Computer Science | Grinnell College

Feb. 26 CS Table location: JRC 224B, noon.

At CS Table we will discuss Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

To prepare for our discussion, please read the selection of short articles that appeared in Communications of the ACM in late 2012, and one of the many retrospectives on MOOCs that has appeared more recently. All of the articles are brief, but contain many links to outside sources. You are encouraged to read all of these articles and explore some of their links, but any subset of these articles would be helpful for you to prepare for our discussion.

• Will Massive Open Online Courses Change How We Teach?
• Will MOOCs Destroy Academia?
• In the Year of Disruptive Education
• Research Questions About MOOCs
• Why MOOCs Didn't Work, in 3 Data Point

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:50pm. Most CS Tables for the spring semester will meet in JRC 224B inside the Marketplace, though a small number will be in an alternate location, so watch each week for the location. Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

We'll be talking about the rise and fall of the One-Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative started by Nicholas Negroponte in 2005. The purpose of the OLPC was to transform education by introducing digital literacy to children around the world, in particular, in developing nations. To do this, the initiative focused on developing low-cost, rugged laptops and software packages that students in low-income countries could use to realize the constructivist dream of learning-by-building, e.g., through tinkering, programming, and creating digital artifacts.While the OLPC started with lofty goals, it fizzled out over the course of half a decade. During this CS Table, we'll analyze what went wrong and what went right with the OLPC movement and what we might learn from it.

The main reading for this week is an excellent historical analysis of the OLPC initiative by Adi Robertson of The Verge.

• Adi Robertson. OLPC's $100 Laptop was Going to Change the World — Then It All Went Wrong. The Verge. April 16, 2018.

If you get interested in this topic, here is an additional paper by one of the authors, Morgan Ames, mentioned in the Robertson reading. Ames takes an ethnographical approach to analyzing the successes and shortcomings of the OLPC movement that I think is a great example of anthropology applied to the history of technology. Please note that to access the Ames article, make sure you are accessing it through a Grinnell IP address, e.g., on campus or through an appropriate proxy.

• Morgan G. Ames. Learning consumption: Media, literacy, and the legacy of One Laptop per Child. The Information Society 2016, Vol. 32, No. 2, 85–97.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00–12:45pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department (sign in at the Marketplace front desk).

This Friday, Jordan and Alex will lead a discussion on approaches to bringing network resources to education in rural communities. Please read the following:

• R. Wang, et al., Digital network going postal and a tale of three schools, Winter 2005.
• M. Trucano, Mobile Phones and Literacy in Rural Communities, World Bank EduTech blog, April 23, 2010.

If you want to learn more, the CSC 295 site links to the research articles these stories report on. As usual, we meet a little after noon in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!