The Fonly Institute

Laptops or Phones - both, but start with phones!

Here's a suggestion I posted recently on an "Educational Technology Debate" website sponsored by InfoDev and UNESCO. The topic, run by Wayan Vota, was whether laptops or mobile phones offered the best platforms for educational use in developing countries. The discussion pushed me to think in the direction of a synthesis:

I had attempted to post this earlier, but managed to lose my text and ran out of time. It does seem, though, that this is not a bad time to argue for a synthesis of the phone and the laptop. 

I have long argued for using technology that is economically helpful to the family of the educational user, so that it becomes a tool seen as worth supporting. For this purpose the mobile phone would be best, as it has been shown to assist in raising the economic level of users. But for the purposes of education we need to add some of the functions of the laptop. Depending upon the level of education that it should provide, this could be done with as little as the addition of a stylus touchpad. 

I say this because it appears that the initial big application would be basic literacy - both for children and for adults (presumably with their childrens' help). The introduction to the letters of the alphabet (whichever one is used locally), the correspondence of sounds to the characters and combination of letters, the ability to practice drawing letters and to have the program correct or otherwise indicate improvements, all are functions performed by every teacher in every classroom for the first year of education. The advantage here would be that parents could engage in the same lessons and learn literacy where they never would have the time or be willing to suffer the loss of pride to come into a classroom - even if they would be permitted there by school rules. 

It's certainly true that adults learn more slowly and differently than do children, and the programs would have to take this into account. But the basic technology required is pretty much covered by the mobile phone - given a speakerphone mode and a stylus touchpad. Different modules of the programs could be downloaded from the network, eliminating the need for mass storage, and the screen would have to be capable of a certain amount of resolution, but given the ability of the program to speak and to hear pronunciation of letters, such an enhanced phone could provide the start for great increases in basic literacy (and numeracy as well, since numbers and arithmetic can be handled with the same device). 

To create such a "literacy phone" and the necessary programs in a sufficient number of languages and cultural settings would be a big task, but it would produce results much faster than the expansion of numbers of laptops. Later applications could make the same phone an electronic book, which would give it a place in the education process well beyond the basic stages. 

Laptops are indeed necessary for the higher levels of the educational process - but don't forget you have to start simple.

An Idea for Chicago Transit

Through an email list I was introduced to Innocentive, a clearinghouse matching inventors and developers with organizations in need of innovative solutions. Often there is a cash award for the ideas and solutions submitted.  In this case the request was for "Ideas for Increasing Public Transportation Use to Reduce Greenhouse Gases in Chicago".

I had done some thinking about this kind of problem back in 2000, immediately following the closure of Interval Research, and had written wrote 14 pages of scenarios on the subject of using wireless Internet on public rail transportation. I took some of the ideas I had developed then, updated them to take into account the growth and penetration of applications on cellular phones, and turned out the following  ideas for making public transit more usable and attractive.

The deadline for submission has now passed so I am publishing the submission here, since ideas have little value if kept secret, and require a lot of value added before they become reality.

Lee Felsenstein

Introduction and Background

A major inhibition to the use of public transportation is the fact that scheduling is very poorly understood by the rider and that time in transit is generally considered wasted (except possibly for reading). If riders could be kept informed of their projected arrival times at transfer points (with real-time performance taken into consideration), the realistically projected arrival times of connecting routes, and could make arrangements for the disposition of their time between connections, there would be significant incentives to chose public transit over private vehicle use.

The growth of wireless communication creates an opportunity in improving these aspects. Penetration of cellular phones (technically known as “handsets”) has become significant, and the arrival of a new generation of “smart phones”, with the Apple iPhone followed by a number of competitors’s offerings has moved the “cell phone” experience well beyond simple telephone voice messaging.

Detailed Description of the Solution

At the base would be real-time access to the database of schedule information, both for intended schedules and actual progress of runs. On rail sections this information can be updated from the signaling system, but on street transportation there are various other ways to update progress of a run relative to the schedule. Since the author is not familiar with the capabilities of the CTA in extracting actual run performance we will make some general assumptions here about possible solutions.

