>> Lee Dirks: Hello. My name is Lee Dirks. I'm the director for education and
scholarly communications here in MSR. I'd like to welcome you to this instance of the
speaker series, MSR speaker series, where we're very proud to welcome Dr. Miguel
Nussbaum.
He concedes from the Catholic University of Chile, and he will be here to speak about 15
years of his experience in research in classroom technology uses and applications.
Miguel has a long and proud history of working with Microsoft with various groups, with
MSR specifically, also with Partners in Learning over the last six or seven years as well
as the last one to two years with the Unlimited Potential group.
So I think his work is very influential and very impactful, and we are continuing to work
with him and engage with him moving forward. He's actually joined in partnership with
the Games for Learning Institute that we announced last year.
So I think his bio was in the actual talk. I wanted to add the Microsoft-specific bits there.
But I will turn it over to Miguel to begin his talk.
And one other word of introduction, Miguel said we have more than enough time I think
for his talk. We have an hour and a half allocated. He said he would be very happy to
take questions from the audience during his talk. So if you feel so inclined, don't want
until the end; definitely interrupt him and ask questions. Right? All right.
Dr. Nussbaum.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Thanks, Lee. I'm really honored to be here. Thanks, Lee, and
[inaudible] for inviting me. So let's start.
So I said it's an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
The first thing we have to see is what's our 21st century student, what does it look like.
He's hyperconnected, and Time mentioned it a couple of years ago. And that's not only
happening in the U.S. and in developed countries, you have to think that I'm working in
Chile and my main aim is the underdeveloped countries because everybody looks where
money is and I look where it don't -- where the money doesn't is. And I was [inaudible]
so very connected.
In Chile there are more phones than people at this time. And if you go to very poor
schools, at least one-third of our students in the poor schools do have a cellular phone.
New codes. This is very nice if you haven't seen it before. It's worth looking to it. My
summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before we used to go to New York to
see my brother and his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New
York. It's a great place.
And that's real. It happens. Schools doesn't address it, but still real.
The multiprocess, the can do a lot of stuff simultaneously.
They are visual. If you ask a teenager about a concept, he's not going to look to
Wikipedia or Google; mainly what he's going to go is to YouTube and ask [inaudible]
concept.
And that has enormous implications in knowledge construction because at least my
generation was based on written symbols and my knowledge construction was on
knowledge symbols, on written symbols. But this generation is building now knowledge
on images. And this makes a complete difference.
And they're not only visual, they're also realtime. The phenomena of World of Warcraft
is something we cannot forget. And they're not only interactive, they're interactive in
their bodies. The [inaudible] of Nintendo and [inaudible] is really making a difference
because our interaction won't be anymore about our brain; the interaction will be our
whole body.
Meanwhile the school is still the same. So in 1996 when my daughter was in fifth grade I
said something has to be done. And I applied to a grant of a Chile government saying I
want to bring games into the classroom. And at that time I used the Game Boy of
Nintendo. It was a very cheap platform. The basic platform cost $37 at that time. The
cartridge cost like $10 each. So we did our own cartridge and our software.
And what we wanted to do is to bring technology inside the classroom. We wanted to
change the classroom. So we put the Nintendos inside the [inaudible] and give each child
a machine so the children could work independently and interactively all at their own
pace, in a sense that they were not only working interactively at their own pace but also
with games.
We really developed games off the ones that were at this time common. In this case they
have to sort numbers, and there was a magician that had to take the numbers in the
correct order and there were antagonists and things like that.
And here's another game where this is a temple, a Greek temple and he has to go through
a different antagonist. This is a monster or whatever. And then he has to find out if the
temple -- this is sombrero with an S and he has to find if it's right or wrong and if it's right
become an angel and whatever.
So games like that, games that were at that time. But the difference was these were really
educational games.
What happened was that once we really got, we work with six schools with at least 500
kids, more than 500 kids. There's a very nice paper in Computer Science Education
about this experience. If somebody's interested I can send it to you. And we get
statistical significant results and also qualitative important results.
But the Ministry for Education say in 1998 games in the classroom? No way.
So then came 2007. And in 2007 basically what happened is that we don't have anymore
this classroom but we have the same classroom. And the only difference is that these
kids now have a computer in front of them. And this is even worse. Because if the kids
were not taking attention to the teacher before, they're taking less attention now because
now they're surfing the Internet, if there is Internet available.
And if there's no Internet available, there's so much fun doing anything else than listening
to the teacher on a computer. But definitely they are having less attention than before.
So the situation isn't better; it's gotten worse.
So the point is what can we do with this technology. And this technology has also come
to Latin America and the whole world. In Uruguay they have bought 180,000 machines.
Peru bought 50 machines, Chile's buying machines. Everybody's buying machines. But
the point is what are we going to do with these machines.
And my point of view is that we really have to transform the classroom experience. We
have to transform what the teacher is doing. Today we have a teacher that's inundating
with knowledge, which is a commodity, to passive students. And what we have to do is
to really make the students work and be the students the first person in the classroom.
And that's what we did at the beginning of 2001. When the first pocket PCs appears with
wi-fi that was 2001. What we did was collective work in small groups inside the
classroom. And basically what we wanted was to use the curricula as a Trojan horse for
the development of social and communication abilities and have the teachers really for
what they're really good for; that this mediate those students that really need it and define
the objectives of the classroom as you see here in the last part of the movie.
When you have collaborative 1:1, what means collaborative 1:1? One machine one child,
and also collaborative. First thing is that the groups we also work with are small groups
of three. What we have seen and we have studied empirically is that when you have
group of students just a conversation; when you have a group of three a momentum
appears in the conversation and the children have to learn to converge. When you have
four or more, there are too many viewpoints and what happens that those students that are
socially capable take control of the group and those that are less capable just are -- don't
do anything. So three has shown to be the best size of group.
