A Physics of Education?

The behaviour of children in Self-Organised Learning Environments everywhere Is reminiscent of self-organising systems. A self-organising system (SOS) consists of a set of entities that obtains an emerging global system behaviour via local interactions without centralised control (Elmenreich,W. and de Meer,H.(2008). Self-organising systems fall under the general area of Chaos Theory in Physics. It is interesting to apply the definition of Chaos to education in general: ‘A system whose long term behaviour is unpredictable, tiny changes in the accuracy of the starting value rapidly diverge to anywhere in its possible state space. There can however be a finite number of available states, so statistical prediction can still be useful.’ (Complex Systems Glossary, Internet references).

The sentence above perhaps sums up, in the language of Physics, what we understand as education and assessment. Working with a group of children, a school cannot predict what will emerge at the end of schooling, but can make statistical guesses based on test scores.

In a SOLE, children seem to maximise the information content of what they are researching. This too is uncannily close to the definition of the term ‘Edge of Chaos’. The definition is ‘the tendency of dynamic systems to self-organise to a state roughly midway between globally static (unchanging) and chaotic (random) states. This can also be regarded as the liquid phase, half way between solid (static) and gas (random) natural states. In information theory this is the state containing the maximum information.’ (Complex Systems Glossary, Internet references).

Finally an explanation of the children’s ability to read in groups above their individual capabilities could be found in the science of Emergence. Emergence is commonly found in nature and is the appearance of properties that are not evident in the parts of a system. Nebula’s, flowers, cells, markets all show emergent behaviour. The definition is: ‘System properties that are not evident from those of the parts. A higher level phenomenon that cannot be reduced to that of the simpler constituents and needs new concepts to be introduced. This property is neither simply an aggregate one, nor epiphenomenal, but often exhibits 'downward causation'. Modelling emergent dynamical hierarchies is central to future complexity research’ (Complex Systems Glossary, Internet references).

These subjects are in their infancy. However, they have the potential to explain not just how learning happens, but why it happens the way it does.

The future of people?

Schools are designed to produce children who will:
-please their parents (because they send the children to school)
-please the government (because they pay for the school)

Schools are not designed for:
-employers (because they don't pay schools)
-peers (because who cares what peers think? they dont count)

20 or more years later, parents would be gone, the government changed 5 times, the employers - starnge new jobs. The peers would be only ones around, for whose desires we do not design schools.

From neuroscience:

- threat perception stops the prefrontal cortex from rational thought. a teacher hovering around produces threat perception, as do examinations

- suppression of emotion also stops the prefrontal cortex, this is what happens when we 'engineer' behaviour.

creative thought and imagination activate when there is no threat perception, no emotion suppression, peer interaction and imaginative problems.

From history:

- the education system is designed to produce identical clerks to run an empire that does not exist and a manufacturing industry that has gone away.

In other words, we are doing everything - exactly wrong.

The curriculum should be taken from the nature of the Universe and our purpose, if any. The universe has a scale from around zero to the 30th power of 10 as far as I can guess. Time goes from the big bang to plus infinity as far as we know. If we examine each power of ten over each epoch of time, will get a curriculum.

Then we can use a combination of the findings of neurosciece and peer expectations to build an education that will produce people who cannot run empires, fight wars, kill animals, hit other people - but are quite intersting, fun to be with and get along well with each other.

My School on Saturday

My school is shaped like a hexagon. I know that’s a big word, but it’s simple. Really. A hexagon has six sides. My school is a hexagon because it has six sides. Do you know why? Well, because six carbon atoms can make a hexagon. When carbon atoms join up they do this with bonds. Like tiny elastic strings that join them. One string is called a single bond and two strings are called a double bond. Double bonds are stronger than single bonds, of course. When six carbon atoms make a hexagon, they use one single bond, then a double bond, then a single and so on. That makes the hexagon stronger. And then, you can fix a hydrogen atom to each carbon atom, at all the corners of the hexagon, and you get a molecule called Benzene. Benzene smells rather nice and it burns like petrol, so you have to be very careful with it.

The benzene ring.

Benzene is very important. It’s because of Benzene that we have life on Earth. Benzene rings can join up together to make really big molecules. That’s what our bodies are made of. Trees, animals, food, plastics are all made of benzene rings. Everyone knows this of course. I learnt this when I was very little and now I look for more complicated things because I am much older. I am nine, and a half.

