panell tàctil incrustat de manera similar a la paret, vam posar Internet d'alta velocitat, Internet Explorer, Altavista.com —en aquells dies— i el vam deixar allà. I això és el que vam veure.
and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like. They're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments. I'll have to really rush through this. They're a set of experiments. The first one was done in New Delhi in 1999. And what we did over there was pretty much simple. I had an office in those days which bordered a slum, an urban slum, so there was a dividing wall between our office and the urban slum. They cut a hole inside that wall -- which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall -- and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end, a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall, put it on high-speed Internet, put the Internet Explorer there, put it on Altavista.com -- in those days -- and just left it there. And this is what we saw.
Així era el meu despatx a l'Institut. Aquí està el “forat a la paret”. Vuit hores després, vam trobar aquest noi. A la dreta hi ha un nen de vuit anys a la seva esquerra, una nena de sis anys, no gaire alta. I ell l'ensenyava a navegar. Això ens va plantejar més preguntes de les que va contestar. És real? L’idioma té importància, perquè se suposa que no sap anglès? L’ordinador durarà o el trencaran i el robaran? I, algú els va ensenyar? L’última pregunta és la que va dir tothom, deuen haver tret el cap per damunt de la paret i preguntat a la gent de la oficina: “m'ensenyeu com fer-ho?”, i algú els ho ha ensenyat. Vaig agafar l'experiència de Delhi i la vaig repetir
So that was my office in IIT. Here's the hole-in-the-wall. About eight hours later, we found this kid. To the right is this eight-year-old child who -- and to his left is a six-year-old girl, who is not very tall. And what he was doing was, he was teaching her to browse. So it sort of raised more questions than it answered. Is this real? Does the language matter, because he's not supposed to know English? Will the computer last, or will they break it and steal it -- and did anyone teach them? The last question is what everybody said, but you know, I mean, they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office, can you show me how to do it, and then somebody taught him. So I took the experiment out of Delhi and repeated it,
a una ciutat anomenada Shivpuri, al centre de l'Índia, per confirmar que ningú no havia ensenyat mai res a ningú. (Rialles) Així que feia un dia càlid i el “forat a la paret” estava en aquell antic edifici decrèpit. Aquest és el primer nen que hi va venir; vam saber que tenia 13 anys i que havia deixat l’escola. Va arribar allà i es va posar a jugar amb el panell tàctil. Ràpidament va veure que quan movia el dit pel panell tàctil, alguna cosa es movia a la pantalla. després em va dir: "Mai havia vist una televisió on puguis fer alguna cosa". I ho va entendre. Va trigar uns dos minuts a entendre que feia coses a la televisió. Mentre feia això, va fer un clic intuïtiu i va tocar el panell tàctil. Ara ho veureu. En fer-ho, Internet Explorer va canviar de pàgina. Vuit minuts després, mirava de la seva mà a la pantalla i va anar navegant. Quan això va passar, va avisar tots els nens del barri, els nens venien a veure què passava. Aquell vespre, fins a 70 nens navegaven per Internet. Vuit minuts i un ordinador incrustat era tot el que necessitàvem. Així que vàrem pensar que això és el que passava:
this time in a city called Shivpuri in the center of India, where I was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything. (Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout. He came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad. Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen -- and later on he told me, "I have never seen a television where you can do something." So he figured that out. It took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television. And then, as he was doing that, he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad -- you'll see him do that. He did that, and the Internet Explorer changed page. Eight minutes later, he looked from his hand to the screen, and he was browsing: he was going back and forth. When that happened, he started calling all the neighborhood children, like, children would come and see what's happening over here. And by the evening of that day, 70 children were all browsing. So eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there. So we thought that this is what was happening:
que els nens en grups es poden ensenyar entre ells com utilitzar un ordinador i l’Internet. Però en quines circumstàncies? En aquest moment, la pregunta principal era sobre l'anglès. La gent deia: “hauríeu de tenir-ho en idiomes indis”. I vaig dir: "Tenir què? He de traduir l’Internet a alguna llengua índia? Impossible”. Per tant, hi ha d’haver una altra forma. Però, com gestionen els nens la llengua anglesa? Vaig dur l’experiment al nord-est de l’Índia, a un poble anomenat Madantusi, on no hi havia cap professor d’anglès, i els nens no havien après mai l’anglès. I vaig construir un “forat a la paret”. Una gran diferència dels pobles, respecte els suburbis urbans: hi havia més noies que nois que venien. Als suburbis urbans, les noies no venien tant. Vaig posar CDs a l’ordinador. No tenia Internet. i vaig tornar tres mesos després. Quan vaig tornar, vaig trobar aquests dos nens, de 8 i 12 anys, jugant a un joc a l’ordinador. I tan aviat em van veure em van dir: "Necessitem un processador més ràpid i un ratolí més bo". (Rialles) Em vaig quedar realment sorprès. Però, com dimonis sabien tot això? I em van dir: "Bé, ho hem après dels CDs". Vaig dir: "Però, com heu entès el que passa allà?" Van dir: "Heu deixat aquesta màquina que parla anglès, i hem hagut d'aprendre anglès". Vaig comptar-ho, i utilitzaven 200 paraules angleses —paraules mal pronunciades, però d’ús correcte— com ara sortir, parar, trobar, guardar, aquest tipus de coses, no només amb l’ordinador sinó en converses del seu dia a dia. Madantusi semblava mostrar que el llenguatge no és una barrera; de fet, es podien ensenyar la llengua ells mateixos, si realment volien. Finalment, vaig trobar finançament per provar aquest experiment