Now, what we also do is make them work randomly. That means that every time the
groups are formed, these groups are formed randomly in such a way that the students
have to learn to work with kids that know more or less than them and kids they like or
dislike.
I have a nice anecdote in Wolverhampton in the U.K. where a well-known racist boy
came to the teacher and said I'm not going to work with this Pakistani girl, you know that
very well. And the teacher said there's nothing I can do, you know how the groups are
formed, you know that your ID's already in the machine and you have to work with her.
That's it.
So the boy knew the rules, came back and worked with the girl. He didn't like the idea,
but he did it. And when the activity finished, he came again to the teacher and said, you
know, it wasn't so bad to work with that girl. And that makes a hell of difference.
So what you have here basically are two networks: one is the social networks where the
students look to them face to face, where the students interchange ideas, where the
students really work out their problem; and the technological network which has to be as
ubiquitous as possible, as seamless as possible in such a way that the technology just
supports the social network.
And the key element is the social network, and the technological network is just the
support for the social network.
Why collaborative 1:1? First, it's space where all actors participate. What you see here is
a movie of children at the end of first school year; that means children which are six- or
seven-year-olds. Interesting is that girl that looks to the camera but she doesn't care.
She's so involved in what she's doing.
And what she's doing, she's discussing about a math problem. So she's not talking about
TV or Michael Jackson; she's talking about math. And she's completely involved. And
all of them are involved. And all of them are involved because basically the software is
done in such a way that there are interdependence, there are mutual support and
accountability. Everybody's responsible of their work.
Building a communication space. This is very nice. Look to this girl. She's verbalizing
something and the others don't get the point so she uses her machine to show what she
wanted to stress. And then look what happens: the other two peers look to their
machines to compare what she had with what they had.
So here you see clearly how the technological network supports the social network. The
learning occurs at the social network, but the technological network really supports that
learning.
We ported this software to XP machines here you have in the classmates. And what
happens with netbooks is that they're not seamless. They're not as ubiquitous as the
pocket PCs are. Look what happened here. This girl to see what the other girl has has to
do something which is really not nice.
What you want is that the technological network really supports in a seamless way the
social network, and this is not the case. A very nice machine is the new tablet of the
classmate -- I don't know if you've seen it -- which is like a big pocket PC. And for me
that's the best really platform I've seen for this type of work.
Here once again you have the technological network, which is formed by a robot, there's
three pocket PCs and the wireless network. And what the robot basically is doing is
moving in such a way that the girls have to draw a graph of distance versus time or
velocity versus time.
And you saw in the movie how the technological networks supports the social network.
Once the activity finishes, then they began to discuss in such a way that they really have
to come out with a common answer in the way the software is built.
Building a negotiation space. Once again you see the children. These are the same
children, the first grade, how interconnected, how coordinated they are. And they have to
negotiate the answers. Look how she's really dealing with the other pieces of knowledge.
Because the pieces are distributed between different machines.
And there's of course immersion, they really like what they're doing.
Building a coordination space. This is very nice. This girl loses her focus of attention,
now comes this girl and says, hey, wait a minute, if you don't work, I cannot proceed so
please return and do your work. And she comes back. These are like gears that are
interconnected. If one gear stops, the other one pushes it.
So the software makes the group really coordinate. And in the back you see the teacher
that's helping a group that needs it at that time.
The teacher. The teacher here you see is looking to a machine and looking to a group of
students. The question the teacher makes herself is who should I help, how can I know
who can I help.
And what you have to do is to really support the teacher. If you want the teachers
[inaudible], you have to give the teacher the corresponding tool.
And what you have here is a teacher's machine. In the vertical axis you have the different
groups. This is group 1, 2, and 3. And here you have the different activities. And what
you can see here through the color-coded, green means it's okay; yellow, they made one
mistake; red, two or more mistakes.
So you see here clearly that this group is not working where group No. 2 is fine.
However, in Question No. 7, nobody did it right. Not only two, but everybody. So
there's a problem with the topic of Question No. 7 that this teacher should address at that
time.
So let's look to real data. I like this data very much. This is real data. You see here that
in question in the group No. 12, if I'm not wrong, what happens is that they have right,
one mistake right and they're working in the first work, in the first activity.
So what happens, they are very slow, but not only they are slow but also they made a
mistake. So definitely the teacher should address this group.
On the other side, the last group is also interesting because what you see here, that the
number of greens and red are the same and there's a lot of yellows. So basically they're
working randomly and they're very fast. So you see that this group is really not working,
they're just guessing. And this group should also be addressed.
So this information is online. It's realtime, sorry, not online. This information is
realtime. The teacher can see at every instant how the different groups are doing and
how the different subjects are doing.
For example, look to these three questions. These three questions have some problems.
They're not so bad, but at least at the end the teacher should address these topics because
there are some kids that have problems with this.
So this information really is available at any moment for the teacher and can help the
teacher to mediate the corresponding groups and all the classroom for the topics.
Also this information can be uploaded to the Internet in such a way that everybody that
has the corresponding privileges can really see what happened with the different activities
and different topics that going on in the school.
We are working in Chile. We want in 19- -- in 2004 the prize of innovation in the
location of the organization of American states. We have a project in Argentina which
will sponsor for partners the learning of Microsoft. We are in Brazil. We just started a
project in Guatemala. It's not just; we had four schools in Guatemala, and last week the
government accepted to make a project of 88 schools in Guatemala, which is now our
biggest deployment.
And we did a project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education with Stanford
Research Institute in three schools in San Francisco for teaching fractions. And what's
very nice that two weeks ago we got the best conference award for this work.
And what I'm most proud is the work in Wolverhampton in England where we work with
the University of Bristol and the Guardian of London in the Tuesday educational
magazine used us -- showed our experience and they said John Galloway tests out an
idea that comes from South America. Not Chile, just South America. But that's fine.