Ideally there would be a central database of schedules for each run, updated by input from signal or sensor networks with real-time information about actual performance. This database would be accessible on a read-only basis by an external application which is itself accessed from wireless phone providers and from the Internet. This application would have the capability to calculate projected arrival times at any schedule point from the schedule modified by performance information. This information would ideally include projected arrival times for the next several runs at any given stop.

The utility of such a system is obvious for users who are awaiting an arrival, however other modes become interesting when one considers use by riders in transit. The obvious question for a rider is whether a connection will be made, and how much time is available before the connecting arrival. If there is to be more than a brief gap, the user would be helped by information about merchant services available at the transfer point during the gap. This would create a market for local advertising from merchants located within a short distance of the transfer point, and this market could be served by another wireless application accessible from the schedule progress application.

Since such a local merchant application would require a sales and marketing function, it would best be implemented as a private profit center. Merchants would be encouraged by the merchant application operator to create special offers for transit riders, who could place orders or reservations through text messages generated through the advertising application.

In this way the rider’s process of decision making about use of time would no longer be deferred until arrival (with uncertainty as to time limits due to the connection) but would be extended into on-vehicle time and given optional connection limits well in advance.

Another area where the trip coordination information could find a use is in social networking. Riders who will be in the same area at the same times would have something temporarily in common, and might want to arrange face-to-face meetings under differing degrees of anonymity. Providers of social networking application service should be interested in extending their offerings to this new venue.

A limited subset of the schedule and connection service could be made available to riders without wireless service through a built-in publicly-accessible wireless unit running only the relevant application. For all on-board users it will be necessary to make the run number available and to provide a relatively easy method to identify stops. Numbering of stops on the in-vehicle route map or an interactive map accessible from the wireless schedule application are two non-exclusive approaches to this requirement.

We will mention here, without further detail, the possibilities for wireless-based charging for merchandise or services. There are technologies available for displaying specialized bar codes on wireless handset displays which can enable charge transactions to complete sales. At the least, the merchant application can provide confirmation numbers to display on the handset by which riders can pick up merchandise ordered earlier.

Conclusion

The effect of these applications would be to decrease the friction inherent in fitting one’s schedule to those of the transit system. In addition, it would provide the opportunity to extend one’s productive time into trip time, as well as reducing uncertainty and anxiety.  In fact, it should be possible to reverse the equation and make travel by public transit less anxiety-producing than travel by private vehicle.

Seeking Stamp Collectors for OLPC

My brother Joe, who is famous in the world of population genetics, tells how for decades those working in his corner of biology (phylogenetic inference – the science of constructing inheritance trees) were scorned by the reigning molecular biologists as “stamp collectors”. While the molecular biologists pursued the secret of life itself, the stamp collectors puttered around with statistics and large data sets, working out how to make sense out of data patterns.

Then came the crowning triumph of molecular biology – reading the human genome. Note that I do not say “decoding the human genome”, as it suddenly became clear that no one knew how to make sense of gigabytes of gene sequence data. Who, the moleculars wondered, could make some order of all this data?

Then everyone looked at each other and exclaimed in unison, “the stamp collectors!” Joe and his colleagues were showered with money and attention. Their grant requests were now favored for approval, and at Joe’s university a brand-new Department of Genome Sciences was created which welcomed his august presence.

The parallel is this – the OLPC project is about as far as it can go without empowering its own “stamp collectors”, by which I mean those who have long labored in the field of experimental education. Yes, there are others besides Seymour Papert, and the official OLPC line on the topic, that the educational research had already been done and that the engineering was all that was left, was always blatantly untrue.

Not the Vision He Had

(A very slightly edited version of a comment posted to Wayan Vota's blog OLPC News upon the announcement that the OLPC laptop would be manufactured and sold in the industrial world).                               

A thought experiment - give an XO to an American kid and the question will be "what does it do?" The answers will have to be "No, it doesn't run Windows programs. No, you can't run games on it. And it looks like it's for kids because it IS for kids".

This seems to be a setup for most kids to reject it. There will be a few, however, who discover they can get into it and mess around, as well as communicate sending pictures without having to deal with the mobile phone bill and its consequences.

