[Edu-sig] An OLPC comment (vs. Apprenticeship)

[kirby urner]

> Kirby U. here sounds like he does that. But, there is no realistic way a
> person can really have 30 apprentices, let alone 150 as is typical in high
> school (one teacher with five classes of thirty kids each). One or two
> apprentices is quite doable, even up to five, maybe. Much more than that,
> and at best you have a pipeline (like the one room schoolhouse) where the
> older apprentices teach the younger, as a sort of learning community.

This is very apropos actually, as through my work with saturdayacademy.org,
a kid'll sometimes bubble up to my attention, as in need of special mentoring.
Just a couple days ago the director was running a case by me, without giving
a name.  Based on prior experience, I guessed who we were talking about,
though some kids in my more recent class might also be growing more
frustrated as well, given they've pretty much exhausted what our curriculum
has to offer a kid at that age (which is why we're scrambling to produce more).

This also happended at winterhaven.pps.or.us, where my advice was sought
on an 8 year old already partitioning a hard drive for the express purpose of
testing multiple operating systems.  Later (still age 8), he sshed from a
classroom NT computer in the school intranet to his laptop via Putty, his
borrowed IBM Thinkpad running a telnet server in Mandrake Linux.

In the case of the older boy (age 15), I suggested to his dad that he think
about OSCON 2007, which I'm also thinking to propose a talk for, but it
involves a motorvehicle I haven't found yet (the SUV in New Mexico came
close).  Given OSCON happens locally, the boy could take TriMet,
spending days mingling with the O'Reilly folks etc., very friendly, smart,
plus local fauna like @ Stonehenge (more of a Perl shop, but that wouldn't
be a barrier to this already-multilingual prodigy).

If someone really insists on working with me personally, then I try to
enlist their support in going back to the schools and recruiting, showing
peers someone close to their own age, or younger, already mastering
this that (or the other) gnu math topic (RSS, IM, SQL, VPython... MailMan,
MoinMoin).

This might happen virtually, i.e. a protege could show up for a few minutes
on YouTube from time to time, introducing some geek topic of special
interest, show how it's done.  Others could then chime in with their
offerings, using IRC to chat about their relative merits, pedagogical
effectiveness and so on (much as older adults do, around their stuff).  I've
actually built a sort of business model around this process at
myspace.com/4dstudios -- focusing on mathcasting as a subtype of
screencasting (at various bandwidths and/or resolutions).

Kirby