South America teaching the British how to make education.
When I began my talk -- any questions up to now? I'm quite fast, so -- so let's leave it at
the end. Yes. Yes.
>>: I have a question [inaudible] changing dynamics in the classroom, but just from the
example that I saw, it seemed like the teacher is very much in control [inaudible]
activities that students are going to be like working on, right, so we have like a
[inaudible] activities [inaudible] activities that each group has to follow, is it right or
wrong or somewhere in between?
And I don't know. When I start to think more in terms of mobile technologies in
learning, I see that you can give more control to the students. I see great opportunity for
students to bring their lives into the classroom and vice versa in a way. So I'm not sure
this is something that's best in their -- how you think about [inaudible].
>> Miguel Nussbaum: I completely agree with you that still it's very classroom oriented.
And it's classroom oriented in the sense of changing the classroom but still being inside
the classroom and still following a curricula.
We have had, and I mention at the end, a lot of -- our biggest problem are the teachers.
[inaudible], how you say [inaudible]? Yeah. That is the teacher.
Now, if you make -- you have to go small steps. And this is a huge step. And what you
are interesting is a much bigger step. So if you go to the next step, they wouldn't even
understand what you want and they wouldn't do it. That's my impression.
This step is very big. And what we're doing in some sense, trying to go a little back.
Because bringing the netbook into the classroom is bringing a computer because a pocket
PC is not a computer. Teachers didn't like the pocket PC. Even I was going to show you
data in a couple of slides more that the pocket PC is the ideal platform. But the teachers
don't like it. They want computers.
So we have to go with the teachers if you really want to change the classroom.
For doing research, fine. I'm going to show what I'm doing with research. I'm really
doing very -- at the end going to show you really Alice in Wonderland. But that's far
away for the teacher. Far away.
But if you really want to go with the teachers, you have to do it in small steps. Yes.
>>: You said that the children have changed [inaudible] classroom to change. Do you
also want the curricula to change?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Oh, that's a great question. You shouldn't have addressed that.
Yeah. My dream is to change the curricula. I definitely think that we should -- that's -you asked it. You gave me the space to say it. I think it's ridiculous to teach logarithm in
schools. Why do we still teach logarithm in schools. Why do we teach to factorize
polynomial.
What we should teach is how to model. If you teach algebra, you should teach really
how to model and not how to solve. If everything can be found today -- find today in the
Internet. If you want to know how -- what's the factors of Q squared minus 1, just go to
the Internet if you don't know it.
What's interesting is what you can do with Q squared minus 1 and not how you solve it.
That's really useful. And there you also do a lot of abstraction.
So I personally would change completely the curricula. Completely. But I'm not -- but
that's too far away.
>>: [inaudible] a little bit. Like I think children should understand how things are
computed and even how [inaudible] they're not just users. I don't think it's -- I think
education should serve more ->> Miguel Nussbaum: Well, I ->>: -- educating users.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Well, that's exactly why I haven't addressed that topic. Because if
I open that topic, then nobody will hear me. So I just follow the curricula. But I change
the way it's going to be teached.
But I'm not saying -- if you ask me what I think about the curricula, that's my opinion.
Yeah? But that's not what I'm doing in my research. My research, I really follow
completely the curricula. Because I know if I would change the way they teach and then
change the curricula, I cannot find a school where I can really put my stuff inside. I
know that.
But my opinion is -- yes.
So the point is my interest is not really to solve the education for the rich countries; I'm
much more interested in the poor countries.
So a couple of years ago, I met Kentaro Toyama of Microsoft Research of Bangalore in a
conference. And I learned the MultiPoint SDK. And I was fascinated of it. Because
what happened is that I saw immediately that we could do the same stuff we were doing
with the pocket PCs but much, much cheaper on one PC and three mouse.
And since from -- and that's like three years ago I began working in multimice.
And what we discovered with multimouse is that especially for small children, and we
have worked with kindergarten, first and second grade, is that they work much better with
multimouse than with pocket PCs.
And what happens is that small children and pocket PCs have to build -- everybody have
to build different pieces of knowledge that are distributed in different machines in their
minds. And that's not so easy for small children, by when the formation is in one screen
and the focus of attention is one machine and not the different machines, makes life
much, much easier for the small children.
And what's also very interesting is that what happened to the teachers is the teacher liked
much more working with the multimice than working with the pocket PCs. Because the
teachers too going to help the groups and see what happened if the machine wasn't so
easy, was some way awkward.
But looking to one screen made life also simpler for the teacher.
I like this movie very, very much because what happens are the children uses both hands:
one hand for the mouth and the other hand for pointing on the screen. And on the other
side what happens is -- I don't know if you saw here yet -- here that this child is trying to
get the mouse of the other child because he just doesn't move the mouse. But he says no,
this is mine, it belongs to me.
What you lose really in the multimouse is one thing. When the children work face to face
they look to their eyes. And looking to their eyes is something very important for human
beings. This trust building. While they look to the screen, they don't look to the eyes.
And that's something we really miss. And that's it. That's the prize of it.
Things we do here [inaudible] is that the children own their own objects. So the blue
mouse has this object, the red mouse has these objects, and the yellow has these objects.
So only the blue one can select these objects. And what they have to do here is to sort
these objects in an ascending way. And here is clearly a coordination and
synchronization objective [inaudible].
And of course accountability, because every child is responsible of what's doing. And at
the end what happens is that not one child is right or one child is wrong. The group is
right or the group is wrong. Everybody's responsible.
Immersion is something very important; that really children like to go and work with this,
and also the teacher like it very much. Look really how we involve [inaudible] what
they're doing. And that happens not the first time, happens the whole year. And we've
been working a couple of years with this already.
