Viewing from Afar : Analyzing Writing

The written word is a two-way street. As the author is telling us something, we learn a bit more about the person. When students write, a good teacher can find places for the student to improve their language skills. But what can a computer see?

In 2003, BookBlog.net released a simple script which counts the number of times common words appear in writing. With 80% accuracy, it then guesses whether the author is male or female. You can try it yourself. Alex Chancellor of The Guardian has an excellent article wondering what this means for equality in the written word. Paired with complexity analysis, a grammar check, slang maps, and other information, computers probably can estimate a writer's native language, familiarity with parts of the language, and dialects used by their English teachers.

This gets to the point which I wanted to make about analysis. A computer can tell if students in Class 3A are using an unusually low amount of prepositional phrases, with a high error rate. Or if students used a variety of new adjectives after reading "The Phantom Tollbooth". Were those adjectives in the book, in the vocabulary quiz given by teachers, or did the story influence students' writing style? When I phrase it this way, it sounds like an awesome idea. If I said, "a consultant in Chicago monitors, directs, and rates each teacher in Montevideo" then it becomes a bad idea. This isn't a privacy issue as much as it's deciding the role of the teacher. We want to help teachers.

We also could use SocialHistory.js, an ingenious script which takes "Share on Facebook" and "Tweet this" buttons and hides them from people who don't use those websites. It didn't take long before a male-or-female test appeared based on 10,000 possible websites, and you can try it here (works in Firefox, IE, and Browse). With some editing, this could be used by educators, too. Suppose I assign a paper, then see how many students read the topic's page on English Wikipedia, versus Spanish or Simple English Wikipedia. We could find out whether students Google the books they read in class, how often teachers visit the Plan Ceibal website, and how many pages students viewed in the Chemistry book in Browse. There are privacy issues, but responsible researchers should use it to get better diagnostics of what schools are doing with their technology.

Suppose we had an activity for students to write and share short story mysteries. We see which resources help students make fewer errors and use more adjectives. It sounds like a research goldmine to me.

Kasiisi Project Laptops Video

YouTube video of Kasiisi School Laptop Program from my summer in Uganda. Maps and sensors are featured, and I make my spiel midway through the video. Actually a few interview answers joined together, which works well. Primate Handshake did a good job.

OLPC Kids as Writers and Journalists

Want to teach students how to tell their stories and make a difference? I combined a few new resources with difficult-to-find classics for this list:

SEETA India's Newspaper Activity -
Builds upon the Write Activity with some newspaper / newsletter layouts. May run slowly on XO 1.0

eHow on writing - short videos teaching how to write different topics, from scary stories to business plans, including cause & effect essays, paragraphs, and teaching tips, too.

YouTube's official Reporters' Center -
Videos advising ordinary people on how to conduct interviews, collect information, build a story, and make a powerful presentation. Collects YouTube videos from many prominent journalists.

Pulitzer Center and YouTube's Project Report:
Best of the best citizen journalists. Scroll down the page to see the Pulitzer Center's tips on Production Tips, including lighting, cameras, and action

CitizenTube - Professional interviews and reporting based on questions and interests suggested by commenters. Recent interviewees include Bill Clinton, BP, and Shakira. One of your student's questions could be elevated to YouTube stardom! Their website also discusses online media made by change-makers and politicans.

Knight Foundation Grants - grants for community news-making, arts, and even application developers.

To get YouTube videos working on an XO, download from KickYouTube.com (just add kick to your YouTube video's URL) then convert using ffmpeg2theora , or check out the Flash guide

OLPC Activity Analytics

One of the big take-aways from the OLPC Summit was: let's share more data! We want to know how often students use activities, when they play with them, and how much time they spend.

My SugarLabs GMap Activity takes reports every 3 minutes. I use it to see if users understand the UI for using zoom and adding markers. It's also fun to see if students are checking out the Taj Mahal or the World Cup stadiums in South Africa.

I am now ready to release 904 usage reports (map center, zoom, and marker locations) from 456 activity launches, over a period of ten days - for education, technology, or research purposes. Almost all of this data is from Uruguay; a few reports are from Paraguay and Argentina.

The data contains no student-written text, contact information, nor identifiers. For additional privacy, I am limiting the release to members of the education and research communities -- and these people must agree to a privacy and data usage statement.