A whole lot more adult geeks will buy it and play with it, which is not a bad thing - I am all for play as a means of exploring the possibilities of technology. And, like the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the '60's, which were written to include some jokes with adult appeal so that kids would get the message that it was funny to older folk and thus not "just for kids", there will start to be leakage to lower age levels.

SuperHappyDevHouse

When I saw in the San Jose Mercury News that SuperHappyDevHouse was trying to "recapture the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club", I knew I had to drop in on their event. Having designed the meeting process of Homebrew in 1975 and run the meetings until we closed up shop in 1986, I wanted to be sure that legacy was not being misrepresented. So, along with Lena, I turned up at the Hillsborough house June 23rd where the sesqui-monthly hacker play party was scheduled to take place.

I knew it was going to be a zoo, having been announced on the front page of the business/technology section of Silicon Valley's newspaper. What I wanted to see was what the zoo would be like. Checking on the web page earlier that day I saw that the count had peaked at 116, a new record.

One Computer Per Village - telemedicine

Ram Dhurjaty, posting in the OLPC News blog, raises the idea of the telemedicine application of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) "XO" laptop computer, which is currently in pre-production trials. I am inviting the readers of that post to use this space for the dvelopment of more discussions on this possibility, with or without the OLPC machine.

In 2005, when I raised my first public criticism of the OLPC program I had been pursuing the idea of "one telecentre per village", which I now modify to "one computer per village", or OCPV. I expanded further on the concept with a post that laid out the telecentre concept in more detail.

While my criticisms have had minimal impact on the OLPC project (so far as I can see, which is not very far), their active publicity function plus their great progress on designing hardware and software with the level of reliability and user-accessibility necessary for use in developing countries has captured the attention of a large number of computer-capable people around the world. One would be a fool not to make use of this interest.

My experience includes structuring the information-exchange forum that was instrumental in establishing the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley, and I see the need for such a forum in establishing a new industry (one which I call "Fair Trade Technology"). I would hope that this site could provide one of many manifestations of such a forum.

I suggest that people use the category "OCPV" to search for and categorize entries.

Makers

Today I spent a few hours at the Maker Faire, an event created by O'Reilly Publications which celebrates our human urge to put things together - things that amuse, delight and amaze others. Held at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds, the weekend event provides a venue for people to show off the things they have made and to meet people who are interested in those things. Lena and I wandered through several gloomy halls which were alive with all kinds of sound and light emitted by the devices being displayed, as well as the low roar of the attendees talking, children playing and exhibitors explaining. Their noise was punctuated by a robotic band with a set of drums and other instruments playing automatically.

The most inspiring thing for me was to watch the children darting about trying various things (there were many opportunities to sit down and try one's hand at putting something together, whether it be from paper , cloth, or wire). To provide an experience of enchantment with technology on the part of children is to do something most important. I grew up able to roam about a very good science and technology museum (the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia) and benefitted greatly from that sense of enchantment. 

The exhibits could be quite simple, as one in which a past acquaintance of mine invited viewers to try their hand at soldering wires without using a soldering iron. This turned out to be accomplished simply by heating the wire (wrapped with solder) using a cigarette lighter. The point was to give the participants the experience of melting solder and seeing how it behaved. Like most exhibits, there was no commercial payoff to the exhibitor. It was there to increase people's familiarity with certain aspects of technology - even the low technology of creating solder joints.

There were various electric vehicles (including a ridiculous flotilla of oversized cupcakes which people could drive around with their heads poking from the tops - built around the individual electric carts which give mobility to people who cannot walk well), a steel giraffe that slowly strode along with people riding on it, demonstrations of "soft circuits" made with fabric and conductive yarn, a small catapult which tossed wadded-up T-shirts to be caught be groups of children, a 3-D TV system with the camera trained on the observer, and much, much more.

Some of the more absurd exhibits had been built for the Burning Man festival, and it was good not to have to brave a desert environment to see them. But the main lesson I took away was that people really love to play with technology, high and low, and it's the best way for them to learn. Along with this observation comes the understanding that a lot of careful work has to be put in by the exhibitors in order to allow this play to take place.