Kusasa live!

The new Kusasa website is now live and features the complete content for Kusasa levels 1 to 3. The material, which is suitable for learners in grades 4 to 6, includes stories, eToys projects and modules that can be loaded in LAMS, an open source learning management system.

All stories can be read online or downloaded for offline reading. Similarly, eToys projects and LAMS modules can be downloaded and installed on your personal computer or school network. 

Many people have been involved in this project and deserve thanks: Mark Shuttleworth for establishing and funding the project; Helen King and Jason Hudson for their guidance and support; Sam Christie for managing the project at The Shuttleworth Foundation; Gareth Rossiter and Marlene Rousseau for their insight and guidance; and, of course, our team of illustrators. 

We were privileged to work with illustrator Luis Tolosana, inkers John Amos and Brendon Thomas, and colourist and effects artist Monique Giannikos. What a terrific team they’ve been!

To the casual observer, the question may well be asked, why all this emphasis on stories and illustration? Isn’t this supposed to be about analytical thinking? It certainly is. Our view is that our stories and illustrations are not just sugar to make the medicine go down but the essential diet required to support a healthy intellectual digestive system. While eToys provides a fabulous learning environment for children, we believe it needs the support of good role models to develop in children the mental attitudes and habits that underpin analytical thinking. The Kusasa stories were designed to provide such role models in the form of the Thunderbolt Kids: Sophie, Tom, Jojo and Farrah. 

Well, the site is up now and the stories and eToys projects can speak for themselves. We hope you enjoy consuming them as much as we enjoyed creating them!

The Brothers Kayton

I love “This American Life”

OK – Perhaps in the first world these things are passe, but out here in South African where decent radio is hard to come by and commutes can be quite lengthy, I am really enjoying listening to this refreshing show. It is about the the only thing that keeps me from road rage on the M5 interchange. I also like that I picked it up on the advice of Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools.

Steve Vosloo and I were talking about the show and he mentioned that there was an associated site Radio Diaries with a lot of background and useful information on interviewing techniques. I am sure this information would be useful for teachers. While checking out the stories section – I came across a resource that would be wonderful to use in South African schools. MANDELA: An Audio History. I have not listened to it yet, but will as I am finally reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography A Long Walk To Freedom. The thought I can’t keep out of my mind is that there must be thousands of terrific resources that just need a usage guide. For now though, I will just keep posting resources I think are good to the site.

(Image courtesy of The Brick Testament)

Serious sillyness

There are hordes of really impressive yet undervalued resources for teachers, parents and kids to use. I keep mentioning that I want Kusasa to embrace other resources and facilitate their use.

One that is perhaps not undervalued is the totally amazing Phun. Folks in the office are, I think, a little bored by my rantings about the coolness. The youtube clip gives an idea of the speed with which you can do stuff. Teachers should definitely check this one out.

Pivot – Stick figure animation for storytelling

One of the very cool things about Kusasa is that I get to visit schools and just hang around and observe. Often I am interested in trying to pin down scenarios where kids share ideas or assist each other to see if we can build similar scenarios into our own material.

What I find particularly interesting though, are the covert activities that kids feel compelled to try hide from their teachers. Surfing the web on the sly, playing games are all pretty common but, sometimes you spot something a little different.

One of these was watching a few boys who very suspiciously attentive and diligent. I managed to manoeuvre myself to see what they were up to and could see three of them developing pretty complex stick figure animation sequences.

Of course these guys were supposed to be doing something else and were pretty adept at flicking back to wikipedia’s soil erosion page when their teacher hovered nearby.

The kids don’t seem to think I am a teacher (my general scruffiness helps I guess) so I hover over and ask what application they are using – Pivot. We chat for a while and the guys show me what they are working on – reworking the whole of Spider Man III in stick figure animation. A pretty daunting task – especially when you are undercover. It seemed the were about halfway through although as they picked new techniques the existing content was upgraded. I could not help but see the appeal of doing this over the dreary task assigned. No doubt they would do poorly on the assessment… but what about the determination and dedication, the attention to detail the constant refinement. “No value there” – oh well…

I tried to gauge how they thought it would go down if they included some stick figure animation in the work they were supposed to be doing – a presentation on soil erosion. They were really not keen. Whether this was because of the likely teacher response as they intimated or because they did not want to pollute they own private “discovery” by exposing it , I could not determine.

Back at the office; I did a bit of poking around and found that there is quite a bit of pivot activity … the coolest example I found was a music video for the catchy “7 Nation Army” track by the White Stripes.