As mentioned, Lee, we're working with unlimited potential.
So the next question was can we go even cheaper. And then comes the massive multiple
mice. And here is not one laptop per child, here it is one mouse per child. And what you
have here and we can work up to 40 kids now, every kid with this mouse. And what you
have here basically, the children owns their own space. And in that space they're
working their activity, they get their own feedback, and they can work at their own pace.
It's really working extremely nicely. And it's very, very cheap. Just one projector, 40
mouse, one PC. Less than $1,000. And transportable to any classroom. That's it.
So you see that here, the different working space, the addition here, the feedback, this is
wrong, this is right, this child is sleeping, is doing nothing, and here is the feedback for
the teachers and the whole classroom. What they did right, and if they did it wrong. So
you have both dimensions.
The next step is let's bring World of Warcraft into the classroom. World of Warcraft was
mentioned before, is a phenomena. And a phenomena that we cannot forgive -- we
cannot forget. Because what happens with World of Warcraft, that's a massive
multiplayer online game where motivation is key and really persistent quests and
interactivity and dilemmas you can play with.
So we asked ourself can we do something with quests that's realistic and interactive. And
what we did basically, said we don't want something massive. What we want is
something for the classroom. And we don't want it online. We want it presential, inside
the classroom. Looking the children face to face.
So it's a classroom multiplayer presential game. And what we did is here. You have ten
kids in this string. It's moving fast to show. And they're all -- we're here explaining what
the game is doing, but basically each child is moving as the same semantics -- the same
syntax as in World of Warcraft. Basically you have lives, you have energies, you have
characters, you have [inaudible] characters and whatever.
And what we achieved -- in the next one you can see better the game. We haven't gone
yet to the school. This is just finished. So you see the different children and a different
way of interrelating. I don't want to lose too much time, but the idea was to show that
we're also using the MultiPoint SDK because basically all the children are interactive at
the same time, ten children, and our aim is to have four projector, one to each wall, and
have the whole classroom interact.
But that's much, much more difficult because how do you really make quests where all
the children interact and the children can really coordinate. So it's not so easy. That's
why we just started with ten, to really understand how we can do this type of stuff.
And the last thing we're doing -- I notice this is Alice in Wonderland. It's augmented
reality and participatory simulation. Participatory simulation basically is simulation
where the character is the person, the person that does the simulation. It's not that
something happens on the screen. You are doing the simulation.
I don't know if you know the work of Vanessa Colella of MIT of the late '90s which was
very nice, was the simulation for virus and to use this tag where they really
interconnected. And there was a technical network, clearly technological network made
by these tags and the social network where the learning occurred.
Well, this same type of concept we're going to use now for teaching, for example, electric
charges.
So what we do here is first the children have to find out if they have the same electric
charge. So they approach each other and if the charge is different, it's a zoom out, they
like going away because they repel. While if the charge is the same, it's assuming
because the charges attract each other.
So the children have to find out what their charge is in correspondence to the other peers.
And then what we do is with augmented reality, it's a game where it's full of asteroids
inside the classroom and what they have to do is to move this asteroid following
Coulomb's law. And what you saw here is that this object is being repelled, is being
pushed by the student that approaches the object.
So the same thing has to happen with the asteroids. So in groups of three they have to
move around this asteroid to push it.
So what we're doing then is that the children in small groups interact with these virtual
objects in these this virtual world.
So what we're doing here is we go one step forward, and that's why I mention it like Alice
in Wonderland. We're not working anymore with the screen; we are working now with
the classroom and the virtual space. And the viewer for the virtual space [inaudible] what
we're using is the tablets of the classmate which has a camera and there's this big screen
that allows you really to look to the different classroom. Because you have the small
screen like a telephone is too small, but if you have a bigger screen to just look in the
classroom and see what's going on.
What we have to go one step further, we're still using these awful tags. Want to use
better tags. And we're working in the Games for Learning Institute and Columbia
University is still developing all the augmented reality platform.
What have we learned all these years? First if you go to schools or you talk to
governments, their decision is about technology, what technology are we going to buy to
put inside the classroom. And it's full of technology.
And what we have learned and have made an analysis of how do children react to the
different platforms we have used. We have used pocket PCs, netbooks and phones. We
also ported the same stuff to phones with wi-fi. Our dream was to use phones with
Bluetooth; however, we haven't really got to solve how to have a good, reliable and fast
network in Bluetooth. I think that's unsolvable.
We have been working with wi-fi. The bad news was that these phones were extremely
expensive, these machines cost $500. It was to i-mate SP5. But we just got new
machines which only cost $100, which makes things much more reliable. We are now
testing these new machines to see if the wi-fi is really reliable and you can build a
network for 40 children with using these machines.
So we asked the children three questions: whether you feel you shared more on the
pocket PCs, classmates, and phone. There were 33 students where we made the study.
And the children unanimously basically said we share more on the pocket PC.
In which platform you do -- you think you have a better work or you work faster. And
they said there was almost no difference, but in the pocket PC they felt that the quality of
work was better.
And finally what do you like more, traditional classroom or technology-based classroom.
There was almost no difference once again. However, the pocket PC still is better than
the other ones.
So if you ask the children, they preferred the pocket PCs over other platforms. But if you
ask the teachers or the principals, they hate the pocket PCs. Not the machine for the
classroom.
So they want netbooks. Netbooks, they love netbooks because they're cheap. It's like
[inaudible] computer.
So that's not the point. Technology is not the point. What you should really address is
what's the educational model you're going to use and what are the contents, what's the
curricula, what do you really want to teach.
And what you have to understand is that when you have a name of teaching a content or a
skill, not every pedagogical model really fits that skill. So you have to find which the
best way of teaching that corresponding skill.
