Evolution can be Revolutionary!
Just like an economy can work without a government, and complex species can evolve without an intelligent designer, under the right mechanism students can drive each other to learn without constant grown-up supervision.
After years of study of simulated evolution, we found that neither "altruistic" cooperation nor "bloody in tooth & claw" competition can account for open-ended innovation in Nature. Nor could they be linearly combined into stable "Co-opetition".
Instead, we discovered that rewards for competitiveness need to balanced by rewards for "informativeness." This led the discovery of a new interaction framework we call The Teacher's Dilemma, which is neither competitive nor cooperative.
Built into to all of our educational activities, the Teacher's Dilemma literally turns children into each others tutors, achieving a "One Teacher per Child" outcome from computers, without a solution to the problem of Artificial Intelligence.
Thus based upon the technology of social webs, of massive multiplayer online games, and of peer to peer networking (where each node in the network adds more power), this technology can scale up immediately to offer free basic educational skills to millions of children across the world as they go online.
You can help. Be a Sponsor. This "Techun Olam" project has been developed using very modest funding. Yet to achieve our ambition and scale up this effort from the 50,000 of children signed up to billions, we need some benefactors who share our interest in leveraging technology to improve the condition of humanity.
Consider each game to be a magazine in a new medium, an "International Scholastech". Hosted on a $2000 server, millions of children on the net can spend several hours playing each game, co-tutoring others, and come away better educated than they entered.
Our roadmap is clear:
- We will develop more great activities across broader ranges of curricula;
- We will open the development tools for others to use.
- We will provide better tools for parents, teachers, administrators and governments to observe progress of their children.
- We will internationalize the applications, and locate servers overseas with the right partners.
- We will move the applications from the desktop to mobile phones and other devices like child-friendly laptops
But each development has both fixed and variable costs. We need foundations which share our vision to endow this activity. We need corporations willing to underwrite this new educational media. Each game website is available for corporate sponsorship on an annual gift basis, and is a great cause for a technology company.
Contact Professor Jordan Pollack to request a traditional proposal or whitepaper.
Wheres Plato?
The story of educational technology has been a Greek tragedy. Starting with the PLATO system of the 1960's, many innovations have been inserted into the educational "system," only to be rejected.
In fact, beyond the chalkboard, calculator, and projection systems, it is hard to think of a technology which has really taken root!
We have studied the factors which have limited the prospects for Computer Assisted Instruction.
There have been many approaches, from Intelligent Tutors, to Lego/Logo, to laptops and handhelds, to "Edutainment" software (which is usually neither) to video games dressing up course content.
Yet each faces different stumbling blocks: The technology requirements may be too high, the software licenses or teacher training costs too expensive, the content is a fad not consistent with local goals, or, worst of all, the technology undermines the teacher's authority or self-esteem by teaching what she doesn't know.
BEEweb works in Java-enabled Browser, off-the-shelf technology already in most classrooms. The sites focus on skills and knowledge which students must have, and use other humans to provide individualized adaptive challenges.
BEEweb sites thus have no barriers to adoption, no training costs, no manuals, or extra workbooks to buy. Privacy is assured, yet real-time assessment data on each student is available to the teacher. And, they are fun!
