Paul D. Fernhout wrote:

Arthur wrote:

...

One theme that seems to run through discussions here is related to this issue. Is it the educators' mission to find just the right motivational buttons and push them just right ??? Or rather focus on responding appropriately to those who come to the learning process with some critical mass level of motivation???

It seems to be one of the fault lines, in some of the discussions here.

You're right; this is very insightful.

Bad form to reply to myself, I know, but on reflection, I realize there is at least one other obvious alternative. One can also try to change the system to "lower the bar". So, here are some options, if you think of learning to program in Python like learning to jump over a high bar. 1. Motivate kids to want to try really hard and jump over that bar (perhaps using operant conditioning like training dolphins, perhaps just making the value of jumping over the bar so compellingly obvious like the value of driving in US society, or perhaps by wrapping the subject matter in something a kid will find more interesting like a game or contest or story or artwork). This is conventional schooling and even conventional homeschooling at its best -- and is based on *extrinsic* motivation. (*) 2. Leave a bar around, and wait however long it takes until a kid really wants to jump over a bar, and then make any help available to him or her they want right then (just in time learning). This is the "unschooling" approach, and it is also the approach of "free schools". 3. Compel or coerce the child to jump over the bar by whatever unpleasant means is acceptable -- threat of the police or parents, threat of withdrawal of privileges, using peer pressure and related threat of humiliation, or alluding to some long term failure to find a job and succeed in life out of school. This is conventional schooling (or even conventional homeschooling) at its worst. 4. Lower the bar. This is the technology developer point of view (the one I usually have). 5. And as I reflect more on it, here is a fifth options. You could also change the task of jumping the bar into something the kid wants to do from *intrinsic* motivation. This merges somewhat into point #1, except it builds the feedback into the process directly. So, for example, you could put up all sorts of numerical feedback about each jump and plot a kids increasing jump height against on a big graph so they can see their progress jump to jump (with no praise per jump needed, except maybe for effort or progress). (Hard to know how to do this in a programming IDE? Perhaps length of programs? Or how often you go between syntax errors?) Or, for a high tech approach to jump training, perhaps you put up a smoky fog with a laser border shining on it to show a target area to jump though and then laser illuminate the area the kid actually jumps through (perhaps without the bar being there at first), or some such thing. (For programming, this might be some fancy system to give you metrics about programs you write: like on complexity or simplicity or elegance -- which are hard to think of, especially as aesthetic evaluation of programs is perhaps hard to formalize.) So, you are changing the nature of the task into one where there is continuous feedback of some kind the kids intrinsically wants to excel at even if they don't like the original task in its own right. Great teachers in any setting tend to naturally think about their material in this fifth way, I would expect -- assuming they don't otherwise just convey enough excitement to get kids hooked on the subject matter in its own right out of intrinsic interest in, say, the feel of jumping well. In the case of our gardening education work, we could have written a "gardening curriculum" that kids had to study and answer multiple choice questions about, giving out gold stars (extrinsic motivation) for success. Or we could, as we did, make a virtual microworld where they could succeed or fail on their own, where motivation is *intrinsic* from seeing plants grow and harvesting the results, and which might then motivate them to read about gardening from other sources (books, peers, mentors, trial and error, the help system, etc.) in order to make their virtual plants grow better. Now, I think our garden simulator fails at being intrinsically motivating as much as we wanted it to be for various reasons (it's both too confusing from having too many features while also missing some other key features) but I think the *intrinsic* motivating approach was otherwise sound. As primarily a software developer, I think of options #4 and #5 as the ones I explore. :-) I think the fourth option of "lowering the bar" (as well as sometimes the fifth option of "changing the bar") is where I always get into disagreements with Kirby here. He maintains the bar is low enough and intrinsically interesting enough (that is, Python is adequate to use for kids to learn to program well). I maintain it would be nicer if it was even lower and more fun (and that Squeak shows some alternatives Python could perhaps benefit from). We are probably both right, and then it becomes a matter of politics in the sense of how to allocate time and money between curriculum and mentoring versus software development. Of course, since there is essentially no time or money beyond what we individually supply, Kirby mainly works on curricula and gives classes, and I mainly write software. :-) Which is probably just for the best. As Howard Thurman said: http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/X000670AA/ "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." --Paul Fernhout (*) And if you are not careful, too much extrinsic motivation might create a "praise junkie". See: http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Praise http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12648314/ John Holt talks about how, ironically, children in progressive classrooms in affluent school districts (where praise is much given for various reasons) may actually live in fear of not getting praised in class, as much as a previous generation lived in fear of being whipped or spanked in class. Remember, the removal of continual praise is itself a form of punishment (deprivation). The short lesson for avoiding that is to praise in relation to effort or incremental progress ("You tried really hard!" or "You're getting smarter every day!"). From the last link: "Recent psychological study findings are quite straightforward and to the point — kids need praise to guide the development of such characteristics as self-control, self-discipline, frustration tolerance and perseverance. ... The results suggest that kids who are praised for effort and hard work begin to value learning opportunities, whereas children who are praised for their abilities value performance. The studies showed that praising a child for a personal characteristic such as intelligence (“Aren’t you smart. I can count on you for getting an A on your reports!”) can often backfire. The researchers noted that kids given praise that evaluates the child or their traits and abilities (known as person praise) were significantly more likely to display helpless reactions (cognitions, affects, and behaviors) when they were later challenged with more difficult tasks than children who received effort or strategy praise (“Wow, I like the way you looked at this problem from several angles and chose an unusual solution”)." Note that what is important here is not a kid getting the right *answer* -- it is a kid getting the right *attitude*.