Now, if you had a media technology, whatever media you think, you have to understand
that not every media really supports every pedagogical model. So at the end what you
have to do is to really understand what you want to teach and at the end select your media
and don't start with the media that's happening today where countries are buying
hundreds of thousands of machines and then asking what we can do with these machines.
Now, what we really want to do, as I mentioned at the beginning, we want to change the
19th century classroom and we want to have a classroom that supports our 21st century
student as we saw at the beginning.
We have today a paper-based classroom. If we could really change with the paper and
pencil from the 19th century to the 21st century classroom, that's fine. But we haven't
done it and we cannot do it.
So the question really is how can we really move from this quadrant to this other
quadrant. What worries me, for example, are interactive white boards. That's my
personal opinion.
Because I think what happens with interactive white boards is that we're moving from
this point to a point which is of course better than this one, but still we're teaching in the
same way. Because interactive white boards, it's interactive for the teacher but not for the
student. The teacher is now very interactive interacting with the Internet, interacting with
dynamic objects or whatever simulations might be. However, the students are completely
passive.
So my point is that we have to have active students. And the point is how can we really
get it.
And my proposition is that with activities like the one I shown. And in the netbooks what
you can do is not only do collaborative work but you can have a window connected to the
Internet where you can ask the students to really find information on the Internet or do
some simulation work. And the result of that work, really use it as input of the
collaborative work. For me this is really the 21st century.
And then comes what I say is the [inaudible] yes, teacher training. That's really the
biggest problem. And I would say what we have found, that immersion and coaching are
the key issues. Immersion where the teachers really go and learn to use this.
But you also have to coach them. You have to go inside the classroom and show how
you use this technology and be an active mirror in a sense that you really helped them to
improve what they're doing. And that's very expensive. To do coaching is very
expensive.
And on the other side, to change the way you teach requires time. And time is something
teachers don't have because the government doesn't pay for that time.
For example, Wolverhampton, what experience was extremely successful, what happened
is that the teachers arrive at 8:39, the children arrive at 9:00 and the children leave like
3:00 while the teachers leave 5:30, 6:00. So the teachers are there nine hours, the
students six hours, so the teachers have three hours every day for preparing themselves.
This time is not available in Chile and none Latin American country.
So if you don't have available extra time, how are you really going to change the teachers'
way of doing things. And I would say that's really the hardest part.
And at the end, if you don't have a vision, if you don't understand why you're doing this
stuff, why you want to transform it and where you want to reach, you don't know what's
the way you have to travel. So you really have to have a vision. You have to have aims
so you really can define your progress.
So you have to start from the vision and at the end define what hardware you want and
not start with the hardware and say what can we do with that, as it happens today
massively.
So conclusion. I like paper and pencil, perhaps because I'm 50. But I think paper and
pencil will be still there. Even [inaudible] but paper and pencil is so ubiquitous.
However, seamless interconnected technology really makes a difference inside a
classroom.
And the second thing is that we have to understand that there are different pedagogical
products for diverse realities. There's no one solution. There are different necessities and
there are different solutions, and we have to understand which solutions are for which
problems. There's no one -- no one silver bullet.
That's it. So now let's go to the questions. I hope there is one question. Yes.
[applause]
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Thank you very much. Let's go behind and then...
>>: So do you have an attempt to bring the content creation to the teachers themselves?
Would they even be responsible for creating the contents for your games and the
applications and so on instead of just, you know, [inaudible]?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: We have authoring tools; however, the teachers don't have time to
train themselves, much less time to prepare materials.
And the other thing what we have seen -- and that's not only in Chile, we have
experienced in several countries -- is that if you don't have very well-defined structured
lectures where you say in this lecture for this aim use this material, they won't make it.
Because what we have, we have a database of now 15,000 different activities, structures
with different goals and through the curricula. And the idea is the teacher really selects
what he wants. But that's time. And if we don't structure them and give them this is for
this lecture, they just don't use it.
So they deal with this and we have editors that can change the activities a little bit, put
different names or whatever they want. They don't have the time. They really don't have
the time.
And even in the U.S. -- because we worked with two years with three schools in San
Francisco. Even the U.S. they didn't prepare the materials. We did it. We definitely did
it [inaudible].
>>: So what happens, for example, when you have as many red squares on a given topic
where the teachers [inaudible], so how do they typically do that? Should they just give
the feedback back to the content creators and then [inaudible]?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: No. The problem is not from the content. The problems
basically -- if you have red squares because it's [inaudible] it's not the problem of the
question. The question's okay. The problem is they didn't understand the material. They
didn't understand the topic.
And it's not the problem of the question. Because the easiest -- and it's very interesting.
The easiest is to change the question. And that's what they do. They make easier
questions. And that's what happened. We have seen that.
Because in our database, the database was started just for the average, for the average.
And so not a comprehensive database, because we cover, we have math, language from 1
to 12, science from 5 to 8, chemistry, physics and biology from 9 to 12. And that's
around 15,000 topics.
And our impression is that it's comprehensive but it's not deep; it's just general. It's not -it's not taught it's not comprehensive. It's [inaudible].
So [inaudible] I would say it should be at least three times as big as this. So we would
need at least 50,000 to cover all these topics through all the classrooms. So we leave it
open.
So what we discovered was the few teachers that really did some contents was that in the
private schools because [inaudible] private schools they found our database too easy.
And in the public schools, they found the database too difficult and they make it easier.
It's no problem to make it more difficult; the problem is when you make it easier. So
they said -- they did exactly what you said. Oh, it's full of red, so let's make easy
equations. But that's not the solution.
You were first.
>>: So you mentioned how three children was a very good group size, but you also
showed the example where 40 children were grouped together. I was wondering if you
could talk a little bit about how that experience was different in terms of how the children
participated and how well they did and was it difficult to design an activity for engaging
all 40 of them together.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Yeah. The 40 -- the massive multiple nice, the aim is to bring
technology and interaction where no computers are available. So collaboration is still not
an aim there.