My school is shaped to look like a Benzene ring from the air. There are six circular domes connected by corridors, double corridors for the double bonds and single corridors for the single bonds. The domes are called C1 to C6. Connected to each dome there is another small corridor leading to six smaller circular rooms called H1 to H6.

We can do what we like in my school. First, we decide what we want to know and how to know it. Sometime we choose study. This means you have to listen to a teacher and write down what she says. Most of the time we learn – by getting together with our friends and surfing and searching the Cloud. I don’t like studying much because it makes me feel sleepy.

My school

On Saturday, Pa and Mum and I had a big breakfast, but things were not good after that. Pa got really annoyed with mum and threw his coffee on the ground. They were arguing and made me go up to my room. I didn’t want to so I stood near the door until Pa said, ‘Jini, get out’ so loudly that I started to cry and ran upstairs. I knew then he was going to hit mum and I heard her sobbing and falling.

I tried not to listen but they were really loud, so I put on my earplugs and told Prime that I was not happy. Prime said to take it near the door so it could listen too. Pa was saying things I couldn’t understand and he was kicking and slapping my mum.

‘Go to school, Jini’, said Prime.

‘But its Saturday’

‘GO TO SCHOOL’, Prime said, loudly.

I put Prime in its silicone case, hung it around my neck and slipped out of the back door. It took twenty minutes of running to reach school and it was all closed. Prime connected with school and everything came on at once. I could not see very well because I was crying. Not a lot, you know. Just a bit.

All the walls in my school are of glass and I ran into H4 because I saw Granny Diane come on sleepily on the wall. She is my best friend, although she was not looking her best, early morning in her country, Belgium, four and a half hours behind Indian time.

‘Good morning, Diane, why are you here on Saturday?’, I asked.

‘Your Prime called me Jini, are you OK?’

Diane has a soft voice and it makes me feel very comfortable so we sat and talked for a long time. Diane told me about people and relationships and how not to get worried about things. She was also typing all the time, I could tell, although she pretended not to.

I ended up having a really good time that morning because two kids from Malaga came on the side screen and we played with virtual Lego for a while. It was a bit slow because we had to use Google Voice Translate to talk – they speak only Spanish in Malaga, you know. Then Mr. Maskall from Australia came on looking very sleepy because it was past his bedtime and told me about the time we found life on Titan and how excited everyone was.

At four, Prime said I should go home, so I went and school locked itself up.

My parents were out and Prime said they had gone to a counsellor and would be back in the evening. I propped Prime up on the lawn and played virtual tennis with it until I was really tired. Then we went in and Played SimCity for a while. You know, a city runs really well if you adjust the demand-supply curves properly.

Monday is curriculum day. Oh, I know it’s another big word but we have to do it. Curriculum is about what we have to learn. Every Monday we decide what we want to learn that week. We look for BIG questions on the Cloud and also ask the Granny Cloud of course. Then we make up a plan and take it to Mrs Steel. She then makes a plan for us. Prime said Sumeeta is online and I connected.

‘I don’t have any time, Jini’, said Sumeeta. She always says that and then talks for an hour. She told me about how seasonal fruits have the right vitamins for us, but the question is why is it that way? Really, do they know what we need? That’s a cool question I thought. Prime said it will remember that question for Monday.

‘I hope they don’t ask all this in the exam’, I said to Prime.

‘Exams are only to find out if you know how to learn something’, said Prime

‘Of course I know how to learn things, stupid!’

‘Well the school needs to know that’, said Prime in a matter of fact way. I put Prime upside down and it went to sleep.

Mum and Pa came back at six. I was a bit anxious but it was OK. Pa said he was sorry about what happened in the morning and he will try not to be that way again

I know! I know what happened. Their Primes must have listened in the morning too. And then talked to my Prime. And they must have talked to Diane, that’s why she was up so early and why she was text chatting while talking to me. She must have organised the counselling.

I woke Prime up and asked about counselling. Prime said the counsellors try to calm people down when they are angry and sometimes use medicines. They used to do this to children a long time ago, when they thought children who don’t pay attention have some disease. But someone found out that it is adults who make children behave that way and invented medicines to treat them, the adults. Lucky us!

Pa had got himself a very big whiskey and was sitting watching 3V in the living room. Mum looked quite cheerful and was playing with her Prime. I sat down next to Pa, his stomach is like a trampoline, very nice.

