Dean's Lecture Series

The Future of Living is Learning

Friday, April 30, 2010 - 5:00pm

Building 70, Room 1400

We live and make choices in an increasingly complex world and it is a Sisyphean task to try to make a simple world. But even if we could, wouldn't we lead richer lives by reaching to and rejoicing in complexity. The Sugar Learning Platform is an alternative to the ubiquitous computer desktop metaphor that has dominated computing since its invention at Xerox Park in the 1970s. The design of Sugar is motivated in part by the observation that children are not office workers and nothing in their future will resemble office work from 30 years ago. Our approach is learning-centric design—using technology to help us discover and apply knowledge as oppose to just collect it. To the Sugar user, teacher, and developer, every day presents an opportunity for learning. In this talk, I will describe and motive three experiences that characterize the Sugar Learning Platform: (1) collaboration is a first-order experience: the interface always shows the presence of other learners who are available to dialog with each other, support each other, critique each other, and share ideas; (2) a “Journal” records each learner's activity and serves as a place for reflection and assessment of progress; (3) guided discovery accommodates a wide variety of users with different levels of skill and experience. Sugar is easy to approach, yet it does not put an upper bound on personal expression.
 
Biography:
Walter Bender is executive director of Sugar Labs, a non-profit foundation he founded in 2008, in
order to support the further development of the Sugar learning platform. Bender is coordinating the
efforts of thousands of volunteers from around the world, a melting-pot of software developers and
educators, who are working together to provide powerful tools for learning to every child. In 2006,
Bender co-founded the One Laptop per Child, a non-profit association with Nicholas Negroponte
and Seymour Papert. The team designed and built the OLPC-XO-1 laptop computer and put it into
the hands of over one-million children, worldwide. As director of the MIT Media Laboratory,
Bender led a team of several hundred researchers in fields as varied as tangible media to affective
computing to lifelong kindergarten.
 
In 1992, Bender founded the News in the Future consortium, which launched the era of digital news.
In addition to pioneering many of the news services that we now take for granted on the Internet, we
also pioneered a new model for university-industry collaboration. In 1980 at MIT, Bender founded
the  Electronic Publishing research group that has been responsible for  much of the foundational
work in electronic publishing, including style sheets for the web, personalization media, data hiding,
media remixing, electronic program guides, digital video encoding, personal video recording,
interactive video, et al. Bender has degrees from MIT and Harvard University.