Depending on the context, that might be a fair question, but let’s extend it further. What if there is no school building? Or even a teacher?

For millions of the world’s poorest children, lack of access to schools and teaching staff is an unfortunate reality and has been one of the most difficult problems facing educational non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Much effort has gone into expanding the educational systems in many developing countries but scattered populations, lack of infrastructure, and teacher shortages remain significant hurdles.

A new approach

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization has been working for the last several years to put low-cost tablets and laptops into the classrooms of developing countries. Recently they began an experiment to see if they could solve the lack of classroom/teacher problem.

Instead of bringing their tablets into an existing school and training a facilitator on how to work them into their curriculum, OLPC technicians drove to a remote village and dropped off sealed boxes of tablets to see what the children there, who had never even seen writing, could figure out on their own. It seems like a crazy idea, but even crazier… it worked.

From MIT’s Technology Review:

I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android.” – Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC

Software from the future

The teaching software responsible for helping the students was the product of OLPC’s Project Nell. Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”, OLPC developer, Dr. C. Scott Ananian went to work creating applications that mimicked some of the functionality of “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”, an AI-powered book-device that provided an education to Stephenson’s protagonist, Nell, through the use of stories.

A couple of the apps, Nell’s Balloons and Nell’s Colors, can be demoed on Dr. Ananian’s GitHub repository. Playing through a few minutes of Nell’s Balloons, it’s interesting to watch how the app rapidly presents concepts and builds upon each of the lessons it presents to students. A large amount of cleverness seems to have gone into the app’s creation.

Having deployed numerous computer labs and learning software packages in schools during my career, I found that the Project Nell apps, while simple on the surface, seem to surpass many of the expensive, commercial learning applications that are popular in U.S. schools.

Just the beginning

It’s still too early to know how OLPC’s new tactic will compare to traditional classroom instruction. More trials are planned and refinement of the Project Nell software continues based on feedback from the initial experiment.

Despite the uncertainty and need for further testing, it’s hard to imagine this as anything but progress towards addressing the classroom/teacher problem. It may ultimately turn out to be just a “better than nothing” solution, but for children who wouldn’t otherwise have any opportunity for an education, it seems like a good place to start.

The post OLPC’s sci-fi inspired tech replaces human teachers with software first appeared on Techerator.

Stephenson recently unveiled his latest project, the online subscription-based serial novel The Mongoliad. The Mongoliad is much more than just an online book, however. Along with weekly chapters, you can also find illustrations, maps, a user editable wiki, and a collection of forums to discuss the novel with other subscribers.

In order to manage such a larger undertaking, Stephenson has teamed up with other writers and artists, forming the Subutai Corporation. The writing talent behind The Mongoliad includes Stephenson himself, Greg Bear, and Mark Teppo among others, forming the literary equivalent of a supergroup.

The Mongoliad takes place in the thirteenth century, in a world much like our own. Genghis Khan’s armies are sweeping across Asia and Europe, conquering everything in sight. A small group of warriors, members of a millennium old order, have plans to stop him, however.

Is it worth subscribing to this new form of literary content delivery? For $9.99, or roughly the cost of a standard paperback novel, you gain access to a year’s worth of DRM free Mongoliad content, which will supposedly cover the release of the entire novel. If you choose not to renew your subscription when it expires, you retain access to everything that was released while you were an active subscriber. If for some reason you aren’t happy with your subscription, you can get a full refund within 45 days. Sounds like quite a bargain to me!

An iOS application with access to The Mongoliad is currently going through Apple’s approval process, and an Android application is supposedly in the works as well. If you’re at all interested, a small bit of content, including a prologue chapter, is available to anyone who takes the time to look.

The post A Quick Look At Author Neal Stephenson’s Latest Project: The Mongoliad first appeared on Techerator.