‘I am having a bad time in office’, said Pa, ‘the quantum entanglement storage device isn’t storing half as much data as it should, I can’t even get a thousand terabytes in a square micron’

I had heard him complain about this before.

‘I am going to ask Serge on Monday, maybe he will have an idea’. I said.

‘Who is Serge?’, asked Pa

‘He is very old, more than 110 years, but he says he knows a bit about quantum entanglement. He is there on Mondays on the Granny Cloud’

Pa sat up and stared at me, ‘Do you mean Serge Haroche?’

‘He won the Nobel Prize!’

‘Yes, I think that’s him’, I said, yawning.

Pa was silent for a while. Then he got up and went to the kitchen sink and poured his whiskey out. Then he came back and we talked about collapsing waves of probability. Even mum didn’t interrupt.

That night I dreamt of an old man with a funny German name. He put a cat into a box with some poison that may or may not work, and closed the lid. He said, as long as the box remained closed, the cat was alive and dead at the same time. As soon as you open the box, it would be either alive or dead.

It’s funny what old people say.

A Tablet to grow up with

What if every child were to get a tablet computer at age 6? And what if the tablet is such that it grows up with the child and is still useful at age 100? What sort of a tablet would we need?

Here is a 2012 fantasy tour of the tablet that could be....

Its called 'The Prime'

Abu got his Prime on his sixth birthday. It was in a sleek and shiny, wine coloured box next to his pillow when he woke up. Abu thought he should hug his mother, but considering her mood at six in the morning, he decided not to. Instead, he opened the box.

A soft and very organic silicone clamshell slipped out of the box. The prime nestled inside it. Abu opened the paper thin cover, like the cover of a new book. A tiny light blinked red, yellow and then blue on the top right corner of the very thin, half a millimetre, bezel around dark screen.

'I am your Prime, Abu', said the Prime and Abu nearly dropped it although the five inch screen was a perfect fit for his small hand. 'Do you want to give me a name?', said the Prime.

'Boomba', said Abu, now quite enjoying himself. His Prime giggled and said, 'OK, Abu'

In the next fifteen minutes, Boomba took a picture of Abu's face, his fingerprint, had him recite a poem to get his voice pattern, had him stand on itself to measure his weight. The black screen was now lit up with a pale blue light and a lovely abstract, fractal background. Abu found out that he could turn it off by saying 'Get dark!' and turn it on by picking it up, staring at it, or by saying 'Boomba!'

Boomba found a WiFi signal, the date, time, its location, the ambient temperature and humidity from the Cloud and its sensors. Then it 'dressed itself' as it put it. Its quad core processor took less than ten seconds to do that. Now Boomba had a face, somewhat like that of a large mobile phone. Abu plugged its tiny wireless charger into a power socket, even though he was not supposed to touch any power sockets. Boomba told Abu it would charge upto 25 feet away from the socket, so he could put it next to his bed.

The Prime was expensive, but Boomba's mother got it for free. The price of the Prime and unlimited lifelong 20 Mbps wireless broadband were paid for by the government, for every child, from a 1% tax on cigarettes, alcohol and cosmetics.

Abu carried his Prime everywhere. In school he found out that you could join Primes together to make bigger screens. In their Self Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs), Abu and three of his friends would take two Primes out of their silicone sleeves and put two Primes side by side until they clicked together. Then they would put two more below these two to make a ten inch screen. The bezels were so thin, they could barely make out the edges dividing the screens. Once, the entire group put all their Primes together to make a 60 inch screen and watched a TED talk. The speaker was nearly life size!

The tiny camera on the Prime could be slipped out of the Prime and put back facing the front or back of the tablet. So, Abu would have the camera face him when he was Skyping his friends or mediators. But he would turn the camera the other way when he wanted to take pictures or videos.

In Norway, a 10 year old had tied his Prime to his head with the camera pointed outwards. Abu was online with him over Skype. Then he got on a bicycle and Abu guided him to ride around his village and show him everything. It was different from India, Abu decided, but not that different. That evening he asked Boomba to tell him about the history of Norway and India. So different, and yet, so same.