Ian Bicking wrote:

Intrinsic desire is a little hard. It certain happens, but often just in a few cases; probably many of us had an intrinsic desire to do the thing programming allows, but there's many useful things I learned that I had no intrinsic desire to learn. Like writing -- I really hated writing as a child, and at that time there was nothing I wanted to do with writing. But I don't think it would have been good if I simply hadn't worked on the fundamentals of writing until such time that I wanted to actually use writing for something. And I still don't just write for myself; it's a tool I use for other purposes.

I'll agree with your larger point in practice in our society, on roles for both intrinsic motivation of liking some thing versus the extrinsic desire to learn something just to get some task done. There is another path humanity used to be on, but we are not back on it much yet, though I feel we will be more and more (and free and open source software leads the way), see: "The Abolition of Work" http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "The Original Affluent Society" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901135,00.html Still, I might suggest you hated writing as a kid because you were forced to do it by compulsory schooling before you were ready or willing? Even if that was not the case for you, it certainly is the case for lots and lots of people. It is funny how we now accept kids learn most easily to walk and talk and use the potty at different ages, but we still insist they learn to read or write or do math at specific ages. Here is a school where no one is forced to read or write or do math or learn to program at any specific age: "Sudbury Valley School" http://www.sudval.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School and just about every single kid learns to do all of those well by the time they graduate (which is far, far higher than most other public or private schools). [Well, I don't actually know about programming rates among graduates, so that is just a wild assumption on my part; the other ones are easily documented. :-)] From the second link: "Sudbury Valley School has published two studies of their alumni over the past thirty-five years. They have learned, among other things, that about 80% of the students continue to study at other schools after graduating from Sudbury Valley. Most alumni have been accepted at the university of their first choice. Students also generally report happiness with their lives, and many have a stated commitment to public service". And I would suggest Sudbury students are more likely to like those activities (reading, writing, arithmetic, programming) than kids going through compulsory schooling. It is the basis of compassionate reading and writing education such as John Holt fostered, http://www.holtgws.com/index.html that the most compassionate way to get kids to want to read is to get them to believe (accurately) that there are stories locked up in the words, and if they can learn to read, they will gain ownership of those stories for themselves. And the best way to get them to write is to help them see they have something to say. See Holt's book: _Learning All the Time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world, without being taught_ http://www.holtgws.com/learningalltheti.html http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Time-John-Caldwell-Holt/dp/0201550911 Fromt he last link: "Holt's thoughts carry the power of common sense. One of his pet peeves: the silly, nonsensical rules of phonics drilled into schoolchildren today. One of those adages, found on the walls of many an elementary school classroom, goes, "When two vowels go out walking, the first one does the talking." Holt points out that two pairs of vowels in the sentence violate the rule. This is not only confusing to some children, but simply "dumb," he complains. He dismisses picture books and primers, with their small, simple vocabularies. In their place, Holt urges parents to expose children to the Yellow Pages, warranties, letters, ticket stubs, and newspapers--the print trappings that adults rely upon for everyday life." If kids wants to get at the stories (or other knowledge) locked in books, that motivates them to spend the fifty hours or so of hard work to get to the point where they have the key and can then bootstrap themselves to a high level of reading skills through practice. Similarly, the key to learning to write well is to have something to say (even just a request for a toy to buy or an "I love you" note) and then to do it -- even if the first results are idiosyncratic and misspelled and ungrammatical. Nothing is more likely to make children not want to read or write than following standard pedagogical advice and breaking reading into a series of incremental hoops (learn letters, learn words, learn simple sentences, and so on) which is just going to bore most kids out of their skulls. Can you imagine if we tried to teach kids to listen to spoken language and to talk that way? Thankfully, kids learn to listen and talk on their own by just absorbing language in their environment and trying to use it to accomplish goals meaningful to themselves. Now, consider how people truly learn to understand and speak a language (by immersion, success for almost everyone) and now think about how we typically teach programming (building blocks, with a high failure rate and few real successes if we are honest with ourselves). Perhaps the most compassionate way to get kids to learn to program in Python is first to show them how there is something they want locked up inside of Python code? Learning to read and write was actually *illegal* for a lot of people living in the USA for many generations (especially for slaves in the pre-Civil War South) and they still learned. From: http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/slavery/a/timeline_slave.htm "1740 -- The Negro Act is passed in South Carolina. The act makes it illegal for slaves to gather in groups, earn money, learn to read, and raise food. The act permits owners to kill rebellious slaves." From: http://pathways.thinkport.org/about/about4f.cfm "A lot of slaves worked very hard to learn to read, write, and do math. This was illegal in most states, but some learned anyway. In Maryland, it was not illegal for slaves to learn to read and write, but whites were discouraged from teaching them. Sometimes slaves learned from each other or from free blacks. Sometimes, white people taught them. ... Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist who was born a slave in Maryland, believed that the ability to read and write was the first step towards freedom. He wrote: "Education means emancipation; it means light and liberty." He learned to read while he was a slave in Baltimore. At first, his mistress taught him, but then her husband forbade the lessons. Then he learned from friends on the street. He also attended Sabbath school when he could. As an adult, he published a famous anti-slavery newspaper called the North Star." So, when people truly *want* to learn, they can. So, to promote Python programming literacy, I suggest we make Python programming illegal. :-)

Most motivation is based on something external, and I think that's fine. For instance, children often want to learn something to keep up with their friends, or because someone they respect (like an older sibling or parent) has a skill and they want to imitate that. To become exceptionally skilled at something a child will probably have to eventually find intrinsic satisfaction in the skill, but there's lots of skills that are valuable without reaching any exceptional level.

