updates on projects.
Viewing entries by
Bodo Hoenen
We are off to Paris to prepare for the launch of the Learning Planet assembly together with UNESCO and the CRI.
There are more than 200 million students in higher education. Most students feel disengaged from the learning process but are highly concerned about world’s biggest problems and want to act.
This is the time to involve everyone in developing sustainable solutions. This is the time for building a learning planet.
Want to learn more: https://www.learning-planet.org/
There are a number of ways we can create a “Google maps” for learning, and a GPS that runs on it to guide you to any learning goal. Here I’ll describe three methods I have tried over the years, their pros and cons, and why the best results will come by combining all three methods.
+8 years of work on this problem
+6 Prototypes and working apps
+2,000 1-on-1 in-depth youth interviews conducted in many settings, refuge camps in Africa, homes in the middle east, k12 classrooms in the US, maker spaces in India, Colledges in Japan…
+10,000 Hours of user research, experiences, successes, and failures
Young kids loved this!
High cost to design
Can only work for maps that work off known learning destinations and linear learning paths
(Static map background, dynamic path layer)
The map’s background does not convey any useful information, and therefore quickly becomes boring.
Kids were initially excited about the map but then became really disappointed!
(Styled Map background, dynamic path layer)
Simple to implement and create different “themes”
There is no map feel to this, little reward for learners to explore new regions on the map
Simple to implement
Quickly becomes boring
No reason to explore and discover new things
Good metaphor and a great way to represent past learning, but not future learning.
How we learn is not in tree-like branches, but rather a highly connected web, that quickly breaks this metaphor.
Treemaps cannot be used to explore anything but traditional linear learning paths
Learn more about this prototype here.
Easily implemented
Easily skinned to suit any learner, can use procedural generation to design maps for kids to adults
Can scale in real-time to accommodate new competencies and paths as we generate them.
Learn more about this here.
An approach we can use to build the learning map is to build it from extracting nodes from standards, like the US common core standards, European educational standards, or national curricula. Here we have pretty well-defined standards we can convert into nodes. This method was tested when we were running the Moonshot Education Project, explained in this blog post: one-size-does-not-fit-all-overcoming-our-factory-education
Pros
Easy to generate maps for traditional education and domains
Easy for existing providers to leverage map
Cons
Not scalable
Does not work for non-traditional domains
Does not allow for cross-domain path generation
One approach we can use to build this Learning Map is to build it from deconstructing existing courses, curricula, online programs, textbooks, lectures or any other pre-packaged learning paths. In this method, we leverage the expertise of educationalists who have created courses, online learning programs, youtube videos or lectures to define not only the nodes, but also the links between them. We then use this as a “seed” to create the start of the map. Here, in this illustrated example I’ll describe this approach.
Pros
Rapidly generate maps for any domain that has existing content
The map becomes a new channel for existing content and content producers
Cons
Building an automated pipeline to deconstruct content is complex.
A third approach to building the learning map is to build it from an ontology like Wikipedia. Like building from standards, this is relatively easy as it again has well-defined structured data, however, in this approach, there are no learning paths within the ontology. Projects like the we.learn project by the CRI are leveraging this method and using learner-generated paths to augment a map built on a Wikipedia ontology.
Pros
Rapidly generate a Map of all human knowledge
This map is continually updated, and we could both leverage the Wikipedia community AND contribute to it too!
Cons
Links do not have directional information, there is no Path information.
We need to do all three approaches in parallel so that we cover all available knowledge and educational material.
2. We need to do all three methods to get the greatest data coverage, metadata, relationship data, ML Data.
3. Why we need all three methods as its the only way we can get all required features
Join us at the Geneva HACKAHEALTH event where various differently-abled people will come together to develop assistive devices, then publish the work as open source so that others can do the same.
We will continue on the journey of Chiara, Lorelei, Eric and Yariv as they hack their own health
If you are a Maker, Designer, Developer or Engineer interested in learning new skills, developing some cutting-edge solutions or just having fun with like-minded hackers, join us.
As we progress with ramping up the Open Social Innovation project we travel around the world gathering support and collaborators. From the west coast of the US where we visited friends at Google and X to the far-east where we meet with the most innovative organizations doing good.
2018 is here, and we are excited to progress!
We can empower our kids to lead the way in solving some of the world's grandest challenges! We are partnering up with Ashoka on an amazing project to do just that.
My work on Dev4X was put at a lower priority for a few months, , here is why:
My daughter, Lorelei, was diagnosed with Acute Flaccid Myelitis a rare polio-like syndrome and lost the use of her arm. Traditional treatments would have given her about a 5% chance at recovery, and state of the art treatments were too costly. Without any experience, we decided to tackle this challenge by setting up an open project and reaching out to experts for help.
We have now built a robotic assistive arm that is helping her move and which has increased her chances of rehabilitation. Over the last several weeks she has now slowly started to regain the use of her arm and is able to move!
Here is a video about our story:
Here are the instructions: www.ourkidscandoanything.com
We were honored to join a panel on empowering girls and 'Female Capital' hosted by The New York Times and sponsored by J. WALTER THOMPSON WORLDWIDE
We have been invited to share our work at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and speak on the panel on empowering girls. We are honored to join this event!
Photograph: Richard Bord/Getty Images
As you may have read in our previous post, Mirum wanted to do something impactful. So they asked their clients to vote for their favorite early-stage charity, promising to put their Mirum24 maker teams into action to help the chosen charity reach their goals. They chose our project and this is a post about selecting the finalists in this #Mirum24 project.
The Unreasonable institute in NYC has awarded us place in their program where they support us with advice, insight, networking support and access to funding.
Mirum Agency, a digital agency under JWT, selected our non-profit as the focus of their #Mirum24 project an idea-thon in which 15 global Mirum teams are competing to help us further our efforts to provide education to the most underserved children.
This past holiday season, Mirum ran a Holiday Campaign and invited their clients to vote for an inspiring nonprofit. The purpose: to put their Mirum24 hacker teams to work solving a difficult global challenge. 15 teams came together and generated some amazing ideas. Read more here.
Benetech and Code Alliance support Dev4X by providing volunteer developer skills through the #chi4good project on May 7th thr 12th.
This is the application I put into the Shuttleworth foundation to join their fellowship program. It's part three of 'the world as I see it' blog series.
The #Mirum24 project is progressing and the makers are hard at work on the project, so let’s take a look at what’s happening.
This past holiday season, Mirum ran a Holiday Campaign and invited their clients to vote for an inspiring nonprofit. The purpose: to put their Mirum24 hacker teams to work solving a difficult global challenge.
In part one, I spoke about my concerns regarding sending my children to school and why they are unable to adequately prepare our children for the future. I also shared a little about what I am doing about this issue. In part two I want to talk a little more about our approach and why it’s important to disrupt traditional education without disrupting actual learning.
My son and daughter are about to go to school and I am dreading sending them there! I am dreading the systematic dulling of their creativity by the focus on grades, standardized tests and outdated teachings. This post is about what I am doing about it: Empowering children to take their learning into their own hands!
A testimonial from Dr. Diana Sharp: A learning scientist with a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. She has spent over twenty-five years exploring research on the promises and pitfalls of technology for reading development. She has worked on numerous projects aimed at transforming the way that children learn to read, and in 2012 she was named a global leader in the field of early-grade literacy and technology by Microsoft’s Global Strategic Education Partnerships division.
Diana Sharp, PhD describes her reasons for working with Dev4X and why our work is important.
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