Abu was too young to realise that his Prime would turn the camera and microphone on every 5 seconds for a quarter of a second so that it could make patterns from the pictures and sounds to figure out what Abu's life was like. Once when Abu was sneezing, Boomba asked him to put his finger of the thermal sensor and told his mother that he was about to get a fever. Boomba would later also tell Abu's parents that his height and weight were increasing normally and that his hand-eye coordination was fine. Boomba also reported that Abu's hearing was really good and that his reading comprehension was a level above what it should be for his age.

Abu's sister Julie was 17 and her Prime, called Amy, had been with her for the last 11 years. Amy was a bit battered from use but Julie had got the screen, camera and battery changed several times, so it really was like a new Prime. Amy knew Julie more than anyone else in the world. It knew her friends, her interests, her abilities, her looks, her moods, her relationships and her sorrows. Julie could not imagine a life without her Amy.

Sometimes, Amy would join with Boomba over the WiFi and exchange notes, or they would look for global patterns of child behaviour with millions of other Primes on the Cloud.

In school, the children would research topics in groups of four with their Primes joined together into 10 inch screens. Groups would talk to other groups, sometimes in other places in the world and discuss what they had found. During examinations, the Primes would help their owners work out the best answers and also check the childrens cognitive, creative and imaginative abilities.

Boomba had, in the meanwhile, taught Abu to play the guitar and sing. They often played a tune together and Abu's mother thought that was really good.

Sometimes, at night, Boomba would call an eMediator from the Granny Cloud to read out fairy tales to Abu until he fell asleep. Then it would turn the lights out and keep an eye on the room door until morning. When Abu walked to the bus stop to go to school, Boomba rattled happily in his pocket. Once, when Abu tripped on the pavement and fell, Boomba had screamed out of his pocket, 'This child needs your help, please, this child needs your help'.

Boomba grew with Abu, changing his stories, his games, his music, his research habits. It monitored Abu's learning, his healthcare parameters, his learning and thinking styles, his intelligences. Boomba suggested solutions when it detected problems – it used the best resources from the Cloud to do so. It even changed its own voice to match his baritone. When, at 13 a thin moustache began to grow on Abu's upper lip, Boomba showed him what it looked like and what he might look like at 40!

Then they laughed a lot, together.

Well, thats it, dear reader, about the tablet to grow up with. Except for the last bit. When, after a happy and productive life, Abu, now 93, fell into a quiet coma and died, Boomba did not make a sound. It waited for a while, as Abu's fingers grew cold....then it deleted its drives on the Cloud....and switched off.

A Self-Organised Assessment Method (SOAM)

A few year ago, I was a bit curious about how well learners can evaluate each other. I designed a small experiment to find out. It goes like this:

1. Take a group of learners, say 15 in number, in a classroom.
2. Give everybody 15 sheets of paper and ask them to write their names on the top right corner of every sheet.
3. Now, ask everyone to write down a question about something they have recently learned, been taught or discussed. It should be from whatever course you are conducting. The question should be such that the person making it should be confident of answering. Also questions should be such that each can be answered in two minutes or less.
4. Now collect all the sheets with the questions. If there are questions that are very similar to each other, then ask one of the authors to change his or her question.
5. You can now construct a question paper with 15 questions. Make 15 copies of this question paper.
6. Distribute the question paper and start a 30 minutes examination. Each learner has to write the answer to each of the 15 questions on a separate sheet of paper. On top of each answer sheet, they should write 'Answer to Q no. x' etc. Each person must answer all the questions except the one they made. So each person has 14 questions to answer on 14 sheets of paper.
7. After the time is over, collect all the answer sheets and put all the answers to question 1 together, all the answers to question 2 together, and so on. At the end, you would have 15 piles of 14 sheets each.
8. Distribute all the answers to question 1 to the author of that question, answers to question 2 to the author of that quesiton and so on.
9. Ask each learner to give marks out of 10 for each answer sheet for the question authored by him/her.
10. After all the answer sheets have been graded, take them back and re-group them by the name of each learner. So, now you have 15 piles of 14 sheets each, for each learner.
11. Total the marks for each learner and convert to a percent score. You now have a list of scores.

In other words, you have conducted an examination without making a question paper and without having to mark a pile of answer books.

I tried this for three years in the course I teach on Educational Technology for M.Ed. Students, each time usually after the first two weeks. There is an uncanny correlation between the scores and the scores at the end of the one year course. I haven't yet done all the stats and written it all up as a paper but I will.

In the meanwhile, I thought you might like to try....