I have now two master's students working on that to see how we can really do
collaboration in a system like that one. Because what we really want to do there is to
give interaction and personal feedback to the students. So there we have them solve the
problem of collaboration.
While in the World of Warcraft type of activity, where you also have a lot of children
work together, there the quests are built in such a way that the students really have to find
groups of three to solve the quests. Because it's made that way. Because we really want
that the groups are small so they can really interact and talk and discuss.
But in the other one, the massive multiple mice, there's still no collaboration. That's an
aim, to find out how to make it. But it's an [inaudible] I haven't [inaudible]. Yes.
>>: I agree with you that it's the professional development issue of the teachers in any
school change. So are you working on technology-enabled coaching or other -- or
working with anybody on that end so that -- because you can't just train the teachers once
and have them progress with this.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Yeah. We haven't really had the funds to make
technology-enabled coaching or teaching, whatever. We just make classical face-to-face
teaching and then coach. But that's very expensive. And we haven't really solved
[inaudible] because it's expensive because of the coaching. Because we don't want really
to make a project where we don't -- are sure that we are going to have good teacher
training. Because it won't work. It just wont work. And that's -- no, we haven't solved
that.
>>: So as you mentioned before, before we decide what the -- we choose a technology,
we first have to think about what to teach or what expect students to learn, understand
[inaudible] or approach for that and then figure out what kind of tools would support that,
right? And then [inaudible] different students who might need different kind of
interaction, different approaches [inaudible].
But assuming there's diversity in terms of quantity and in styles and et cetera, what kind
of technology [inaudible] unlimited budget, right, and you could develop -- implement
something like a hardware piece or a software piece, what should you do?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Unlimited budget.
>>: Yeah.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Well, I'm fascinated with Alice in Wonderland. I think that
discovering a virtual world inside the classroom can be really fascinating. So if I would
have unlimited budget, I would go in that direction. That's for me now my most
interesting work I'm doing.
>>: [inaudible] virtual space.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: A virtual space. Because this idea of having a screen is still back
of the '70s. We're still on the same model. But with Alice in Wonderland where you are
discovering with a screen, small screen this virtual world, changes everything. Changes
really everything.
And even more -- I saw it some time ago in Europe three weeks ago and couldn't believe
it because only 30 Euros. I should have bought it. It was a T-shirt with a real clock. It
was a clock on the T-shirt. It was a T-shirt with a clock. It was only 30 Euros and a real
clock. It was working. It was the same time. And I wait a minute to see how it changed
and it changed.
So this is a real screen. So you have screens everywhere. You can see inside the
building, you're making Alice in Wonderland. I think the next step is really Alice in
Wonderland. That's unlimited budget. I think that's the future [inaudible].
>>: [inaudible] and then you leave kids alone, then?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: No. Teacher. Always the teacher. Because in Alice in
Wonderland the teachers has his own platform to see how the teachers are -- students are
doing. For example, when they define if they are at the same or different chart, the
teacher sees the matrix of the different kids and know who did right, whether or not did
wrong. So to go to the children and make -- looked again why did it right or what wrong
with it to understand. And when they're working with the Coulomb law, which they don't
know is really the Coulomb law, because they're playing, they're playing with these
asteroids, trying to push in the asteroids, but it's really Coulomb law. And the idea is to
transfer the Coulomb law. And the teacher should have explained before the Coulomb
law and now they are working, playing with the Coulomb law. And the teacher should
see which students are really making it or not, and the teacher has his own tool to see
what's going on in the classroom.
So the teacher, for me it's very important. Really. I think that the teacher is key.
Somebody has to be mediator. Somebody always -- if you're thinking [inaudible] there's
always somebody that help us in the [inaudible] development. So the teacher is that
person.
Or a very intelligent tool, but still that's very expensive. Yes.
>>: So the pocket PC tool that you had [inaudible] have you looked at adaptive learning
at all? Say a group a doing well, give them more challenging questions?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Yeah, yeah, yeah. For example, what we are doing with these
massive multiple mice with additions is we are doing now with an expert the whole tree
how to start from basic arithmetics to the aim at the end is and have a tree so that it's
really adaptive to the children. And the child when finishes the lecture, the next lecture
he continues at the same point where he stopped. So that's really adaptive, and each child
can really work at his own pace.
And the teachers get feedback how the teachers -- students are doing. So the teacher
should address those students that are much slower and that are progressing in a different
pace. Yes.
>>: I heard some opinions of people saying that computer games are nice for the
children to learn concepts, but actually they're not that good for them to learn large
amount of contents, just like [inaudible].
>> Miguel Nussbaum: The problem is this point here. An activity takes a long time. For
example, this game which I just showed a little bit of what type of World of Warcraft,
which is [inaudible] game, it takes an hour and a half, the whole game, because first
there's a tutorial to learn the game and then they have to make mistakes until we get the
game. So it takes at least one and a half hour.
And that's expensive. It's what, half hour of game just for one or two concepts. And that
takes time. So that's surprise for it.
But at the end there's today, for example, electric charges of 100 people, one understands
electric charges. So there are two possibilities, where you just don't teach electric charges
because you don't get the point, or you teach less and you teach it in the right way.
So, for example, activity of electric charge it would take at least one hour or 90 minutes.
At least 90 minutes. And that's time because that's after you already teach the concepts
that you begin to play inside the classroom.
This is what's not really the -- I would say in -- with the Nintendo experience works
differently. Because with the Nintendo, instead those children that had the Nintendos,
what happened was that instead of doing exercises with paper and pencil as they usually
do inside the classroom, they played with Nintendo. So there was cheap -- there was a
same time.
