Education and Gender

In the 2008-2009 school year, women received the majority of the U.S. doctorial degrees for the first time. This should not be a huge surprise because women have received the majority of BS and MS degrees since the 1980s, and women received 49% of doctorial degrees in the 2007-2008 school year. Men continue to earn approximately three-fourths of the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) doctorates.

According to BBC, girls believe they are cleverer, better behaved, and work harder than boys. Boys believed they were equal at the ages of 4-6, but then agreed with the female students by age 8. Researchers questioned 238 students at two primary schools in Kent, England. This research was presented by Bonny Hartley at the annual conference of the British Educational Research Association.

I don’t want to accidently offend someone by summarizing this from my point of view, so please read, and let me know what you think: Geek-aversion May Explain Lack of Women in Computer Science

12-Year-Old Takes the Initiative to Run a School in her Village

At the age of 12, Bharti Kumari, is the head teacher at her school in Kusumbhara, an Indian village. Each morning and each evening after Bharti Kumari attends her school that is a 2-mile walk away from her home, she teaches the English and math learned during her school day to 50 village children who are not enrolled in school. The children at her school are between the ages of 4 and 10 years old, and they are among the 10 million Indian children that are not able to attend school because of poverty.

As an infant, Bharti Kumari was abandoned at a railway stations in Bihar, India. Her adoptive father, Rampati, encourages his daughter to continue her learning in school rather than continuing the rural tradition of pushing young girls into marrying.

Dr. Sugata Mitra: Unsupervised Learning

Most people would agree that there is no replacement for a good teacher, but what happens when the good teachers do not want to go where they are needed the most? In this TED Talks video, Dr. Sugata Mitra argues that every country on earth has regions where good teachers are needed but are not available. He also has suggestions for improving these situations.

Mitra says, “Children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.” He experimented with the ways children will drive their own education by placing computers (without instructions) in various areas of the world such as embedded in a wall in a slum in Delhi, India; then observed the students' interaction with the devices and the students' ability to identify and make use of its resources. Mitra found that the children’s interest in the computers allowed the students to work together to educate themselves in using the hardware and software and in navigating the Internet to find the answers to both simple and complicated questions.

I encourage you to watch the video and check out Hole-in-the-Wall , a learning methodology created by Dr. Sugata Mitra .

Digital ‘Smart’ Pens Transform Paper into a Digital Tablet

Echo, Liverscribe’s latest smart pen:

• streams all notes taken on their special dotted paper in real time to a computer while also recording the notes in pen’s memory. (Currently, it must be connected to the computer via a USB cable to stream notes.)


• records audio as well as handwritten text— by tapping the paper with the pen, students can hear what the instructor was saying at that exact moment in their notes.


• has a 4GB model for $169.95 and an 8GB model for $199.95. The 4GB pen can record about 400 hours of audio while the 8GB pen can record approximately 800 hours.


• provides reference tools such as a dictionary, simple games, and study guides.


• will allow users to instantaneously create a PDF file of the recording and save or share it through email with the click of a button.

…Software allowing the above capabilities will be released this fall.

IOGEAR’s Mobile Digital Scribe:

• does not require special paper.


• is built with enough memory to store the notes on 50 standard-size sheets of paper.


• stores handwritten notes or drawings that can be uploaded to any computer.


• handwritten text and drawings cane be displayed directly on the computer screen when the scribe is connected to the computer.


• provides editing capabilities that make it possible for users to modify their notes.


• allows users to export notes via JPEG format and share notes with other users through email or Instant Messaging.


• supports 12 languages (English, Spanish, Traditional/Simplified Chinese, French, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian).

OLPC Founder Give Recommendations for India’s Tablet

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), invited the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to examine how the OLPC team created their $100 laptop. As I mentioned last month, India’s government recently revealed a $35 tablet that is specifically designed for students. Negroponte stated in his invitation to India’s MHRD that he would like to collaborate with the tablet’s inventors rather than compete. Negroponte also gave six pieces of advice, and I found one of those most interesting:
“Focus on children 6 to 12 years old. They are your nation’s most precious natural resource. For primary school children, the tablet is not about computing or school, it is about hope. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.”

KIPP: Knowledge Is Power Program

While reading articles on one of Bill Gate’s websites, I learned of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP is an open lottery program gives students from low-income communities leaning experiences that allow them to transform themselves into high-achieving students with goals of higher education. KIPP is determined to teach in a kid-friendly manner which includes teaching students through music and chants the same way young people memorize popular songs.

I found most of these tidbits of information on KIPP’s website :

Over 85% of KIPP alumni have gone to college. (This is compared to 20% of low-income students graduating college nationwide.)

Fifteen years ago, KIPP started with 2 schools and 120 kippsters and now there are more than 82 schools and over 20,000 kippsters.

Nationwide 94% of kippsters outperform the district average in language arts; 100% of kippsters outperform the district in math.

33 of kippsters who have graduated from college have come back to work at KIPP.

Click here to watch KIPP in action, or click here to learn how KIPP started by two DEDICATED teachers.

One-Kindle-Per-Child Program

In May, I wrote about One Laptop per Child, and last Friday, a co-worker of mine showed me this article from The Wall Street Journal. Former Amazon senior vice president, David Risher, co-founded Worldreader which created the One-Kindle-Per-Child Program. Guess where they have chosen to test the program. GHANA!

When I taught in Ghana, the lack of books was one of our major challenges. Ghana’s capital city, Accra, did have bookstores with a decent number of book options, but they still would not have the selection we have in most American cities. The other cities in Ghana that I visited had a bookstore or bookstand, but the options were very limited. The selection was similar to what we could expect if we bought all of our books at thrift stores and garage sales. As anyone could guess, it is extremely difficult to get kids excited about reading when all of the book options are secondhand, random selections with content that usually is not relevant to young people. I am excited to see how this program plays out. I firmly believe programs such as this one is the best way to provide kids with the opportunities they need to take control of their future no matter where they live.