I can’t help thinking that there is scope for using these kind of tools in ways that appeal to kids and teachers.

bag of tricks…

Part of the idea for the Kusasa blog was to create a space for recording ideas and insights that are linked to the Kusasa approach. Kusasa is more that just the content we are creating, it represents a kind of head space. Last night while watching Cameroon trounce Ghana in the African Cup of Nations semi-final I started teasing out the following thoughts:

I am still trying to beat this into shape…

Get kids to solicit and record testimony (text/audio/video?) from people (neighbors, relatives or community members?) who have participated in historical events and use this to augment existing content (Wikipedia?). There is nothing tremendously novel about the interview process, nor the recording process, but what I think might be interesting would be to see how kids react to putting their content out into a space where it adds value – my hope is that kids would be able to add a interesting perspective and a contextual authenticity to information that exists already by interviewing ordinary people whose views and memories may not have been recorded or articulated.

In the South African context, obvious examples would be to interview people who experienced important events first hand or have specific local insight. The 1976 Soweto uprising and the 1994 elections as well as perhaps less visible and more likely to be forgotten events come to mind. The picture of of one of Joburg’s landmarks, was just too cool for me to leave out – here again though it makes one think about the people who live in Hillbrow – their insight and local knowledge are essentially unrecorded in our web2.0 world. I prefer to use existing technology if possible and was wondering if MXit would lend itself to the interview process …

MXit, a cell phone instant messaging client with over 6 000 000 active users, is a phenomenon in South Africa. While discussing the idea outlined above with Steve Vosloo a moment ago it dawned on us that we could an existing MXit service, the “Viewing Room” to allow kids to talk to interesting guests. At present it would seem that this service has been used to talk to local celebrities. Steve and I thought that this platform would be great for interviewing “higher value” guests who would appreciate the ability to talk straight to the MXit user base (mainly youngsters).

With the sheer numbers of MXit users, one should be able host a broad range of guests and cover some fairly esoteric topics. Off the top of my head; Zola and Stephen Otter feel like they could generate some lively debate.

As luck would have it Steven Otter is speaking next week at the Penguin Book Lounge in Cape Town which could be worth attending.

 

Image by Represent.co.za  Some rights reserved.

Domain specific knowledge

I have been slowly working my way through the The Black Swan audio book by Nicholas Taleb and apart from finding the work pretty interesting generally, I was struck by the introduction of the concept of domain specific knowledge.

Taleb raises the issue that knowledge, insight and intuition in a particular context are not always transferable elsewhere. As an example he gives an experiment conducted with university professors of statistics who could not answer basic statistics questions when they were presented conversationally and not in a typical classroom manner. This is something that resonates with the intended outcomes of the Kusasa project – our intention of course is to develop the toolbox of thinking skills and the awareness to know where and how to use them. The extent to which these skills are applicable beyond the scope of the classroom is obvious but whether learners are able to apply them outside the school context is something that we are going to watch with interest as we monitor and evaluate Kusasa.

Recalling my own school experience at Graeme College in the early 1980’s – as kids we were extremely capable at adapting our behavior to suit the the context. Graeme was a pretty rigid, short back and sides kind of place with not a lot of intellectual room to move. I have never really considered if all the kids adapted their behavior to suit the context – but I would imagine that most did to some extent.

It is not unlikely that kids will respond similarly and play “Kusasa” when appropriate… lets wait and see.

A short course in thinking about thinking

Yesterday I came across A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking by Daniel Kahneman. What a fascinating resource! I was searching for “metacognition” but what I found there is relevant to so much of what we’re doing in Kusasa. For instance, in session one Kahneman talks about “inside” and “outside” views of planning or problem solving…

The inside view is looking at your problem and trying to estimate what will happen in your problem. The outside view involves making that an instance of something else—of a class. When you then look at the statistics of the class, it is a very different way of thinking about problems. And what’s interesting is that it is a very unnatural way to think about problems, because you have to forget things that you know—and you know everything about what you’re trying to do, your plan and so on— andto look at yourself as a point in the distribution is a very un-natural exercise; people actually hate doing this and resist it.

As a problem solving strategy “taking the outside view” is itself an instance of a broader strategy: “solving a similar problem.” As it happens this broad strategy is one of George Polya’s problem solving heuristics. “Inside and outside views” will be the subject of one of our Kusasa modules.

In session five Kahneman talks about attribute substitution as it happens in optical illusions and many other contexts. Alan Kay discusses illusions as examples of “the world is not as it seems” in his paper on Children Learning by Doing (PDF). Why is this important? Because, as Alan explains, we “want to help [children] escape from the very simple perception of the world that their senses (including their ‘commonsense’) provides them.” Optical illusions, attribute substitution and other cognitive biases such as anchoring will be the subjects of several Kusasa modules.

If you want to further explore “inside and outside views” consider Kahneman’s article in the Harvard Business Review. It’s $6.50 but well worth it. And you’ll find more on “attribute substitution” in his Nobel Prize lecture.