The Naked Future by Patrick Tucker

Author:Patrick Tucker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

The End of Teaching

It’s January 2012, the setting is the Ethiopian village of Wenchi, which sits on the rim of a volcanic crater lake some eleven thousand feet above sea level. Wenchi village is one of the poorest communities in one of the poorest countries in the world. The majority of the houses here, without running water or electricity, are scarcely larger than a single room. They have dirt floors and roofs constructed of branches, which seem to provide little more than shade.

A group of non-governmental organization (NGO) workers arrives in the village from the nearby capital of Addis Ababa. They bring with them a sealed cardboard box. The workers have a brief conversation with one of the village elders and explain that inside the box are tablet computers, one for every child in the village ages four to eleven. The tablets have been outfitted with solar screens so they can charge in the sun and come fully loaded with hundreds of apps, movies, and games, all in English. English is the official language of this village and this was the chief criterion in its selection for this gift. But “English speaking” is just a technical designation because the population of this village is illiterate down to the last person and unable to understand instructions or subtitles that are part of the apps or the movies on the devices. In fact, almost no one here has ever encountered the written word in any form. There are no street signs, no candy wrappers, Coke bottles, flyers, or advertisements. It is a tabula rasa in the desert.

The relief workers from Addis Ababa leave the box and return to the capital. They will circle back to the village soon, in about a week or so, to swap out the subscriber identity module (SIM) cards in the tablet PCs.

Software running on the tablets will log every keystroke and swipe when it occurs. The devices will record each child’s progression through the games and apps, step-by-step, command by command. The cards will then be express mailed from Addis Ababa to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Nicholas Negroponte and a team of researchers he’s assembled will analyze the data and search for clues to reveal how the children are improving at written and spoken English despite having no instruction whatsoever.

Skip ahead a few months. On October 25, 2012, Negroponte stands in front of a gathering of technology enthusiasts at MIT to relay what months of research have uncovered. “In five days they were using forty-seven apps per day,” says Negroponte. “In two weeks they were singing ABC songs.” By the end of five weeks, Negroponte reports that several were able to activate the tablet’s disabled camera and take their photos. “They hacked Android!” he shouts to the crowd.3

Negroponte is the founder of the MIT Media Lab. He’s credited with being the first investor in Wired magazine and is the author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital, a forward-looking treatise on the future of man and machine that seems to grow only more influential with the spread of the Internet.

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