Group items tagged

What have we learned? We learned that kids learn a great deal by themselves.

can children learn how to read on their own?

To answer this question, we have delivered fully loaded tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, one per child, with no instruction or instructional material whatsoever. The tablets come with a solar panel, because there is no electricity in these villages. They contain modestly curated games, books, cartoons, movies—just to see what the kids will play with and whether they can figure out how to use them. We then monitor each tablet remotely, in this case by swapping SIM cards weekly (through a process affectionately known as sneakernet

If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?

children can learn a great deal by themselves. More than we give them credit for. Curiosity is natural, and all kids have it unless it is whipped out of them, often by school. Making things, discovering things, and sharing things are keys.

Having massive libraries of explicative material like modern-day encyclopedias or textbooks is fine. But such access may be much less significant than building a world in which ideas are shaped, discovered, and reinvented in the name of learning by doing and discovery.

“hacking” journals in different ways:

every day is something creative, but also a little destructive, to make the journal the person’s own.

. I found a journal at a bookstore called “wreck this journal”

getting away from the idea of a journal as a pristine collection of thoughts, by getting away from the journal as a sort of rigid cultural model of private thoughts or experiences that are locked away

private

collaborate project, and it could still stay private because we wouldn’t have to share our journal entries if we didn’t want to