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Solve For X talks

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Owen Densmore

Solve For X talks

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I just watched 3 of the initial Solve for X videos. They are short, 10-15 mins on average. (You can skip the intro by Schmidt and Brin .. you already know all that I think.)

The three were:

<higher education impact> Michael Crow

<resource reclamation> Privahini Bradoo
<learning by themselves> Nicholas Negroponte

They all had the same structure: TED-like talk with an actual project interleaved with it.

So Negroponte is working on learning and talks about OLPC and its evolution into a tablet, but with an actual research project: can children learn to read by themselves .. no teaching, no literate adult within 200 miles. He makes the good point that if you were to drop any of these kids in Paris, for example, they'd be speaking French within 10 months. We have language built in, apparently .. along with walking, eating, and so on. But not reading. Why? That's the X for his Solve for X.

The others are equally structured: talks with existing, ongoing projects/research.

Michael Crow talks about Arizona State University's radical restructuring higher ed while Privahini Bradoo is looking at e-waste as mining ore with orders of magnitude greater "load", and doing it with distributed, local facilities.

Fascinating. I think SimTable is a good example: take the computing out of the computer and put it in the room and your lap.

One huge surprise for me was Negroponte finding out that learning to program is on the decline and his disappointment that Papert's Logo work which was so successful in the 60's and 70's did not result in computing literacy today. Here in NM we have the Supercomputer Challenge and Project Guts which I think may negate this trend, but I'd love to know if it is so.

-- Owen

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Russ Abbott

Re: Solve For X talks

Michael Crow's Solve-for-X talk itself sounded more like a proposal than a report on work accomplished. He has been re-engineering ASU for a decade. Other than a reshuffling of the faculty units (from traditional departments to something else) does anyone know what has actually been accomplished? One of the responsibilities of ASU is education. What is the record of education that ASU has established since Crow took over? How have students who have gone through ASU in the past decade done after graduation compared to those who graduated prior to Crow? I looked on his web page but didn't see any links that would answer any of those questions.

One particular comment on his talk. He said that they "blew up" anthropology and other departments and put the faculty into the school of Sustainment. What do those faculty do there? Presumably one still needs anthropology expertise. (I'm asking about Anthropology because he seemed to focus on it.) Do some students still get trained to have expertise in Anthropology and others get trained to have expertise in biology? How does all that work, especially with no disciplinary organizations?

-- Russ

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Michael Crow talks about Arizona State University'