Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them

[Wowzers. -egg]

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Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child presentation at the MIT Tech Review EmTech conference recounted an inspiring experiment in which illiterate Ethiopian village-kids were given solar-charging laptops in sealed boxes, and quickly taught themselves how to operate, then master, then hack, these devices, acquiring basic literacy and technological literacy at the same time.

MIT Technology Review‘s David Talbot reports in a piece reprinted on Mashable.com:

The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”

In an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early results are promising, reaching conclusions about whether children could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said. “We’d have to start with a new village and make a clean start.”


Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves

(via Reddit)

University of the People: free, online education

University of the People: free, online education:
Nora sez,


Founded in 2009 by educational entrepreneur Shai Reshef, University of the People is the world’s first tuition-free completely online university, offering Associate and Bachelor degrees in Business Administration and Computer Science. Students are asked to pay a one-time application fee ($50), and $100 end-of-course final examination fees. Aside from that, there is no tuition and all courses, books, and resources are provided free of charge online. UoPeople is approved to grant degrees by the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE), and is currently working to seek accreditation.

In keeping with its mission, UoPeople strives to ensure that no qualified individual is excluded from a chance at higher education for financial reasons. To assist students in financial need with their examination fees, UoPeople has dedicated student scholarship funds. Corporate sponsors include Hewlett-Packard’s sponsorship of 100 HP Scholars as part of the UoPeople Women Scholarship Fund, as well as Intel Foundation’s sponsorship of women students from Haiti. In the near future, UoPeople will launch a Micro-Scholarship Portal, the first of its kind, to allow donors to contribute to individual students.

To date, the university has been funded by Shai Reshef, and by grants from various foundations including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Kauffman Foundation, The Hewlett Foundation, The Goodman Family Foundation, and The Passport Foundation, among others. With $6 million more, the University will be self-sustainable. In its quest to reach sustainability, UoPeople is currently in discussions with several foundations regarding grants, and is always seeking philanthropic and corporate donations.

University of the People – The world’s first tuition-free online university

(Thanks, Nora!)


Aralac: The "wool" made from milk

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Aralac: The “wool” made from milk

Yesterday, Cory posted a vintage ad for boys’ hats and accessories, which included a small selection of ties made from something called “Aralac”. I didn’t think much of it, until I noticed J. Brad Hicks’ comment pointing out that Aralac was a synthetic wool made from cheese. Which was not a joke.

Seriously. It’ll make more sense once you understand how the stuff was actually made.

Think about it this way: Wool (the actual kind, that comes from sheep) is a protein. So is casein, which is found in milk. Making Aralac is basically about getting the protein casein to behave like the protein wool. In 1937, Time magazine described how the process worked:

Having practically the same chemical composition as wool, it is made by mixing acid with skim milk. This extracts the casein, which looks like pot cheese. Evaporated to crystals, it is pulverized and dissolved into a molasses consistency, then forced through spinnerets like macaroni, passed through a hardening chemical bath, cut into fibres of any desired length. From 100 pounds of skim milk come 3.7 pounds of casein which converts to the same weight of lanital. [Aralac was also called Lanital.]

Casein isn’t cheese, as J. Brad Hicks described it. Instead, it’s the stuff that makes cheese happen. If milk is the liquid and cheese the solid, casein is the stuff that facilitates the transition — the casein in milk clumps together and solidifies into cheese.

So, in a way, Aralac really was cloth made from cheese. During World War II, when wool was scarce, it made a lot of sense to buy Aralac — which was significantly cheaper and easier to get a hold of.

Why don’t we wear Aralac today? Couple reasons. First off, it wasn’t a particularly strong fiber. According the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, Aralac fibers were only about 10% as strong as natural wool, so the stuff was usually mixed in a wool-Aralac blend to improve durability. And, despite assurances to the contrary in that 1937 Time story I quoted above, Smithsonian says Aralac was a royal pain to successfully dye.

It’s also worth noting that Aralac isn’t totally gone. In fact, there’s a German company trying to market QMilch — a fabric made from milk that isn’t deemed high enough quality to be sold as food. It’s apparently more like silk than wool.

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