Well, you're clearly right; people do learn a lot of things from other people for a variety of reasons and motivations. And you are right that it is not true that "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well" given how many things we need to know and how there is a law of diminishing returns for many tasks. As with the car example I mentioned, a lot of people don't like driving (I'm one of them) but do it anyway because the benefit of it is so high (I actually didn't learn to drive until I was a senior in college). Even being an average driver (compared, to, say a race car driver) is better for most people than not driving at all, in US society (sadly, as I like car-free or car-optional places. :-) "New German community models car-free living" http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20061220/wl_csm/ovauban This line of thought makes me realize I should add a category #6 (or maybe #1B. :-) That alternative is, how a great teacher can use *extrinsic* motivation unrelated to a task (like giving out gold stars or "good job!" praise) to get kids to try it enough so they develop an *intrinsic* motivation to continue in the task (from appreciating it on its own merits). Or in other words, a "try it, you'll like it" strategy. Obviously there is more to it than that, as a great teacher conveys enthusiasm for the topic. That is often hard in schools, as rarely do many teachers have professional experience enjoying their subject in other than a teaching capacity. Still, an unpaid amateur or hobby interest in writing, programming, mathematics, chemistry, or whatever certainly is good enough to have such excitement, and maybe even better than professional experience in some ways, see: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html If there is any justification for compelling or coercing children to show up and sit through a class on a topic they have no current interest in, then making them available for the teacher to practice strategy #6 (try it, you'll like it) is probably it. But, it remains wasteful when it so often fails; almost any educator will admit how much better their classes would be if only the people who wanted to be there showed up -- so "just in time" learning is as much about making teachers' lives better as making students' lives better. Speculating here with no supporting data but my own experiences, in a compulsory school classroom, perhaps by chance, some 2%(?) percent of any children who show up in class they are assigned to based on age and career track may find the subject matter of *intrinsic* interest of a high level. Another tiny fraction of kids may have a positive attitude towards any sort of "just in case" learning so that they dive into it and quickly enjoy it (another 3%? who are core "A" students overall but not "grinds"). Maybe these numbers may be higher depending on how the curriculum is structured (that is, if kids know supporting concepts that make the new material easier to grasp then it is probably easier to take interest in rather than just get lost the first day and stay lost). But most kids probably won't fall into either case of liking *the* subject or liking almost *any* subject (about 5% total?), which is where all the apparatus of compulsory pedagogy comes in, and then we can start talking about cost-effectiveness of compulsory extrinsically motivated "just in case" learning instead of intrinsically or extrinsically motivated "just in time" learning. Personally, I'm all for people learning Python -- but only when they want to; otherwise it just becomes another tool for oppression IMHO. I think Alan Kay goes wrong when he says here: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-April/102956.htm... "[On someone learning to program on their own] And, most likely, that you were in that 5%! Adele and I realized early on that the real key was to find out what to do for the next 85%, and this is where actual pedagogy and educational environments (and mentoring) really matter." I think Alan Kay here misses the whole "unschooling" point of intrinsic motivation and "just in time" learning -- which is rather shocking to me. :-) I agree with the value of mentoring (both to communicate enthusiasm and values as well as to communicate "just in time" facts and constructive criticisms), educational environments in terms of better software tools to lower the bar or make it even more interesting, pedagogy in the sense of well written tutorials, and such, so I don't disagree with the value of all these things. It's just I think he maybe misses part of the bigger picture here of why they are so often needed (which often relates to compulsory "just in case" learning instead of freely-chosen "just in time" learning). I should have said before that option #2 ("unschooling") mentioned in my previous post was almost entirely about *intrinsic* motivation. So this #6 option above ("try it, you'll like it") sort of bridges the gap between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and probably has a role to play in either compulsory schooling or freedom-based unschooling (and likely many "unschooling" parents use "try it, you'll like it" all the time).

Anyway, I've been thinking about a structure for encouraging external motivation, while trying to avoid coercion. It's definitely informed by some of the discussions here, as well as other internet phenomena. I wrote up a proposal of sorts here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peer_teaching_website

I think it could be useful to provide structure to the otherwise unstructured activities planned on the laptop. But there's nothing OLPC specific about it, or really anything specific to any particular domain; it's not really about teaching programming or anything specific.

At this point I don't really know what I (or OLPC) do with the idea though.

