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→Mark Surman talk about "Open Sourcing Education in South Africa"
Mark Horner was at a science fair, giving a demo on wave theory when the students approached afterwards to ask if they could copy his notes. They were so excited by the concepts he spoke of but their textbooks had no information for them to turn to. This discovery led to Hack-a-thons (essentially sprints like in agile modeling) where textbooks were written in an open source manner – with tons of authors hammering away at the material and creating a complete curriculum. These books are then copied and distributed to the ones who need them.
Where is this all heading? We are on the cusp of new ways of teaching and learning. The [http://laptop.org/ One Laptop Per Child ] project and other philanthropy are aiding in this movement towards peer learning and access to materials for learning analytical thinking through programming and computer use. Mark told us about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay Alan Kay’s ] “squeak” which is an analytical program in the form of a simple game – similar to Logo –what if we take the theories from the 60’s and 70’s and get two students using simple computer languages to teach each other? [http://www.kusasa.org/ Kusasa ] (Zulu word for tomorrow) is such an educational tool where kids can learn and teach with open source programs. In the test runs the students were extremely excited by the software and asked if they could take it home with them.
Mark mentioned that MIT has open courseware [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm Open Course Ware] where people are free to download and learn with full course material in a wide variety of topics. This is creating a peer to peer university. He is extremely optimistic that all this openess openness is leading to a prevalence of open culture including business and government. What kind of changes will we see in education in this generation who are growing up with [http://facebook.com Facebook ] and the expectation of collaboration? A new pedagogy that can’t even be imagined is coming whether we want it or not.
====Comparing Apples and Apples?====