And this was a very successful experience. The experience finished when the Nintendo
died. Because the schools that had the machines, they use it and use it and use it and use
it. And then when the Nintendo dies, that was five, six years.
And then it died. Because we made one big mistake. Really one big mistake with
Nintendo. We developed all the software in assembly language because it was for the
Nintendo [inaudible]. That was a terrible mistake. But we had no other solution at that
time. Yes.
>>: Can you go to the slide where you had your long-term vision? So can you explain to
us like what is the vision and educational model that guides your research?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: My vision?
>>: Yeah.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Oh. My vision is to have active students inside the classroom.
Because the classroom -- from my point of view, I don't think the classroom will
disappear. Because the classroom is good for developing social abilities, for developing
communication abilities, and a place where the parents rely that the students are going to
be with other kids. So there will be always a classroom. But make the classroom
effective.
So how could you make the classroom effective. Making the child the first person in the
classroom and not the third person. Today the child is the third person and the teacher is
the first person. I don't want the teacher to be the third person. I want the children and
the teacher are as important; that both talk a lot, that both are active.
But our kids are not active in the classroom. It's so boring to be in the classroom from
8:00 to 4:00. It's extremely boring. They're doing nothing.
And giving them a computer just don't -- giving them a computer just don't change it. It
just doesn't change it.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Miguel Nussbaum: I want to show you -- just go ahead. I want to show you a joke.
Yes. Yes. Go ahead.
>>: Oh. Well, I guess, so then is your view that those pedagogies that use, you know,
small-group activities without any technologies, let's say -- so you're kind of espousing
those frameworks and using the technology to say, hey, these small-group activities are
hard to implement or if nobody implements them so -- but everybody wants computers so
let's put computers in there and use a Trojan horse to put these small-group activities into
the classroom? Is that kind of what you're saying?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: No, no, no. The Trojan horse is basically that I'm using the
curricula as the Trojan horse. Because as she asked about the curricula, I don't believe in
the curricula. But still use the curricula. They want to teach curricula? I'll teach
curricula.
But my aim is the developing of social and communication abilities. Because our kids
don't know -- they don't know how to relate in schools that don't teach them how to relate
and they don't know how to verbalize. It's a problem in the U.S. and it's a problem
everywhere; that children don't know how to verbalize their ideas.
And that's really important today. But if you don't talk in the school, how can you
verbalize your ideas? You don't have the space to verbalize your ideas. But when you do
collaborative work, you have to verbalize your ideas.
Now, this point, what is collaboration? Because I've seen, and I mentioned to you before,
a lot of people saying this is collaborative, not because you're putting a lot of mouse
inside one computer and you're using multimice this is collaborative.
For me collaboration occurs when first there's accountability. Every child has to be
responsible of their work. There has to be mutual interdependence. So my work is
related with your work, so I cannot -- you remember that girl? If you don't work, I don't
work.
And, second, there has to be mutual support. If I'm stuck, would you help me or you help
me. That's collaboration. And there's no moving mouse around and everybody -- that's
what they want. There's a lot of software which says it collaborative and it's really not
collaborative.
Let me show you this joke. Here I have another photograph I don't use; it's too dark. But
it's a very nice -- can you see it? Yeah, you can see it. It's a class -- a huge classroom full
of students with an Apple computer. You see it? Can you see it? And I found this joke.
Just read it. Can you read it?
That's what's going on. So they're not there. They're even less than before, as I
mentioned it. And this is true. It's happening. In a classroom like this one, of course it's
happening. So why you giving these kids a machine? You're not solving anything.
You're not changing anything.
Yeah, they're less bored. Of course they're less bored. But they're not learning more.
>>: They're engaged by other things.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Yeah. So you're not solving the educational problem here.
You're solving the boring.
>>: [inaudible] asking was whether these more involved activities that you're having
students do on the -- what's it called -- pocket PC, for example, and have you also had
them [inaudible] similar activities, paper-based fun activities that require active
participation in groups, and sort of what's the difference between doing those activities on
paper versus on the computer, are those students more engaged or do they learn better or
do they learn different skills or ->> Miguel Nussbaum: Since you asked for it, give me just 10 seconds to find it.
Because these videos were really part of the Ph.D. where we compared -- where we
compared a paper and pocket PC-based activities. And I hope they're here so I can show
you really -- here they are.
So, for example, here the girl has pieces of papers and she has to build the same type of
[inaudible] with technology. And what happens, she's worked -- this is a group of three.
And she's working by her own because the other one just doesn't care. And the teacher
doesn't have time because there are 40 kids there. The teacher is looking for one group,
but not 10 or 12 or 13 groups. So she does everything by her own. So that's not
collaboration. She's learning.
And there's no feedback. She doesn't know if she did okay. And the teacher has no time
to look for this, if this was done in the right way. So there's no feedback.
And then you see what happens here. Let me see what happens here. Well, this is a
computer lab, the same thing what happens what I show you with the netbooks; that the
best way to do communication is with seamless machine like tablets or pocket PCs.
Well, there are more examples of the same, more examples of the same. You saw this
already.
This is very nice. This is negotiation. Look. This is negotiation. Yeah?
[laughter]
>> Miguel Nussbaum: And this happened -- we didn't pay for this. We got it for free.
So we really studied -- they're negotiating, yeah? So we study a whole -- it was a whole
months, and we have a paper of this. So if somebody wants my paper, just give me your
card or your address and I send you all the papers.
This is terrible. This is just terrible. This -- my favorite but depressing, my most
depressing film.
What happens here is that here you have the board where you have to build the words.
And here are the pieces they have to cut for the words.
Now, this boy, which is the socially most powerful and the bullying one, says, okay, give
the pieces to me. I'm going to show you how to do this.