Well, we may just end up disagreeing on the value of structure. Still, again and again I keep coming back to Manuel de Landa's insights on meshworks (unstructured or loosely structured with incoherent but widespread power) and hierarchies (tightly structured with narrowly focused but coherent power): "MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES" http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm He says: "But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for." So, to move your peer teaching proposal forward, perhaps you could think about the appropriate interface between meshworks (lots of kids wanting to learn whatever interests them at the moment, maybe helping each other in an ad-hoc way) and hierarchies (adults [or other peers] who think they know what kids need to learn and are willing to put some time and effort into helping kids learn those things). --Paul Fernhout

Arthur wrote:

That is, at the stage when the fact that an offered experience is a being mediated through a digital Mystery begins to become something we can expect to have accepted without a very wrong message attached.

And even at that stage it is (almost?) exclusively the demystification of the digital Mystery that is of educational import. It used to be called science. Art

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:

Ian Bicking wrote:

...

Intrinsic desire is a little hard. It certain happens, but often just in a few cases; probably many of us had an intrinsic desire to do the thing programming allows, but there's many useful things I learned that I had no intrinsic desire to learn. Like writing -- I really hated writing as a child, and at that time there was nothing I wanted to do with writing. But I don't think it would have been good if I simply hadn't worked on the fundamentals of writing until such time that I wanted to actually use writing for something. And I still don't just write for myself; it's a tool I use for other purposes.

I'll agree with your larger point in practice in our society, on roles for both intrinsic motivation of liking some thing versus the extrinsic desire to learn something just to get some task done. There is another path humanity used to be on, but we are not back on it much yet, though I feel we will be more and more (and free and open source software leads the way), see: "The Abolition of Work" http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "The Original Affluent Society" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901135,00.html

Still, I might suggest you hated writing as a kid because you were forced to do it by compulsory schooling before you were ready or willing? Even if that was not the case for you, it certainly is the case for lots and lots of people.

I hated it intrinsically. I still do at times -- something about committing words and ideas to writing can be quite uncomfortable. Committing ideas to speech can be uncomfortable too, but in a different way; I was also a quiet kid. It's something I had to get over, and sometimes the only way to get over something is to do it, and to be pushed to do it. I think just about everyone needs pushing from time to time, as children or as adults. *What* the person needs to be pushed to do differs. Everyone drives because they are pushed to drive, not because everyone wants to do it. They are pushed by a need to get around, but also social pressure. And well they should be -- because of (understandable) anxiety about driving some people really wouldn't learn even though the skill would be useful to them, without the extra social pressure.

It is funny how we now accept kids learn most easily to walk and talk and use the potty at different ages, but we still insist they learn to read or write or do math at specific ages. Here is a school where no one is forced to read or write or do math or learn to program at any specific age: "Sudbury Valley School" http://www.sudval.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School and just about every single kid learns to do all of those well by the time they graduate (which is far, far higher than most other public or private schools). [Well, I don't actually know about programming rates among graduates, so that is just a wild assumption on my part; the other ones are easily documented. :-)]

It's easy for privileged kids with conscientious parents to do fine in these unstructured environments. When I have a kid I'll probably choose an unstructured environment too, because I won't be worrying about their acquisition of basic skills. Well, over the span of time I won't be worrying about it, because I'll be thinking about it from day to day in a tight feedback cycle. If every child had someone thoughtfully watching their progress and connecting that with a larger set of experiences and ideas from the world around them, then our education system wouldn't be that important. (*Without* connecting to a larger world of ideas, I don't think this would be successful -- a thoughtful and dedicated but ignorant caretaker will not accomplish the same thing.) And maybe it's not right to fix our social problems with institutions. But that's not the choice given to us. No one in any position of power is asking how we can tear down institutions. So maybe we can keep these better models in mind, but we still have to look for a way from where we *are* to where we want to be. Where we "are" is relative of course -- where we are here in the US is different from where people are in Brazil, which is probably itself very different from where people are in Libya. And we also must not reject the tools at hand -- the tools given us by the institutions in which we are embedded. I firmly reject the self-imposed impotence of the Luddites, the back-to-Earthers, the purists who won't accept that we can best effect trajectories.

If kids wants to get at the stories (or other knowledge) locked in books, that motivates them to spend the fifty hours or so of hard work to get to the point where they have the key and can then bootstrap themselves to a high level of reading skills through practice. Similarly, the key to learning to write well is to have something to say (even just a request for a toy to buy or an "I love you" note) and then to do it -- even if the first results are idiosyncratic and misspelled and ungrammatical.

I offer keyboarding as a counterexample. It's not all that uncommon that I find someone who uses computers a great deal who cannot touch type, because they learned to type as they needed to. Obviously no one (or at least very few people) learn keyboarding out of a genuine love for the craft of typing. But if you only learn typing in the natural way you end up with a self-limited skill; at some point it just about everyone *should* sit down and learn to touch type. Clearly without excellent typing skills you could not properly participate in these long winded discussions ;) (But I suppose one could argue poor typing makes you a better writer ;)

Nothing is more likely to make children not want to read or write than following standard pedagogical advice and breaking reading into a series of incremental hoops (learn letters, learn words, learn simple sentences, and so on) which is just going to bore most kids out of their skulls. Can you imagine if we tried to teach kids to listen to spoken language and to talk that way? Thankfully, kids learn to listen and talk on their own by just absorbing language in their environment and trying to use it to accomplish goals meaningful to themselves.

