“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something,” physicist Richard Feynman once said. “Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Maybe Feynman’s brain was big enough to simply “learn by understanding”—sucking in and comprehending complex realities in a single glance. But what I think he actually meant was that people should learn by exploring and investigating, rather than just memorizing. Only then would their knowledge be useful and durable.

What makes Microsoft Research’s new Project Tuva website so wonderful is not just that it puts some of Feynman’s most famous physics lectures online, but that it invites viewers to explore the subject matter in exactly the way Feynman would have recommended. The Caltech scientist was famous in part for for his lucid way of explaining things like gravity and quantum mechanics—so the lectures certainly stand on their own as educational set-pieces. But the transcripts, note-taking tools, and multimedia “extras” that now show up alongside the videos make the material even more entertaining, accessible, and, well, explorable.

Project Tuva was unveiled last week. It’s named after the central Asian country Feynman famously and somewhat quixotically wanted to visit before he died. (He never got permission from the Soviet Union, of which it was then a part, as his friend Ralph Leighton chronicled in his 1991 book Tuva or Bust!) The site uses Microsoft’s Silverlight software, a Web-based multimedia player similar to Adobe’s Flash platform, to showcase a series of lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell University in 1964. The lectures were filmed by the BBC for broadcast in the United Kingdom, and weren’t available to Web viewers until Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a longtime Feynman admirer, purchased the rights and asked Microsoft Research to find a way to host digital versions online.

“I said we could host them, but we could also do something much more interesting with it,” says Curtis Wong, who leads a small division of Microsoft Research called the Next Media Research group. I’ve known Wong for years and I make a point of following his work, because he’s always got some great new idea about how to take a cultural resource and increase its value through multimedia technology.

For the concepts behind Project Tuva, Wong told me by phone this week, he reached back to three projects he led in the mid-1990s. The first was an interactive tour, published on CD-ROM, of the Barnes Foundation’s collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings outside Philadelphia. The second was another CD-ROM about Leonardo da Vinci, built around a digital facsimile of one of Leonardo’s notebooks, the Codex Leicester, which also happens to be owned by Bill Gates. (See this May 2008 column for more on those two projects.) The third was an interactive video documentary, developed as a demonstration for PBS but never aired, in which the program’s closed-captioning information was interspersed with hyperlinks that led to related articles in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia.

Each project represented a step in the development of what Wong calls his information learning model for interactive media; it’s also been called the “contextual pyramid” or “ECR,” for engagement, context, and reference. It’s a simple idea: first, you hook someone—whether they’re using a CD-ROM, watching a video, or visiting a website or a museum—with a story or an object that produces an immediate emotional impact. Then, at the very moment they’re most engaged and curious, you offer them context that broadens their understanding. Finally, you provide a deep reference layer, for the people who get so intrigued that they want to know a lot more.

I’d love to explain all the lovingly crafted ways in which the Barnes and Leonardo CD-ROMs and the PBS demo implemented this model, but it would take too long. Jump back to 2008 or so: as soon as Wong found out about Bill Gates’ quest to put the Feynman lectures online, he realized that …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Many people wouldn’t touch coffee or cereal without sugar. And the XO laptop would be useless without Sugar—the standard, Linux-based graphical interface for the little green laptop, nearly a million of which have been distributed to classrooms in developing countries by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

While OLPC and Microsoft have been talking for nearly a year about shipping XO laptops that run Windows XP rather than Linux and Sugar, that hasn’t yet happened. Which means Sugar and the XO are still cohabitating, despite the acrimonious divorce last year between OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and Sugar creator Walter Bender, the foundation’s former president of software. In fact, not only are Sugar and all the programs that come with it (”activities,” in Sugar lingo) still the keys to the XO laptop’s educational value, but they’re spreading beyond the XO to other platforms—and may well end up overshadowing the little laptop when it comes time to write the histories of technology and education in the developing world.