Write an explanation of how you'd work with this data, then e-mail it to ndoiron AT cmu.edu

Going to OLPC SF Meeting

I am about to meet so many people in the OLPC community in San Francisco. For people reading this who can't make it - be sure to tune in to the live streams, off-site sessions, or wiki articles to be written later. We still want to meet all of you.

I have an unusual packing list:

• 8 spliced microphone cord wires


• 8 photoresistors


• 10 thermoresistors


• CO and volatile organics sensors


• 2 pounds of homemade conductive PlayDoh


• 1.5 pounds of non-conductive (insulator) PlayDoh


• 2 laptops (one considerably more eared than the other)


• Environmental health T-shirt (you have to see it)


• Sky of Stone (sequel to October Sky)


• Kettleman City, California community development plan


• Arduino Lilypad


• USB drive with the software listed on my blog

I'm also going to be setting up a community networking site tonight. Hope to see everyone there or on the networking site by the time I'm in Pittsburgh on Monday.

Maker Faire

I am on my way to Maker Faire in New York City! I may see OLPC's SJ there.

Top three things on my schedule:

* Squishy Play-Doh Circuits (also seeing sewn and papercraft electronics)

* Africa and Unconventional Industrialization - talk about getting Africa's skilled craftsmen and craftswomen into this higher-tech form of arts & crafts, from MakerFaire Africa

* ArcAttack - music with Tesla coils!

Cross-Post to Kasiisi Blog

Nick Doiron, now a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, taught P5, P6, and P7 classes at Kasiisi Primary School.

When I found myself in Entebbe Airport at midnight, I couldn't help but wonder what I had gotten myself into. I hadn't taught a class since a 6th grade project. I didn't speak Luganda or Rutooro. What followed was amazing, overwhelming, and the best summer one could hope for.

The main goal of my class was to encourage teachers and students to think differently about technology. Kasiisi now has 160 XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child, enough to teach all of the students in P5 or P6 at one time. Not too long ago technology would be a rarity, but in today's Uganda, millions are already using mobile phones and internet services. A computer-literate student will have the potential not just to use these technologies, but one day help design them for local businesses and innovations. For this reason, students must learn to be more than computer users. Instead, they encounter ways computers can help them as readers, as mapmakers, and as junior scientists.

Readers
A few years ago, I visited Japan with my high school classmates. When I saw the students reading Sadako together in literacy circle, I had to share my experience and tell them more about Japanese culture. When the students moved on to The Color of My Words, I listened to their reading and helped with some Spanish words. These books are a fantastic way for the teachers and students to find out more about how many different cultures and stories there are to explore in the world.

With the laptops, I could show them photos and resources about the people and places in the books. Here was an article about the real Sadako, and her heroic statue in Hiroshima. Articles about new books and authors in the library encouraged students to read ambitiously on their own, discovering characters and stories which their classmates and teachers might not know.



Mapmakers
A world map covers one wall of the Kasiisi School library. Even at this scale, it is difficult to point out more than a few features of Uganda. Adding computerized maps of Kasiisi and several cities in Uganda has changed the way maps are taught. Suddenly the square labeled 'FORT PORTAL' became the familiar sprawl of roads and shops, and a corner under the L revealed the students' school, the road home, and the wells where they get water.






The students learned to make this map their own by taking their own photos, posting them, and writing descriptions.



I also biked to Rweteera School to teach maps the old-fashioned way: paper, pencils, and stickers. All kids love stickers. The kids in P7 were thrilled to see their town on a satellite map, and creatively interpreted it with four different maps.



Scientists
You may have read about the Water Testing Class while I was in Uganda.

We also used light and temperature sensors to show that computers can sense their environment. It was also an opportunity to teach about graphs. You can wave your hand over a light sensor and see waves appear onscreen in real time.

With aluminum foil and wires, the students could make their own simple sensors. This sensor detects when a pair of pliers is squeezed.



I wanted to show some newer technology to further push the idea that computers can connect with real-world items, so we used an RFID reader (similar to a barcode scanner). The students drew their favorite sports stars, faraway places, and forest animals, then attached stickers. The stickers connected their drawing to a description and the artist's name onscreen. This sensor was complex, but the students understood right away. They were quite happy to see the computer was recognizing their work.





There is such a marked difference when you can show the students how their computers can interact with the environment around them, even work with sensors they've built themselves, and give students a new visual perspective of their own community. Each one of these projects could be opened up for more lessons with the students. With any luck, I hope to return to Kasiisi someday and see laptops open on desks in reading and science classes, with a world full of stories and information available to them.

You can read the full story on my blog.