Kids are also cute and enjoyable, and adults sing them silly songs and mouth out words and do all sorts of things to help them learn to talk. Being around a baby and some toddlers these days, learning to talk is clearly not effortless for anyone involved. In cultures where children receive less direct attention when they are learning to talk, they *do not talk as well or as soon*.

Learning to read and write was actually *illegal* for a lot of people living in the USA for many generations (especially for slaves in the pre-Civil War South) and they still learned. From: http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/slavery/a/timeline_slave.htm "1740 -- The Negro Act is passed in South Carolina. The act makes it illegal for slaves to gather in groups, earn money, learn to read, and raise food. The act permits owners to kill rebellious slaves." From: http://pathways.thinkport.org/about/about4f.cfm "A lot of slaves worked very hard to learn to read, write, and do math. This was illegal in most states, but some learned anyway. In Maryland, it was not illegal for slaves to learn to read and write, but whites were discouraged from teaching them. Sometimes slaves learned from each other or from free blacks. Sometimes, white people taught them. ... Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist who was born a slave in Maryland, believed that the ability to read and write was the first step towards freedom. He wrote: "Education means emancipation; it means light and liberty." He learned to read while he was a slave in Baltimore. At first, his mistress taught him, but then her husband forbade the lessons. Then he learned from friends on the street. He also attended Sabbath school when he could. As an adult, he published a famous anti-slavery newspaper called the North Star." So, when people truly *want* to learn, they can.

We love to talk about the rebel and the hero, the person who casts off the chains of oppression, but the sad reality is that the slave owners had more influence than Frederick Douglas. Most times when I see someone who "worked their way out of poverty", there is a parent or strong mentor behind them, usually someone who wanted to work their way out of poverty themselves but didn't succeed. Well, they kind succeed through the success of their children -- I certainly don't intend to diminish those mentor's accomplishments (quite the contrary). But it takes a generation.

This line of thought makes me realize I should add a category #6 (or maybe #1B. :-) That alternative is, how a great teacher can use *extrinsic* motivation unrelated to a task (like giving out gold stars or "good job!" praise) to get kids to try it enough so they develop an *intrinsic* motivation to continue in the task (from appreciating it on its own merits). Or in other words, a "try it, you'll like it" strategy.

Certainly good learners are usually open to this line of suggestion. Of course it's only fair to then allow the learner to decide otherwise -- "try it, you'll like it -- but if you don't, do it anyway" is a less convincing way to approach things. I think there's something different here to foundational skills (like division) and other skills (like long division) that aren't really a prerequisite for anything else. And how would a child know the difference? They wouldn't, unless we tell them. And in an earlier time people really *didn't* know the different, they didn't know how to stack up ideas as well as we know now. This is fairly obvious in mathematics, but probably just as true in other areas; people may disagree over whole word vs phonetics, but I think we all recognize that penmanship should not have the role it once had, or any number of other learning theories that have passed on. Someone has to guide a child, lest they be forced to repeat millennia of false starts. If we lean too much on curriculum, tests, and coercive institutions it doesn't mean we can replace those with simply "freedom".

Obviously there is more to it than that, as a great teacher conveys enthusiasm for the topic. That is often hard in schools, as rarely do many teachers have professional experience enjoying their subject in other than a teaching capacity. Still, an unpaid amateur or hobby interest in writing, programming, mathematics, chemistry, or whatever certainly is good enough to have such excitement, and maybe even better than professional experience in some ways, see: "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

How do we make someone unafraid of failure, and yet also eager for success? That's very hard, and you can never really just figure it out -- it's a constant struggle. It's an unbalanced position; from month to month I feel myself drift one way or the other, my attitude and enthusiasm shifting directions. I guess viewed that way it's no surprise that institutions seek consistency more than they seek quality. (That doesn't necessarily mean they can find what they seek.)

I think Alan Kay goes wrong when he says here: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2006-April/102956.htm... "[On someone learning to program on their own] And, most likely, that you were in that 5%! Adele and I realized early on that the real key was to find out what to do for the next 85%, and this is where actual pedagogy and educational environments (and mentoring) really matter." I think Alan Kay here misses the whole "unschooling" point of intrinsic motivation and "just in time" learning -- which is rather shocking to me. :-)

I think he's just saying that good teachers and good teacher matter. Is that so odd? Motivation alone isn't enough.

...

Anyway, I've been thinking about a structure for encouraging external motivation, while trying to avoid coercion. It's definitely informed by some of the discussions here, as well as other internet phenomena. I wrote up a proposal of sorts here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peer_teaching_website

I think it could be useful to provide structure to the otherwise unstructured activities planned on the laptop. But there's nothing OLPC specific about it, or really anything specific to any particular domain; it's not really about teaching programming or anything specific.

At this point I don't really know what I (or OLPC) do with the idea though.

Well, we may just end up disagreeing on the value of structure. Still, again and again I keep coming back to Manuel de Landa's insights on meshworks (unstructured or loosely structured with incoherent but widespread power) and hierarchies (tightly structured with narrowly focused but coherent power): "MESHWORKS, HIERARCHIES AND INTERFACES" http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm He says: "But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."

As an example of bad drift -- one that relates directly to my proposal, really -- there's MySpace or other similar internet phenomena. I don't think they are the end of the world or anything, but they are rather disappointing in terms of content and results -- they really seem to plumb the depths of the trivial. And on a scale never before seen! It's like a participatory form of the Society page in the newspaper -- which perhaps is better than the Society page itself, but I wish it could have improved on something more worthy of improvement.

