Breaking education’s taboos

If the incitement of debate on controversial topics was the goal of the Edu Tech conference taking place in Brisbane this week, then its organisers must have been thrilled with the presentation of MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. Addressing the conference via a video link, Negroponte hit on a range of taboos including the detrimental effect he believes private education has on public schools, the need to scrap age segregation in education and even the concept of nationalism, which he described as a “disease”. Negroponte, who also established the One Laptop Per Child initiative for students in poor and developing countries, also took aim at traditional teaching modalities which he said were failing to inspire children to want to learn. Using the example of children who were being taught computer programming in the early 1980s, Negroponte said those who took part in the classes were found to be better spellers than their peers who were not part of the course. The reason, he told delegates, was because the central element required to be successful in programming was to be able to identify mistakes and problem solve in order to “de-bug”. “I was always a terrible speller so if I ever got a B or even a C grade in an assessment task I was so happy with the words I had spelled correctly that I didn’t care about the ones I had got wrong,” he said. “This is because that is what the system rewards. But debugging is effectively learning about learning. “These kids had been learning to discuss their mistakes, to track down where they went wrong and correct their errors.” Negroponte argued that unlike television, the educational potential of computers was being effectively mined. The era of globalisation that the connectivity computers were ushering in would continue to rapidly transform the face of learning he said. The result, he said would soon demonstrate not only the need to rid the world of national boundaries that hampered the opportunities of children born in certain countries but also breakdown other traditional elements of teaching such as the age segregation of students. “Connectivity is a human right – because it is the end of isolation,” Negroponte argued. “It is like the difference between fried eggs and omelettes. Where once we had very clear established boundaries of yolks and egg-whites, we now have, and we will continue to see a lot more blurring and blending. “This is a good thing.”