Archive for the 'education' Tag

The Case for Shared Computing

My elementary school’s computer lab probably had 50 computers, where we frequently played Oregon Trail and made flashy presentations in HyperStudio. My middle school had a lab of iMacs and rolling carts full of brand new iBooks. My high school had hundreds of PCs available for use in computer labs, classrooms, and even in the hallways. Needless to say, as I grew up, I always had individual access to computers and never needed to share.

In most of the world, this isn’t the norm.

Due to the fact that computers cost money, resource-constrained schools simply cannot afford to provide kids with access to one computer each. One approach to this issue is that of Nicholas Negroponte, which is to reduce the cost of computers to the point that One Laptop per Child is a feasible ideal.

Unfortunately, even if Negroponte achieves his goal of producing laptops at $100 each (they’re $200 today), maintenance expenses will bring the real cost of deploying these machines to over $250 per year. In India, where the government spends under $100 per student per year, deploying such technology is obviously an impossibility given these budget constraints.

Another approach is to split a single computer for simultaneous use by multiple people. Microsoft Research India has done much work in this field, through projects such as MultiPoint and Split-Screen — these projects connect multiple input devices to a single computer and thus allow people to have individual access to the machine, allowing for shared computing.

I’m currently working on a project for the Computing for the Developing World capstone course at UW with three other friends to explore the use of shared computing via multiple numeric keypads in improving primary education. Called MultiMath, our software provides arithmetic drills to four students at once, allowing for shared computer use, individualized attention, and adaptive questioning in competitive and collaborative environments.

This week, we are in Bangalore, running preliminary field tests at government schools in the area. We’ve learned a lot, but I’ll save that for another post.

MultiMath will be presented as a demo at ICTD 2009 in Doha, Qatar.
Interested in similar projects at UW? Check out Change.

March 26, 2009 | no comments | tags: computerscience, education, ictd, india, multimath, research, sharedcomputing

How to Analyze Public Speakers

During my senior year of high school, I attended a weekly seminar on Media, Politics, and Public Speaking. Every week, we would have a politician from the Portland area, such as Brad Avakian or David Wu, speak to us for the first half of class. Not only did these interactions serve as great exposure to local politics, but our instructors used the time to help us become more media savvy by asking us to reflect upon and analyze what we heard after the speaker had left.

One of the tools we were given for analysis was a worksheet written by Aloha High School teaching legend James Barlow. It provides four pages detailing various categories of argumentation that a speaker might use to persuade his audience, such as “folksy appeal” or “tabloid thinking”. I found that using it just a few times really helped me to see through these tactics, which are ubiquitously used by public speakers, and also enabled me to better challenge their arguments.

I came across the document recently while sorting through some old papers, and thought that the world might benefit from its presence on the internet. All of the definitions don’t seem entirely accurate, but the content is all perfectly valid. There’s a pdf of all four pages available here, and a transcribed version is below the fold.

July 15, 2008 | 1 comment | tags: education, media, politics, speaking