So, to move your peer teaching proposal forward, perhaps you could think about the appropriate interface between meshworks (lots of kids wanting to learn whatever interests them at the moment, maybe helping each other in an ad-hoc way) and hierarchies (adults [or other peers] who think they know what kids need to learn and are willing to put some time and effort into helping kids learn those things).

I'm not proposing one singular website or community, but rather a series of communities centered around some self-defined domain. There's software to be written there, if it's going to exist at all -- but the idea isn't really software, it just needs software to enable the idea. There's no One Website To Rule Them All. Teaching is central to the idea, but it is decentralized insofar as it doesn't expect or rely upon a professionalized set of teachers, and that success in the system depends on children becoming teachers themselves. Part of the community structure is to help those children become *good* teachers, by teaching each other how to teach. -- Ian Bicking | ianb@colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org

John- An excellent post; and I'll have to agree with most of it, including your conclusions at the end, especially in relation to choosing educational strategies based on empirical research. Some minor comments below. John Zelle wrote:

On Thursday 28 December 2006 12:51 pm, Ian Bicking wrote:

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Paul D. Fernhout wrote:

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Ian Bicking wrote: I offer keyboarding as a counterexample.

I'll be keeping this reply very short, as I never learned to touch type. My keyboarding style is, at best, idiosyncratic. I'd score that one for Paul, based on my experience. I never "learned to type." I just do it.

Actually, and unfortunately, I am a self taught keyboarder. I started on the original Commodore Pet chiclet calculator style keys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET I've tried a few typing tutors since (twenty years or so into typing) but never stuck with them. I can type at 60+ words per minute, but, I still mostly need to look at the keyboard, and my accuracy is not 100% (so, more revision is needed, especially if I am excited and type faster). Fortunately, spelling checkers help with some of my loss of accuracy (though sometimes introduce semantic mistakes if I don't read over things carefully, so another cost of being self-taught here). So, I'll have to agree with both you guys -- you can be self-taught and really good at something, but you may still have lost something. A typical example from music is classical pianist training versus jazz pianists who picked it up on their own (and have quirky styles and can never play as complex pieces). On the other hand, today's typing tutor programs have become so interesting that there is little question in my mind that if I had been offered access to one from the start on full sized keyboards, I would have learned as a young kid (the value would have been obvious to me, and the experience interesting). I think my best bet at this point if I wanted to learn to touch type (having a previously learned system to overcome) would be to use a different keyboarding modality. I tried a chord keyboard, but the one I picked (the twiddler) was unergonomic. So, I should either get another one or perhaps get a Dvorak lettered keyboard. http://www.maltron.com/maltron-press.html On the other hand, and perhaps I am wrong i thinking this, it seems quite a few people do not have my ability to take somewhat-legible written notes without looking at the paper (except occasionally). And that just emerged. Still, there is another issue here that for *writing* like emails, touch typing can be a big win. But for *programming* (especially in some languages with lots of symbol characters or numbers) touch typing is not so much of a big win. Programmers spend most of their time reading code (why Python is such an innovation), and when they write code it often has symbols in it or unusual words (so conventional keyboarding training focusing on letters is limited). Also, the task of browsing and editing code is much more mouse intensive than just writing emails, and using the mouse is disruptive to touch typing. So, when writing code, lowered keyboarding performance isn't quite the problem as with writing text. Still, even their, I'll agree, compared to someone who is a touch typist, like my wife, it still would be better to touch type, to improve the flow from ideas to screen. Now, to go on the offensive here, Doug Engelbert and others clearly showed even in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a set up with a chord keyboard in one hand and a mouse in the other is much father than a full keyboard and a mouse when using a typical computer application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_keyset Then why doesn't everyone use this settup? My only conclusion is that there seems to be a general problem with people investing in IT skills and technology. :-) And that was a big part of Doug Engelbart's point: that people have to be willing (or able or aware) to invest in technologies that make them more productive. Note that court stenographers do use chord keyboards: http://www.slate.com/id/2119534/ and othter compression practices, resultign in accordign to the following link approximately 225 words per minute at very high accuracy (many users of this machine can even reach 300 words per minute): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype Why don't we all make this investment to multiply our text input speed by a factor of five? Especially the people here advocating touch typing. :-) I know for stenographers it is a very high investment (two to three years, thought I am not sure how much time per day is spent on typing). http://stats.bls.gov/oco/ocos152.htm So perhaps another issue comes up here of diminishing returns. But in any case, I don't think learning keyboarding skills (which is perhaps the one most important thing a kid can learn in the internet age, until voice recognition accuracy improves) can justify thirteen years of compulsory education. Maybe as a compromise, we can think about which of these things are *really* important and whittle the compulsory part down to a few years. :-)

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Nothing is more likely to make children not want to read or write than following standard pedagogical advice and breaking reading into a series of incremental hoops (learn letters, learn words, learn simple sentences, and so on) which is just going to bore most kids out of their skulls. Can you imagine if we tried to teach kids to listen to spoken language and to talk that way? Thankfully, kids learn to listen and talk on their own by just absorbing language in their environment and trying to use it to accomplish goals meaningful to themselves.

