TeachingTorrent and the $100 Laptop

“Harvard’s Ethan Zuckerman, founder of GeekCorps and Global Voices, got a chance last week to drop in on Nicholas Negroponte and get a preview of the $100 laptop Negroponte has designed for students in the developing world.” (/.)

1. These boxes need to perform interactive teaching
2. These boxes should be sold in developed countries for slightly more, to ensure the $0-$100 price tag in developing countries

On point 1: The issue with a ‘real’ interactive teaching program is that it requires computing resources. Outside of simple –here is some information, here is a test and this is your grade–type teaching application, it would need to monitor things such as time to digest, free-form Q/A, finite troubled area detection, etc…all while taking to point the locale involved (not one program will be affective for all places even if it has been translated into the local language).As such, I believe the best solution is to develop a teaching app that uses ’smart’ methods of determination. This will obviously require more resources than any one of these boxes may have (in the near future)…therefore I believe the best method would be one of distribution.

IE: When in ‘classroom’ mode, coursework analyzation processing occurs for all students on all networked boxes. Since each student proceeds at their own pace, analyzation need not be required for all students at the same time (some will be reading, some taking tests, while some wait for their next smart-planned lesson plan). While this occurs, local norms are taken into account–sort of like grading on a higher resolution curve.

Perhaps even lesson plan data can be distributed and held in small pieces amongst all of the boxes in the room. Updates to lesson plans need only be discovered by one connected box as that box can return to the classroom and ‘infect’ the rest of the boxes with the latest updates. Think TeachingTorrent.

When not in the classroom and not connected to the net, the teaching app ‘dumbs’ down to research/explore mode…basically for studying and report writing.

However, when connected to the net, perhaps an enhanced processing can take place by net resources for use by the smart teaching assistant. This could deliver the same interactive teaching those in the classroom are receiving (albeit at greater latency perhaps), for those home-schooling or with a really small classroom (not enough boxes to process learning).

On point 2: If these boxes cost $100, then a box sold in a developed country for $250 should be more than enough to pay for an entire free box for someone in a developing country (plus a tiny bit of profit for the program to continue).

Donate a box by buying a box…2 for 1 special!

Sounds good to me…especially if they contained a fundamental distributed processing architecture.