[Edu-sig] Learning (some more) programming

[Ian Bicking]

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.html
> "[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 at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org