Here, things get a little silly. Is there really evidence that children who are motivated to read (say because their parents read to them) are somehow then de-motivated by having that skill taught to them in a sane way? And yes, I'm afraid there is research showing that it's sane. Children who already know their letters pick up reading faster than those who don't. Starting with simple sentences leads to faster learning than starting with Shakespeare, and the best way to quickly enhance reading is to tackle "graded" texts that are at about 75% comprehension. Any easier than that, and you are not learning anything new. Harder than that, you don't have enough scaffolding to figure out new constructs from the context (since the context makes no sense). Not only is that common sense, I believe it's supported by _actual_reading_research_. I might also add that around my house those incremental "hoops" are themselves bringers of much delight. Successfully learning the alphabet is a source of joy to children.

However, I really want to weigh in on the second point of this paragraph, as it brings up a faulty analogy I often see in educational debates (even those surrounding programming ;-). I have considerable background in the areas of learning and language acquisition (specifically machine learning for natural language). The consensus of modern linquists is that learning to speak is almost nothing like learning to read (or driving or programing or...you name it). Learning to speak is in your genes. We are adapted through evolution to be a speaking species. Our ability to learn language is so innate and acute that it's arguably best thought of as a "speech organ" or "language instinct" (see Steven Pinker's excellent book of that title). No normal child fails to learn speech in _any_ culture, even those that Ian points out below do not necessarily encourage it. Learning to speak is an inevitable developmental phenomena that requires only exposure to speech at an appropriate age. Just like children don't need to be taught to recognize their mother's face, they do not have to be "taught" to speak.

Overall, I'll have to agree with you based on the facts that humans are wired for language. And you are right to say the specifics of language learning are different because of that from many other human learning tasks. (My undergraduate advisor, George A. Miller, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/~geo/ would also probably be very displeased if I said otherwise. :-) Still, clearly if we did teach language like we taught other things, the basic machinery would probably have a hard item with it, you have to admit that -- we would be going against the grain of how humans are set up to learn language. So, clearly, there is precedent for saying, humans naturally learn well a certain way, and trying to structure such learning in certain unnatural ways may actually reduce progress. Still, even for foreigh language, the "puberty" argument by itself is being discredited (even as it is less common to learn languages later, and certainly much harder to speak them without an accent). On accent, what seems to be more the case is that kids learn to *not* distinguish certain sounds in the first year or so of life (that is, the processing ability for , say, distinguishing between "r" and "l" is lost early on for Chinese speaking natives). We can get that discrimination back somewhat later, but it is very hard. As for "puberty", as kids get older, lots of other things get more interesting. See: http://ivc.uidaho.edu/flbrain/latelang.htm "Merrill Swain (1979), a leader in the field of foreign language learning, believes that early immersion students enter into the process of learning a second language at a time when it does not compete with other interests, as it is an integral part of their normal school activity. Older students, on the other hand, quickly recognize that learning a second language involves considerable time, dedication and effort, consequently preferring to spend their time and energy elsewhere. In other words, older students may excel in their initial rate of second language learning as input is more comprehensible for them because of their background knowledge--they are faster acquirers as well as faster learners and because of this they have a greater ability to consciously learn grammar rules (Krashen & Terrell, 1983), while younger students excel in long-term second language achievement. However, it is a myth to think that children find the process totally painless (Hakuta, 1986). The most difficult learning task for children and adults alike may be the attempt to acquire second language proficiency in school environments (Asher, 1982). It is simply not true that young children learn a new language more easily and quickly than adults because the many variables that are directly involved in the process of learning a language such as specific situations, input, interactions and most importantly, the amount of time invested in language learning in a quality program make language learning hard work for both groups." I think there is some other research somewhere that says when adults are taught the same way as kids are taught, that is with pointing and naming of objects, and short social interactions, that adults learn language faster than through conventional adult means of text books and repetition of dialogues. Which makes sense if you think some basic wired machinery is being properly activated. Throughout human history tribes with differing languages have been neighbors and learning multiple human languages informally has been an important survival skill. Almost everyone agrees that if you want to become fluent in a language, the best way (and perhaps only thorough way) is to live somewhere it is spoken as a part of normal life. Having said that, almost every academic likes to think their specialty is of special importance. Linguists are more likely to be right, of course. :-) Still, many people communicate via sign language, or touch codes, are via typing and reading, even from birth, and so clearly "language" like capacities are also applicable in other modalities than speech and hearing.

Skills such as reading, writing, mathematics, and programming are not innate. In fact, even with great effort, many people do not learn to read well. There are precious few self-taught readers. The analogy to speech just doesn't cut it. It's even less appropriate for considerations of writing and mathematics. Even learning a second language after a certain age (around puberty) simply does not (and cannot) happen the way we learn our first language as children. Second language learning draws on different cognitive mechanisms. So all those language courses that promise you can learn effortlessly the way a child learns language are just blowing smoke.