Bender came by Xconomy’s Cambridge office yesterday to give us the latest news about Sugar, whose development is now led by Sugar Labs, the non-profit, open source community he set up after leaving OLPC last April. Sugar Labs—which Bender says is based in “cyberspace,” though he himself works from his home office in Newton, MA—provides a forum for the global community of educators and volunteer developers that has sprung up to support and extend Sugar.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news from Sugar Labs is that Sugar is going portable: the community has created a version of the Linux-Sugar stack that can be copied to a so-called “Live USB” thumb drive, which can then be used to boot virtually any laptop or desktop PC into the Sugar environment. Bender calls it “Sugar on a Stick,” and he’s in discussions with USB drive manufacturers to create a branded version that would be available for sale from the Sugar Labs website (though you can also create your own version for free). The implications are big: separating Sugar from the XO means that any child or teacher, in Minneapolis or Mumbai, could take advantage of Sugar’s educational tools without having to wait for OLPC to find funding to get XO laptops into their schools.

And next month, Sugar itself is getting an upgrade, in the form of the next major release, called “Sucrose 0.84.” Bender says he and the Sugar community have built some major improvements into the new release, including a better system for storing and accessing saved work (the Sugar environment is built around an automatic diary called the Journal rather than old-fashioned files and folders); easier ways for users to edit the Python source code underlying Sugar activities; and a portfolio presentation tool designed to make it easier for students and teachers to engage in periodic critiques. As Bender explains, critiques of open-ended problem-solving work—as opposed to standardized testing of students’ performance on closed-form problems like arithmetic or vocabulary questions—are a big element in the constructionist educational philosophy from which Sugar grew.

When OLPC announced drastic staff cuts last month, the last two people who were being paid full-time to work on Sugar development lost their jobs. And Sugar Labs has yet to raise the money Bender says it needs to bring the community together for more face-to-face brainstorming and software critiques. But overall, it sounds like the split between OLPC and the Sugar community may end up being a healthy one, with each platform now free to develop in its own direction. Indeed, Bender says “a lot of people have actually come forward now [to help with Sugar] because they see a cleaner separation between the two organizations.”

Certainly, “Sugar on a Stick”—or on a netbook, or another low-cost laptop like the ASUS Eee PC—could help the software find its way into classrooms around the world much faster than OLPC is able to build and distribute XOs. And if there’s one thing Negroponte and Bender agree about, it’s that the One Laptop effort is about learning, not about hardware.

An edited version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: Thanks for coming by. So, where are you with Sugar?

Walter Bender: [Holding up a USB thumb drive] This is where we are. Live USB is going to be a really big part of Sugar in the next year or two, because it’s an easy way in the door. Most schools’ IT departments don’t even let teachers install software. The overhead associated with large IT infrastructures forces these people to be very conservative about adopting new ideas. So having Sugar on a stick means we can hand this to a teacher or a student and they don’t have to have any impact on the existing infrastructure at all. They can be off to the races using Sugar and all its advantages, in a computer lab, a classroom, at the library, at home, on their parent’s computer, at an Internet cafe—wherever they can get a computer that they can boot off a USB, which is most computers these days. Everything is stored on the USB, so essentially, your schoolwork walks around with you, in the form of your journal. We think it’s going to really make Sugar a lot more accessible.

X: It sounds like “Sugar on a Stick” lets you pretend you’re using an XO laptop, without actually having one.

WB: You get all the advantages of the XO software environment, but you don’t need to be tied to any particular hardware. You don’t even need a laptop—you could do it with a desktop. So, that’s a big thrust, in terms of our strategy for outreach and getting Sugar into the hands of more kids.

X: But if you boot into Sugar on a home computer or a library computer, aren’t you missing the mesh networking built into the XO and the collaboration aspect that’s so important to the pedagogical theory behind Sugar?