that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the Internet. But under what circumstances? At this time there was a -- the main question was about English. People said, you know, you really ought to have this in Indian languages. So I said, have what, shall I translate the Internet into some Indian language? That's not possible. So, it has to be the other way about. But let's see, how do the children tackle the English language? I took the experiment out to northeastern India, to a village called Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all. And I built a similar hole-in-the-wall. One big difference in the villages, as opposed to the urban slums: there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk. In the urban slums, the girls tend to stay away. I left the computer there with lots of CDs -- I didn't have any Internet -- and came back three months later. So when I came back there, I found these two kids, eight- and 12-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. And as soon as they saw me they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse." (Laughter) I was real surprised. You know, how on earth did they know all this? And they said, "Well, we've picked it up from the CDs." So I said, "But how did you understand what's going on over there?" So they said, "Well, you've left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English." So then I measured, and they were using 200 English words with each other -- mispronounced, but correct usage -- words like exit, stop, find, save, that kind of thing, not only to do with the computer but in their day-to-day conversations. So, Madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to. Finally, I got some funding to try this experiment out
i veure si els resultats són repetibles, si es repeteixen arreu. L’Índia és un bon lloc per fer aquests experiments, perquè tenim totes les diversitats ètniques tota la diversitat genètica, totes les diversitats racials, i totes les diversitats socioeconòmiques. Podria triar mostres per cobrir una mostra representativa que abastés pràcticament tot el món. Vaig fer això durant gairebé cinc anys, i aquest experiment ens va portar en un camí de banda a banda de l’Índia. Aquest és l’Himàlaia. Al nord, molt fred. També vaig haver d'inventar un disseny d’enginyeria que sobrevisqués a l’aire lliure, amb ordinadors normals i corrents, així que necessitava diferents climes, i l'Índia és ideal, perquè fa molt fred o molta calor... Aquest és el desert de l'oest, prop de la frontera amb el Pakistan. Aquí un petit vídeo d’un d’aquests pobles el primer que van fer els nens va ser trobar una pàgina web per aprendre l'abecedari en anglès. Després cap a l’Índia central, pobles de pesca molt càlids i humits,
to see if these results are replicable, if they happen everywhere else. India is a good place to do such an experiment in, because we have all the ethnic diversities, all the -- you know, the genetic diversity, all the racial diversities, and also all the socio-economic diversities. So, I could actually choose samples to cover a cross section that would cover practically the whole world. So I did this for almost five years, and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of India. This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold. I also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors, and I was using regular, normal PCs, so I needed different climates, for which India is also great, because we have very cold, very hot, and so on. This is the desert to the west. Near the Pakistan border. And you see here a little clip of -- one of these villages -- the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the English alphabet. Then to central India -- very warm, moist, fishing villages,
on la humitat és una amenaça pels aparells electrònics. Vam haver de resoldre tots els problemes que teníem sense aire condicionat i amb poca electricitat, Moltes solucions consistien en utilitzar petites corrents d’aire situades als llocs correctes per mantenir les màquines en marxa. Seré breu. Això ho vam fer una i altra vegada. Aquesta seqüència també és bonica. És un nen petit, de 6 anys, dient a la seva germana gran què ha de fer. I això passa molt sovint amb aquests ordinadors, que els nens més petits ensenyen als més grans. Què hem descobert? Que de 6 a 13 anys s'ensenyen entre ells
where humidity is a very big killer of electronics. So we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power, so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running. I want to just cut this short. We did this over and over again. This sequence is also nice. This is a small child, a six-year-old, telling his eldest sister what to do. And this happens very often with these computers, that the younger children are found teaching the older ones. What did we find? We found that six- to 13-year-olds can self-instruct
en un entorn connectat, sigui el que sigui allò que mesurem. Si tenen accés a l’ordinador, aprenen tots sols, i la intel·ligència. No vaig trobar cap correlació amb res, però havia de ser en grups. I això pot ser d'interès per a aquest grup, ja que tots parleu de grups. Heus aquí el poder del que pot fer un grup de nens sense la intervenció dels adults. Només una idea ràpida de les mesures.
