The Diamond Age: A young Lady’s Primer by Neal Stephenson had a huge impact on me when I first read it. The protagonist is given an advanced tablet, enabled with an artificial intelligence that is capable of interacting in an engaging way with a young child, thus enabling her to learn to read, program, do arithmetic, hence any topic of interest to her. I was also just listening to the intriguing personality and futurist, Balaji Srinivasan (time stamp 1:03:00) discuss his goal of changing the world might be dropping a bunch of tablets with similar capacity all over the world! Imagine, that if we took the same development and research that goes into making video games so addictive into making educational software JUST AS ENGAGING?!?!
One might wonder how this dovetails with a physical institution as I’m dreaming, and why would want to plant kids in front of more screens. I hear these concerns, and sincerely wish that we could just drop ready functioning schools wherever they might be needed, but obviously that’s even more far fetched than just getting 1 pilot school off that ground. And, I truly believe that people are the best teachers, either those with teacherly authority, peers near or far in age or skill, as well as apprentiship based learning. However, that may not be possible or practical in all cases nor immediately.
Thus, I envisage an ecosystem of educational opportunities that complement each other, depending on context and available resources. I’m inspired by “Self Organized Learning Environments” established by Sugata Mitra, which showed that children can self organize and learn with a basic internet connection, and then go even further with “Granny’s” to prompt, encourage, and ask questions of the learners.
Imagine dovetailing one of these tablets with the 1729.com project, which is a sort of global talent search and job task earner, inspired by Ramanujan? (1729, the Ramanjuan number, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways, = 13 + 123 = 93 + 103)