<incom> Shuttleworth Launches Kusasa

[Soenke Zehle]

Not much there yet as the curriculum is under development, but it seems 
to be a high priority for the Shuttleworth Foundation, most of the SF 
projects I have seen turned out to become useful, Soenke

<http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/>
<http://www.kusasa.org/rationale>

Rationale

One of the broad themes of research of the Foundation in 2006 is the 
idea that the two core skills learners acquire at school are 
communication, and analysis. "Communication" is self-explanatory, it is 
the ability to understand what one reads and hears - and to participate 
fully in that dialogue. "Analysis" is the ability to recognise patterns 
and divide a problem into constituent parts, solving the parts using 
familiar tools or arguments, and then synthesizing a result from the 
individual pieces. A key hypothesis of the Foundation is that schools 
should ensure that learners build strong capacity in both of these 
dimensions, and in fact, that scarce resources demand that schools 
prioritise these fundamental skills above all else.

This project falls under that theme, and explores the feasibility of 
creating a curriculum that:

* can be peer-taught and large self-evaluated, or automatically evaluated
* does not require the presence of teachers skilled in the subject 
matter, but rather teachers trained to act as facilitators in the 
classroom / computer laboratory
* can be studied even if mathematics training is not available in the school
* can give learners excellent analytical skills even if they do not 
receive mathematics training

Traditionally, "analytical skills" have come from the teaching of Maths 
and Science. These are key subject areas that the Foundation has 
supported very strongly. We believe that these subjects are important to 
create economic capacity in the country. This project delves deeply into 
that belief - and seeks to explore the core value of "analytical 
capacity". It is built on the idea that it is not in fact the actual 
algorithms, laws, theorems, techniques and tools taught in Maths and 
Science which are valuable, but the long term life skill of analysis 
that this teaching and testing creates in learners. This is borne out by 
the fact that we retain so little of the domain-specific knowledge a few 
years after leaving school. Even the best performers in school science 
and mathematics are hard pressed to remember the details of their high 
school curriculum in these subjects. What they retain is the underlying 
skill of being able to apply known processes and tools to solve a 
problem, and also the ability to break complex problems into smaller 
pieces that can be solved individually, synthesizing the result as needed.

We face a crisis in mathematics education in South Africa and in many 
other developing countries. Many would argue that this crisis is not 
limited to developing countries. This is primarily driven, in South 
Africa, by a chronic shortage of mathematics teachers, but perhaps the 
true root of the problem goes deeper than that - the MP3 generation has 
too many alternatives for its time and energy to be drawn into the study 
of mathematics in the way that previous generations were expected to.

If that is true, then we need to find new ways to build analytical 
capacity in learners. Those new techniques need to speak to the real 
interests of today's learners, and recognise the real constraints on 
teacher training and availability. The cost of computer technology 
continues to plummet. Many countries are embarking on substantial 
programs to ensure that learners have access to that technology. This 
project seeks to explore ways in which the availability of cheap 
computer laboratories can act as a substitute for the lack of 
mathematical teaching capacity, or the lack of interest in mathematics 
in many learners, delivering the same long term analytical life skill 
even after the details of the subject are themselves forgotten.

This project will explore that possibility. It will create a curriculum 
and a framework for training the teachers in that curriculum. It will 
not depend on mathematical knowledge or skills. It will not depend on 
the availability of highly skilled teachers. This is because experience 
shows that teachers in whom an investment in IT skills is made, often 
depart the teaching profession in favour of IT itself, at least in South 
Africa.