in a connected environment, irrespective of anything that we could measure. So if they have access to the computer, they will teach themselves, including intelligence. I couldn't find a single correlation with anything, but it had to be in groups. And that may be of great, you know, interest to this group, because all of you are talking about groups. So here was the power of what a group of children can do, if you lift the adult intervention. Just a quick idea of the measurements.
Vam usar tècniques estadístiques estàndard, així que no en parlaré. Però tenim una corba d’aprenentatge neta, gairebé exactament igual que la que obtindríem en una escola. Ho deixaré aquí, perquè ja s’ha dit tot, no? Què podrien aprendre a fer? Funcions bàsiques de Windows, navegació, pintura, xat i correu electrònic, jocs, material educatiu, baixar música, reproducció de vídeo. En definitiva, el que fem tots. Més de 300 nens amb coneixements informàtics i que poden fer totes aquestes coses en sis mesos amb un sol ordinador. Com ho fan?
We took standard statistical techniques, so I'm going to not talk about that. But we got a clean learning curve, almost exactly the same as what you would get in a school. I'll leave it at that, because, I mean, it sort of says it all, doesn't it? What could they learn to do? Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video. In short, what all of us do. And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer. So, how do they do that?
Si calculem el temps d’accés real, serien uns minuts al dia, però no és així com passa. El que tenim, de fet, és que hi ha un nen que utilitza l’ordinador. Al seu voltant, solen ser tres els nens, que l'aconsellen què ha de fer. Si els posem a prova, tots ells obtindran la mateixa puntuació en tot. Al voltant d’aquests quatre, hi sol haver un grup d’uns 16 nens, que també aconsellen, normalment de manera errònia, de tot el que passa a l’ordinador. I tots ells també aprovaran un test sobre aquest tema. Així aprenen tant observant com fent-ho. Sembla contraintuïtiu a l’aprenentatge dels adults, els nens de 8 anys viuen en una societat on sovint se’ls diu: “no ho feu, no toqueu l’ampolla de whisky”. I què fa el nen de vuit anys? Observa amb molta cura com s’ha de tocar una ampolla de whisky. I si el poséssim a prova, respondria bé totes les preguntes sobre el tema. Així doncs, són capaços d’aprendre molt ràpidament. Quina va ser la conclusió després de sis anys de treball?
If you calculated the actual time of access, it would work out to minutes per day, so that's not how it's happening. What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what they should do. If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. Around these four are usually a group of about 16 children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that's going on on the computer. And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing. It seems counter-intuitive to adult learning, but remember, eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told, don't do this, you know, don't touch the whiskey bottle. So what does the eight-year-old do? He observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched. And if you tested him, he would answer every question correctly on that topic. So, they seem to be able to acquire very quickly. So what was the conclusion over the six years of work?
