Ethiopian kids hack Android in 5 months with zero instruction (and literacy)

[JimB]

Awesome story about an educational experiment that turned out to be incredibly successful and has huge implications for education in developing countries (at least). The vast majority of the kids had never even seen a written word before, let alone english.

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

Don't ever tell me to RTFM again 

[Andrew March]

What a load of bollocks!

[TheBadger]

Jim,
Whats a "RTFM"

Andrew,
Whats a "bollock"

[Andrew March]

RTFM is Read The F'in Manual and a bollock is a common name for a testical, the phrase a 'load of bollocks' is used to describe something the Americans would call Bullshit.

[JimB]

What a load of bollocks!

Are you saying they're lying?

(Let me just warm up for my own declaration of bollocks)

[Andrew March]

I'm saying that not one single reputable news organisation has posted this as news and that all of the sites that have are either 'tabloid trash' or tech related sites extolling the virtues of android as an OS.

In fact I spoke with a friend of mine at the BBC, who told me that they had heard of the story but after carefull investigation decided not to run the story as there were 'significant concerns' that the story may have been 'engineered' to promote Motorola's new products!

[JimB]

Then well why the hell didn't you just say that in the first place?!!!!

[Andrew March]

Only spoke to him yesterday after my curiosity got the better of me.

I mean come on Jim, didn't the alarm bells start ringing with you as well. A bunch of uneducated, illiterate africans, who haven't even seen a TV before let alone a tablet computer, suddenly find themselves with boxes of Motorola tablets and manage not only to teach themselves to read and write english but manage to hack the operating system in order to get the camera working, you know the camera, a device which again they apparently have never seen before.

What's more likely to have happened is they were used as mirrors, spangly things to hang off trees and plates to eat food from.

[JimB]

The Reading Project in Ethiopia explained by the OLPC team involved in the experiment:
http://blog.laptop.org/2012/11/03/the-reading-project-in-ethiopia-explained-by-the-olpc-team-involved-in-the-experiment/#.UJe6xobB7D4

Ed McNierney of OLPC explains in comments at Technology Review:

Although OLPC initiated and has been managing this experiment, we haven't done it alone.  Right from the beginning the project team has included Prof. Sugata Mitra of Newcastle University (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/sugata.mitra) and Prof. Maryanne Wolf, director of the Tufts University Center for Reading and Language Research (http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/team/wolf.htm).

I'd also like to emphasize that the project began with the support and endorsement of the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, and the team has worked closely with the MoE and the adults in the villages to explain the project and recruit their support.  The choice of English as the language was encouraged by the MoE, but realistically the use of local languages would not have been practical.  All the programs originally distributed on the tablets were existing, commercial, off-the-shelf literacy applications - and there are none of those applications written in Oromo, the local language in both communities.

The choice of hardware and infrastructure was intended to support the experiment, not as a recommended large-scale deployment approach.  And the villages chosen aren't utterly remote, due to the experiment's needs.  In order to monitor the progress by collecting data weekly, each village needed to be within a day's round-trip travel from Addis Ababa.  And the intent of finding illiterate villages was to ensure the children were teaching themselves without the assistance of literate adults.  Although there are certainly people who pass through each village with cell phones, and some of those people may be literate, the adult community in each village is indeed entirely illiterate and is not in a position to be helping the children learn to read on an ongoing basis (outside of simply encouraging them).

There was certainly no English spoken in either village, and the MoE confirmed that the children do not attend school; in one of the villages there is a school nominally available, but it is about 10 miles away and 3,000 feet lower - it is completely impractical, and none of the children attend it.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/

[JimB]

The white paper for NELL:
Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy
http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf

[JimB]

In fact I spoke with a friend of mine at the BBC, who told me that they had heard of the story but after carefull investigation decided not to run the story as there were 'significant concerns' that the story may have been 'engineered' to promote Motorola's new products!

BBC Radio4. Today: Ethiopia children 'master tablet PCs' 31 October 2012 12:05
"American researchers from the organisation Global Advocacy, One Laptop Per Child have mounted an experiment in two small Ethiopian villages to see the effect of new technology on children in remote regions of the developing world."
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/today/rss.xml

[Andrew March]

Well there you go, OMG. Seems my mate didn't know and his news editor said it was bullsit, mind you he his BBC TV and at the moment all they are interested in is Jimmy Saville!

So, there you go, sorry I doubted Jim.

[TerrMite]

I take it for what it is, a funny story :-)
What will happen the 1st of April? Wonder if the crew of Planetside has planned something :-)
Cheers