1. Leadership Conference and Cultural Exchange
2008 Women2Women
Leadership Conference and Cultural Exchange
Walter Bender
12 August 2008

2. “Technology is anything invented after you were born.”—Alan Kay

4. a global transformation
Giving children who don't have the opportunity for learning that opportunity: so it's about access; it's about equity; and it's about giving the next generation of children in the developing world a bright and open future.

5. children lack opportunity, not capability
1. High-quality education for every child is essential to provide an equitable and viable society;
2. A connected laptop computer is the most powerful tool for knowledge creation;
3. Access on a sufficient scale provides real benefits for learning.

7. A vaccine is an agent of change.
Jonas Salk made the analogy between education reform and immunology: both require scale and reach in order to be successful.

8. A connected laptop is not a cure.
It is an agency through which children, their teachers, their families, and their communities can manufacture a cure.
Computers are tools with which to think, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics.

9. in mathematics, our children live in a “linguistic desert.”—Minsky
The typical vocabulary of school-mathematics is remarkably small: children learn some nouns and verbs—such as addition, fraction, quotient, divisor, rectangle, parallelogram, and cylinder, equation, variable, function, and graph.
It isn’t enough just to learn nouns; one also needs adequate adjectives: linear; discrete; isomorphic; etc.

10. three traits we humans all share:
1. everyone is a teacher and a learner;
2. we are by our nature social beings; and
3. we are by our nature expressive.
These are the three pillars of the Sugar learning experience.

11. Information is about nouns; learning is about verbs.
expressing,
constructing,
designing,
modeling,
imagining,
creating,
critiquing,
debugging,
collaborating...

12. ce
Sugar
The Sugar interface is the first serious attempt to create a user interface that is based on both cognitive and social constructivism: learners engage in authentic exploration and collaboration.