Que l’educació primària pot ocórrer per sí sola si més no, certes parts poden succeir soles. No s’ha d’imposar de dalt cap a baix. Podria ser un sistema autoorganitzador, així que aquesta era la segona cosa que volia dir-vos, que els nens es poden autoorganitzar i assolir un objectiu educatiu. La tercera part era sobre els valors i, de nou, per dir-ho molt breument,
It was that primary education can happen on its own, or parts of it can happen on its own. It does not have to be imposed from the top downwards. It could perhaps be a self-organizing system, so that was the second bit that I wanted to tell you, that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective. The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly,
vaig fer un test a 500 nens repartits per tota l’Índia i els vaig preguntar (els vaig fer unes 68 preguntes) sobre valors i simplement els vaig demanar les seves opinions. Vàrem obtenir tot tipus d’opinions: “sí, no o no ho sé”. Vaig seleccionar preguntes amb un 50% “sí”, i 50% “no” Així vaig poder reunir 16 preguntes d'aquest tipus. Es tracta de zones on els nens estaven clarament confosos la meitat sí, la meitat no. Un exemple típic és: "A vegades cal dir mentides". No tenen una manera de determinar com respondre aquesta pregunta; Potser ningú la té. Us deixo una tercera pregunta. "Pot la tecnologia alterar l'adquisició de valors?" Finalment, els sistemes d'autoorganització, sobre els quals, una vegada més, no diré gaire, perquè ho he dit ja. Els sistemes naturals s’autoorganitzen: galàxies, molècules, cèl·lules, organismes, societats —tret del debat sobre un dissenyador intel·ligent. Però en aquest punt, pel que fa a la ciència, és l’autoorganització. Altres exemples: els embussos de trànsit, la borsa de valors, la recuperació dels desastres, el terrorisme i la insurgència. I sistemes d’autoorganització basats en Internet. Heus aquí les meves quatre conclusions.
I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them -- I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions. We got all sorts of opinions. Yes, no or I don't know. I simply took those questions where I got 50 percent yeses and 50 percent noes -- so I was able to get a collection of 16 such statements. These were areas where the children were clearly confused, because half said yes and half said no. A typical example being, "Sometimes it is necessary to tell lies." They don't have a way to determine which way to answer this question; perhaps none of us do. So I leave you with this third question. Can technology alter the acquisition of values? Finally, self-organizing systems, about which, again, I won't say too much because you've been hearing all about it. Natural systems are all self-organizing: galaxies, molecules, cells, organisms, societies -- except for the debate about an intelligent designer. But at this point in time, as far as science goes, it's self-organization. But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency. And you know about the Internet-based self-organizing systems. So here are my four sentences then.
La llunyania afecta la qualitat de l'educació. La tecnologia educativa s'ha d’introduir primer en àrees remotes, i posteriorment en altres zones. Els valors s'adquireixen; la doctrina i el dogma s’imposen i són dos mecanismes contraris. És molt probable que l’aprenentatge sigui un sistema autoorganitzador. Si les ajuntem totes quatre, jo penso que ens dona un objectiu, una visió, per a la tecnologia educativa Una tecnologia i pedagogia educativa, digital, automàtica, tolerant amb l'error, poc invasiva, connectada i autoorganitzada. Com a educadors, mai no hem demanat tecnologia; la manllevem. Se suposa que PowerPoint és una gran tecnologia educativa, però no estava feta per l'educació, sinó per fer presentacions. La vam manllevar. La videoconferència. L’ordinador personal també. És hora que els educadors crein les seves pròpies especificacions, i jo ho faig. Això és una breu introducció. I aquestes especificacions haurien de produir la tecnologia per afrontar la llunyania, els valors i la violència. Vaig pensar que li posaria un nom, per què no l'anomenem "desdoctrinament"? Podria ser aquest un objectiu per a la tecnologia educativa en el futur? Vull deixar-vos-ho com a reflexió. Gràcies.
Remoteness affects the quality of education. Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later. Values are acquired; doctrine and dogma are imposed -- the two opposing mechanisms. And learning is most likely a self-organizing system. If you put all the four together, then it gives -- according to me -- it gives us a goal, a vision, for educational technology. An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized. As educationists, we have never asked for technology; we keep borrowing it. PowerPoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology, but it was not meant for education, it was meant for making boardroom presentations. We borrowed it. Video conferencing. The personal computer itself. I think it's time that the educationists made their own specs, and I have such a set of specs. This is a brief look at that. And such a set of specs should produce the technology to address remoteness, values and violence. So I thought I'd give it a name -- why don't we call it "outdoctrination." And could this be a goal for educational technology in the future? So I want to leave that as a thought with you. Thank you.
(Aplaudiments)
(Applause)