WB: When you stick in the Live USB, you’ve got Sugar and you’ve got collaboration. You might not be doing the collaboration through peer-to-peer networking; you might be doing it through Jabber [an open-source instant messaging platform]. But the mesh-networking is not necessary to make Sugar work. It’s a nice-to-have. And one issue with a lot of schools is that they don’t want kids using the Internet—-they want to keep the kids containerized. With Live USB, you could run a classroom environment over a local Jabber server and have the kids collaborate without ever going out onto the net.

X: What are your plans for distributing the USB version? Can people make their own?

WB: If you’ve got a blank USB drive, you can download the Sugar image off our website. For Windows and Ubunto and Fedora, there are utilities for writing the image to a USB key. There must be one for the Mac as well. At conferences, we set up little USB stations so that if you’ve got a key, you can walk up and we’ll make you an image right there. I’m also talking with a couple of USB manufacturers about …Next Page »

Comments (13) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s 4:00 a.m., you’ve been up all night studying for the big linear algebra exam, and you have the sinking feeling that there’s something about eigenvectors and eigenvalues that you still just don’t understand. Your roommates are all asleep. You’d call up your friend the math whiz, who never sleeps, but you’ve already used up all of his patience. What do you do?

If anything like this ever happened to you in college (and it certainly did to me), the answer is probably “You get a C- on the exam.” But uProdigy, a tutoring service launched publicly this week, has a way out that wasn’t available when I was an undergrad: fire up Skype on your computer and talk live to a math teacher in India, who will explain everything you need to know about those pesky eigens for $15 an hour, charged to your Paypal or Google Checkout account.

UProdigy’s service isn’t the first live, Internet-based tutoring system (Washington, D.C.-based Smarthinking does that), and it isn’t even the first one to use tutors who are based in India (Bangalore-based TutorVista does that). But it is definitely the cheapest, at least if you use it for 6 hours a month or less. (Smarthinking costs $35 per hour and TutorVista charges a flat $99.99 per month for unlimited hours.) And it’s the only one started by a philosophy-of-religion graduate student from Harvard.

Actually, he’s on leave for the semester. “There’s just too much going on—the opportunity is just too big,” says Syed Hussain, uProdigy’s founder and CEO. “I can’t justify sitting in class and learning about some obscure medieval philosophy when I could be out building this business.”

When Hussain uses the word “obscure” he’s not really serious—his focus in school is on Islamic studies, which he says is “not only an intellectual concern, but deals with a pressing problem nowadays, this existential tension between the Western and Islamic worlds, which is a problem that needs to be studied, especially by people in the West.” But when he uses the words “building this business,” he’s very serious indeed. He’s spent the last year and a half—since finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan—pursuing the idea of affordable online tutoring, and has assembled a distributed team of more than a dozen programmers and businesspeople, based out of office space that the company shares with several other startups in Cambridge’s Porter Square. He says uProdigy represents an upwelling of his business instincts, which he briefly tried to submerge by choosing graduate school over a planned career in investment banking.

Here’s his telling of the idea behind the business: “I was a double major in math and economics at Michigan and I was taking a class in advanced partial differential equations. The homework problems were ridiculously difficult, and all 20 of us in the class would show up in the library and work on the problems together. There were occasions when all of us collectively could not solve a problem, and in those instances we needed to hire a tutor.

“But it was difficult to find someone on campus who could help us with partial differential equations—only a PhD math student would have been able to help. And they weren’t always available, and they charged $70 or $80 an hour. It was relatively cheap, when we all pooled our resources, to hire someone for three hours and pay them $240. But you can’t afford that on your own when you’re an undergraduate. That’s when I conceived of this idea of having tutors on demand, 24 hours a day”—and for a reasonable price.

Hussain raised $130,000 in seed funding from a contact in the investment-banking business to start the company, and his team set out to recruit tutors by advertising around university towns in India. Applicants, who consist mostly of teachers and university professors looking for some extra work, are rigorously screened, and only 1 in 20 are …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share: