how to make geeks?
that title makes me think “1 cup of lego. 1 cup of abundant home library (can be substituted with proximity and encouragment to use local library). dash of genetic autism or socialization development issues.
Arun Mehta was at the London WSFII and the Community Wireless Summit. He was asking some good questions at the very end about how to make geeks (among other things he’s training blind people in India how to code). Matt’s answer was that just give kids the toys + tools to play with, and for the ones that are interested, don’t get in their way.
It made me think of my earlier post on the 100 laptop.
I’m upset that we don’t have better ways to discuss this and that we aren’t further along in understanding and talking about the people that are the engines of these floss + community wifi movements.
okay - going to try and relax now and maybe go to sleep - considering I caught maybe 2 hours in the car last night. it’s really hard to relax after 4 days of constant work + putting stress on myself.
breathing in . . . breathing out
;-)
June 7th, 2006 at 1:10 am
Thank you for taking this up, and relating it to the excellent discussion on the Pidgin to Creole topic.
Let us look at spastic kids, who are usually diagnosed when they are very small. Many of them could attend normal school, if their motor disabilities would let them write and speak. Particularly in countries where special education is scarce, computers with special software such as my eLocutor (http://holisticit.com/eLocutor/elocutorv3.htm) could allow them to attend normal school. What happens today is that they compound their disability with illiteracy.
Let us also look at the case of autistic kids, for whom communication problems are serious, and computers are known to help in many cases. I’ve just started to work on this, see http://www.india-gii.org/wiki/index.php/Workshops/Computing_for_Autistic_Kids
In these cases, everyone should agree with you, that we need to “find some way to get her to spend 20+ hours a week between the age of 6-14 yrs old interacting with a computer that is designed for her age group and that encourages and rewards exploration and intellectual curiosity.”
Question is, how do we design software that works for, and appeals to, kids who do not know how to read and write — indeed might use the software to learn how to read and write. Some thought devoted to this would be highly appreciated.
Arun Mehta
June 7th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Hey Arun,
Sorry for taking so long to accept this post. Lots of spam recently and I was in transit.
Thanks for the note. I will ping you if I find anything else on the topic or if I do any more exploration of it myself.