Now, agreeing their may be special wiring for language, consider how people learn so many things -- playing the piano, how Unix directory structures work, really big philosophical ideas, or learning some aspect of programming. Often times we need to return to something over and over again (in slightly different contexts) before one day it just "clicks" and becomes clear. That is a function of how a neural network is processing information. And it is clearly not just "hierarchical". I'm sure everyoen here has had "aha" moments like this abotu a lot of things. Sometimes they are not obvious -- like when you get new glasses and a fewer days later you stop noticing them. Hierarchical presentation may help some in some cases (depending on the skill). Maybe even a lot in a lot of cases. I have no problem arguing for the value of well written tutorials, innovative learning games, texts of increasing structured difficulty, or whatever. It is more the compulsory aspect and the timetable aspect I have problems with. And those are aspects which deny that we don't really understand what is going on in that neural net, and also often deny the role *intrinisic* or what I might call "extrinsic direct value" motivation plays in learning. By extrinsic direct value I mean you see directly the value of what you are learning to solve a problem of importance to you (e.g. touch typing or driving); it isn't just about a grade. We don't know all the details about motivation and learning, but we do know motivation is a really important part of learning; and we know that frustrating and boring kids repeatedly turns them off learning in an area. One can, even for language, distinguish between "immersion" and "submersion" :-) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion

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Teaching is central to the idea, but it is decentralized insofar as it doesn't expect or rely upon a professionalized set of teachers, and that success in the system depends on children becoming teachers themselves. Part of the community structure is to help those children become *good* teachers, by teaching each other how to teach.

Teaching at its heart is really just good communication. Part of communication is making sure you have a receptive audience, that's where I see all the various discussion of things like enthusiasm and internal vs external motivations. And I think Arthur's original post about taking on interested learners, vs. getting them interested is an important distinction to think about. BUT. The second part of communication is providing the right information that will most effectively communicate. Teachers have been teaching for many centuries now. We know a lot about how children learn, and many ideas that have been demostrated through both experience and research are now standard parts of educational curriculum. Now, I'd be the first to admit that I have very little patience with a lot of so-called educational research, but finding better teaching methods can (and should be) an empirical, scientific process. I have _no_ patience for the "everything we're doing now is just plain wrong" crowd. These sorts of claims are seldom backed up by any evidence except vague hand-waving and appeals to ideology (centralized, hierarchical BAD, unstrutured GOOD, "coercion" BAD, voluntary GOOD, lecture BAD, contructionism GOOD), or false analogies (kids should learn to read the same way they learn to speak).

Can we improve education? Almost certainly. But I'm sure we can also make it much, much worse. Before we throw out the bathwater, let's see what's actually in it.

I'll have to agree. Still, even the results of scientific studies can be biased, based on the funder, the assumptions, the researcher, the peer review process, and so on. All the best. Wish I had more time right now to reply more fully. --Paul Fernhout

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:

Now, to go on the offensive here, Doug Engelbert and others clearly showed even in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a set up with a chord keyboard in one hand and a mouse in the other is much father than a full keyboard and a mouse when using a typical computer application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_keyset

I quite doubt this. The "clearly showed" may be true for editing (mark-up and movement tasks), but as I recall the Augment group was quite frustrated that a fast typist could beat even a well-practiced chord-pad and mouser. The Referenced article claims w/o citation that "Engelbart proved that trained typists, after just a few hours of training, could perform more efficiently using a chord keyboard than a conventional QWERTY keyboard." From what I recall, this was not true for text entry, but was for commands and short phrases. It was the movement back and forth between the keyboard and mouse that killed the skilled typist, not the letter entry speed. The article is suspect, because it claims the chord-pad had 31=2**5-1 distinct chords, but really, it was 30=2**5-2; 0-0-0-0-0 (all up) cannot be entered, and 1-1-1-1-1 was reserved for "cancel that chord, I typo'ed (much as DEL was an over punch to erase a mistaken byte). If you used the mouse buttons with the chord-pad (which I think you did), you had access to 126=2**7-2 or 254=2**8-2 chords if you kept one mouse button out of the chord, enough for all of ASCII (Note the NUL and DEL would still be out, but old paper-tape rules dictated special uses for those characters as well). -- Scott David Daniels Scott.Daniels@Acm.Org

Scott David Daniels wrote:

Arthur wrote:

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Have dug in quite a bit to VPython's code, which has become an intensive C++ course for me. And have accomplished a good deal in keeping the project moving forward, healthy and on-track. I happen to be proud of that.

I recommend you read Stroustrup's book, "The Design and Evolution of C++." It will give you a nice skeleton around which to wrap your understanding of C++, and help you understand how C++ came to be the way it is.

I would love to, and should, and probably won't - at least until some time considerably later in the game. The effort to do so does not, in my mind, speak directly enough to my motivations. The relationship of my learning style, and the fact that I was originally drawn toward the study of literature again strikes me. But the "work" I am studying is the VPython code, not the C++ language itself. The fact that the code is dense and difficult, and that I can only understand it in fits and starts and that it requires numerous iterative passes at it in order to begin to "get it", is a motivational plus, rather than a motivational negative. It becomes a game worth playing. It feels efficient. Guess I have a decent tolerance for being at sea, as long as I know that only time, focus, and effort is between me and some land. The analysis/understanding of dense working code is to me the starting point. Understanding something of the language anatomy is a byproduct of that effort, not the focus of it. I feel strongly that this top->down approach to learning in relationship to programming, rather than an atomic bottom->up approach approach, is not generally given its do. Which is part of why I bring the subject and my experience up - here. Art