Then these two boys stand up and say, hey, wait a minute, and look to this boy which is
the little poor boy. So this is the [inaudible] by your own. So he takes control. Now
comes these two, say, wait a minute, we want this back, why do you have control of this,
belongs to everybody, this is group work, why? And say no, no, no, no, and now he
makes physical pressure. Do you see how he's doing physical pressure?
So he gets them back. But these poor boys, they also want it. But didn't make any
pressure. So he say, no, no, no. I can bully you. So no, no, no. I'm not going to give it
to you, no, no, no. And now he says if you don't give it to me, I'm going to the teacher.
So he goes to the teacher, and before he goes to the teacher, look what happens. He
throws it to the bottom. You see? He throws it. And look how he's been humiliated in
front of his peers.
And this happened really. This is real. This a group work. So negotiating and bullying
other peers.
>>: Do you find that the pocket PCs -- obviously the pocket PCs can enforce rules for
equal collaboration ->> Miguel Nussbaum: Yes.
>>: -- do you find that the students are more reluctant to actually physically take
someone else's ->> Miguel Nussbaum: They never took the machines of the others, as they don't take the
mouse of the others. It belongs to me. It's my responsibility. We really didn't see never
that somebody took the machine of the other and just I'm going to do it for you. No, we
haven't seen that.
>>: And probably in the software itself you can enforce more rules that, you know, are
hard to enforce just by using ordinary media like paper and pencil? There might be an
advantage there.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: And we have been working a couple of years [inaudible] now.
We started in 2003 in the classroom, so six years. And we haven't really seen nothing
like [inaudible].
Let me see what else I have here. No. That's the [inaudible]. So that answers your
question, yes [inaudible].
>>: One final question here. Does your business model require you to have the
government as the big sponsor of the initiative or were you able to articulate some
partnerships with the private [inaudible]?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Well, that's a very good point. Up to now we haven't been
really -- well, I'm a researcher. You've seen that my interest is in research. I'm thinking
Alice in Wonderland, yeah? But on the other side, I try to really make this happen.
So with the support of Microsoft, too, we're trying to make a startup which has been
extremely difficult, extremely difficult, first because teachers, second because it was a
platform. But now with multiple mouse, it isn't the platform anymore.
However, I would say the biggest problem has been that if the government doesn't like
the decision, the schools are reluctant to really make this change. Because they have
some problems. And discussed money because of the coaching, and it's not cheap
because coaching is expensive, so it hasn't been real easy.
So what I mentioned in Guatemala we have now 88 schools. This has been our biggest
success up to now. In Chile we have 80 schools. But that one country just buys 88. In
Chile it might be at the end of the year we reach 300 schools, but still we have -- we are
in the middle of it.
And, for example, in Brazil, we're working with [inaudible], which is a big foundation.
They own the second biggest bank of Brazil, and they also have -- we have been working
three years for them and we just renewed a project and they want the project now in all
their schools, which is a big success for us. And they want to make now the connection
to the government because they are very respected as an educational foundation because
they love the multiple mouse.
The multiple mouse -- everybody that sees the multiple mouse loves it. Because it's
cheap, and, second, it's so simple to understand because what happens with the pocket
PCs, people don't understand what's going on. Because you really have to be there
because it's distributed. The objects are distributed and you have to really focus your
attention on the different machines and think a little bit. It's not 1:3. You have to really
look at it and understand what's going on.
But on the screen with the multiple mouse, you get it immediately. And they love it.
>>: So I have a question along those same lines, which is when you say there's 300
schools here and 88 schools, how many of those is it just kind of they tested it, or are all
those actual deployed and continuing to utilize this?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: No, in Chile we have 88 schools which has been tested, and we
have done -- our biggest objective is the two objective assessment: one which was
performed by SRI in San Francisco which obtained statistical significant results and we
got this prize, and the other one is that in Chile every year in first grade there's a national
test. And we use this national test for measuring our schools.
And we had five schools in the north of Chile [inaudible] this was date of 2007 because
takes some time till we get the data, et cetera. And we compared these schools with the
other schools of the same city, which are public schools, and we obtained statistical
significant results. So I'm convinced we are really not cheating nobody. That children
are learning.
And one thing is they're learning the curricula, and they're also obtaining these social
communication abilities. Nobody discusses that their children really improve the social
communication ability. That's a fact. However, that fact nobody pays for. They pay for
the curricula and don't pay for the other, which is much more important from my point of
view.
>>: Besides the -- learning the curricula and learning social and communication skills,
are you also trying to measure whether the students learn technological skills as a
byproduct of these things or are they more comfortable using new types of technology
out there?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: No. I really -- it's nice that you mention it. It was not in my
mind. No. I haven't really looked to it. It really develops the technical ability. I would
say yes because they have to -- there's a model behind, there's a technological model.
There's a user interface that follows some standards that we all have. It's not -something's very special.
And I would say once you have this language it's easy to go to other systems that follows
in some way the same language. And with the multimice, what happens is that the
children really get very good -- how you say -- fine motor -- yeah.
If somebody wants to see the multimouse, I have mouse here. So if somebody wants to
see it, I can show it.
Last question before we go? Yes.
>>: I was wondering about your methodologies. I know you showed a lot of different
studies here, but I was wondering about your methods of analysis, how you did it, was it
even qualitative or quantitative, or was it mixed methods?
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Mixed methods. First we assessed -- for example, learning we
tried to assess with tools that we don't do by our own so it will be as objective as
possible.
So it's national tests, and with these results we measured a control group that has the
same characteristics, and we also measured [inaudible] control groups that are in
classrooms that don't use technology in the same school. So to really be as objective as
possible.
And in the qualitative aspects we used mixed methods, yes.
If somebody wants to have -- I've published a lot, so if somebody really wants to see my
papers, just let me know.
>> Lee Dirks: All right. Well, thank you very much.
>> Miguel Nussbaum: Thanks for inviting me and your time.
[applause]