Out flew the Web and floated wide, the mirror cracked from side to side

Academics have been seriously discussing 'modern' issues with education. Open Learning, Distance Education, Autonomous Learning, Lifelong Learning, Collaborative Learning etc.

While we were in the middle of these serious deliberations, the carpet was slowly sliding from under our feet. We did not have to make those important things happen. They had all happened by themselves. Because of three developments in technology: the Internet, WiFi and Tablets.

Wherever these three things are available, people do open, distance, autonomous, collaborative lifelong learning. Provided they can search, read, understand and form beliefs from information.

And where these technologies are not available, they will be, in just a few years.

We should now change our agenda and figure out what the next big issues are in education. We have to figure out how to dematerialise our institutions and convert the existing brick and mortar into museums of education where future generations will come and say, 'Oh, so that's how they used to educate people!'

'The used to teach children to do arithmetic in their heads!', they would marvel.

Just as we look back at our past, in vast palaces that are now museums, and say, 'They used to cut off huge blocks of ice from the glaciers in the mountains, wrap them in straw, and carry them with hundreds of animals and men into the hot plains - just so the emperor could have an ice cube in his drink'

Getting a visa for Argentina

I have been to Argentina 3 times between 2005 and 2010. The first two times I got the visa from Delhi and it was very straight forward the first time. The second time was not too bad, just seven trips to the consulate and one to a bank in Connaught Place. The third time I got the visa from London and it involved a trip to London from Newcastle and took the whole day.

In 2011, the University of Buenos Aires invited me and I applied for the visa from New York. Nine hours of bus rides later, the visa was refused because speaking at a conference on a tourist visa is not allowed, I was told. Mind you the previous three times this was not the case, as I was speaking at conferences each time This was the first time I had been refused a visa from any country.

This year, 2012, I was invited again. Back to New York on a nine hour to and fro train ride. Visa refused, they need more paperwork.

 ‘Why are you attending a conference?’

‘I am not, the conference is being organised because I am there’

(serious suspicious frown)

‘OK you will get your visa in three days’

By the time I reached Boston, there was a voice mail. My visa has been denied. More paperwork is needed. You cannot attend a conference on a tourist visa.

I was to leave for Benin, (having got a tourist visa by post for speaking at a conference!) shortly and needed my passport, so I went back to New York the next day, seven hours of to and fro train rides. I had my passport back.

Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I attended to the paperwork. Invitations have to be in original, signed by a notary and the notary’s signature verified by a county clerk, whatever that means. Inviting organisations have to prove that they are genuine. Letters, emails and phone calls flowed like rivers. My dreams were full of notary publics being minutely examined by county clerks in cowboy hats.

I had to go to England for a conference. I called the Argentine consulate to explain that I had just one day on which I could return to New York to reapply for the visa with all its intricate paperwork.

‘No problem they said, we will let you know when we have everything and you will get the visa the same day’

A week passed. I heard that all the paperwork had now been completed. I emailed the consulate to ask if I should come to New York. No reply. I emailed again. No reply. And again, no reply.

The day after returning to the US from England, I left on the 4 hour journey to New York from Boston. The now familiar consulate was crowded with people being refused visas. I had my passport and the filled in form, since all other papers had been sent directly to the consulate. After a half hour wait a man appeared.

‘This is an incomplete application, you have no papers and anyway you can’t attend a conference on a tourist visa’

‘This is a reapplication, sir, all the papers are with you already’

‘You had applied before!!’ (deep suspicion)

‘The consul knows all about it’

‘Wait’

Another half an hour, the man reappeared to say ‘I am working on it, don’t worry’

Another half an hour.

‘All your papers are In order’, he said accusingly.

‘Please collect your visa after two working days’

‘I am supposed to leave tomorrow! The consul knows this for a month’

‘This is a problem, wait’

Half an hour.

‘You have to pay $100’, I pulled out my purse.

‘We do not take cash, cards or cheques, only money orders’

I rushed off on a two mile walk to the post office and got a money order. Another two miles later, I was back.

‘Come back at 4 O’clock to collect your visa’

I got down to some serious drinking while explaining self organised learning to a pub full of driniking security guards. Hours passed. I marched purposefully, if a little unsteadily, holding Amartya Sen's 'The Idea of Justice' like a shield in front of me.

At four, a beaming gentleman appeared with my passport.

‘Your visa’, he said, ‘enjoy Argentina’