 over here. I met Julian just maybe less than four months ago. Two months ago? I feel like forever. So I was organizing this alien conference in India, and Julian and I shared our friend Simon Stewart who runs this Australian project. So we were looking for a keynote speaker, and we were trying to find someone who was unusual, who was not the other keynote speaker. So Simon suggested Julian's name, we came on Google Hangout for the first time, and we started talking. In about 15 minutes we figured out the keynote, we figured out the event, and we got everything flushed out. And it was just like, wow, I mean, it's been 15 minutes I've known you and we've made so much progress. One of the most productive distributed meetings I've ever had. So with that, I'm going to call Julian on stage and let him talk about how he's changing the world one school at a time. Thanks Julian. Three weeks to write a modified version of the description. Am I only okay? Doesn't look very good. Yeah? Good. Right. This is provocative title for you, and you'll see it at the end. This is the world at all of 2010. We have 6.8 billion people in 2010, it's now about 7.2. You'll see that Indians scores number two, Kenya 32, Tanzania 30, blah blah blah, 61 little blobs are where I'm running projects at the moment. And that's up from three when I came to India two months ago. So we're now in seven countries. So how did all this start? Well, I went to Kenya. As Nuresh says, I speak at conferences, occasionally conferences give me money, this one doesn't, but never mind. And I gave him my little project in Western Kenya, a friend line round. And I trust him basically, so I just spend this time to see fit. He ended up building a couple of classrooms with money and kept saying, come and see what I'm spending your money on. I was busy, I was travelling, I was working for these fancy companies like Google and eBay. I didn't have time for all that. But finally, I went out there in October 2012, just over two years ago. And I went and cut the ribbon. You know, that's like, you know, children sing, you cut the ribbon, you see a classroom, thanks for using it. But then I sat down with teachers and tried to understand what they're doing in school in Kenya. I've never been to Kenya before, I've never been to Africa before. At that point, I'd only really be to India once to the fancy high-tech areas. And when I discovered it horrified me. Half the teachers were unqualified, the schools had no books at all. They had no paper to write on. Basically, they painted one wall black, and they wrote on the blackboard. And the kids repeated what the teachers said. Now, you're probably familiar with this. For all schools in India, aren't that different in some cases. I happened to visit a cabera. Cabera is a bit like your slums, you know, your little blue plastic slums. It's about a million to two million people sitting just outside Nairobi that not many people hear about, because it isn't very sexy for the tourism, tourist industry. But nonetheless, it is where the people from my area went to, the Luos, if they didn't succeed at home. So, what I realized is I didn't want the kids to have the only choice to go and live in the slums, which is what most men are doing. And also a third of the orphans, because the parents weren't very educated. So, typically, they end up making children early to be polite. Unfortunately, the men are periscuous in particular. AIDS is prevalent. The parents die early. We have orphans, and this repeats cycle after cycle after cycle. Didn't see my deal to me. Meanwhile, I had one of these things. This is a Kindle, Bachelor of Two Months. It has 3G built into it. Amazon deals with 70 countries, so that I don't pay any more for the data. I just use it. And so, every morning, my newspaper would arrive at 6 in the morning. I'd read my newspaper and get on with the day. Wherever I went in Kenya, unlike India, 3G worked. So, even in Savannah, 3G worked. So, I thought, well, you know, maybe this could help something to do with education. So, essentially, I was looking at the schooling and saying, well, we feed the kids one meal a day, sadly. You know, we have school buildings. We provide writing materials. I really wanted to understand what happened after the kids left school. I was travelling with school teachers from England. They have sort of partner relationships with the schools out in Kenya. They go at their own time. They go and visit the schools. And they go and sort of talk to the teachers, talk to the kids, try and build relationships. And they basically said to me, you're wasting your time. This technology isn't what the kids need. They need good food. We're paying for that. You know, we're trying that. And he clashed again doing all these things. And so the challenge was, what else could we do, even though I had so much inertia against me? And this nice little quote, I'm not sure the exact wording of it, is if an old excerpt like me, I'm 50, tells you something can't be done, they're probably wrong. If they tell you it can be done, they probably can. So in other words, it's worth just trying things. And typically, someone younger than me will find the answer out if I can't. The theme of this conference is action precedes clarity. And this is very much how I had to start. I knew nothing about the Kenyan education system. I didn't really know much about teaching. I'm a teacher, I'm a computer geek. I work with Amazon, but Amazon has, I think in India you probably have the same with Amazon. You probably need to give me your bank card details or credit card details, don't need to pay for stuff. Well, the last thing I wanted was my credit card details on Kindles in Africa. Because once the Kindles get stolen or someone starts going, buy now, buy now, buy now, buy now, and a lot of other stuff start arriving in Kenya that I'm paying for. So can we do this without credit cards? Would Amazon block the account because they're paying for the data? And they sell these to the English market, for people in England, the search for people in America, for people in America, who are cabled or abroad. They don't sell them to have them shipped to Africa and left there. So I just didn't know what would happen here. At the Krypton contents, well, in Kenya I think they claim four times the government has claimed they digitize the curriculum, but I never saw it. I asked an initial education, put it politely and no one would answer my questions. So millions have been spent on this, but there's no evidence that they're doing anything. How do you power a device when there's no power? Well, down here is a little solar panel. This is what I end up doing, solar panels and little batteries and stuff like this. There's a way of providing power for these equipment, but I didn't know this would work at the time. One of the problems I give an expensive technology of living in poorer regions is this little thing, which is a tablet, is worth money, isn't it? It can buy food. It can buy drugs. It can buy pretty much most things. It's a convertible currency. So what happens if you give these sort of devices to locations? So we had to find out could we even get them there and keep them there, and would they be used? Would they work? Would they keep going? A very nice quote from a chap on the clergy read this a little bit more. His article from about 10, 15 years ago is five orders of ignorance. And zero order of ignorance means I know the answer. One order of ignorance means I know the question, but not the answer. So I know the question is five plus three, but I don't know the answer yet. The second order of ignorance, I don't know what the questions are, but I need to get answered, but I need work to create the questions that I need answers to. And the last order of ignorance is I have no clue, I have no framework to create anything. So we're working at the one and two level of ignorance. Sometimes we know the questions, sometimes we don't even know what the questions are, but we're trying to answer. I mentioned I'm 50, I started working at 16, fixing aeroplanes for military. I did a little bit of training, didn't even say go boy fix. I grew up as an engineer and moving to computing in about 8 to 6, 8 to 7. And that's where I've stayed ever since. And I've run online businesses for multiple years. I've worked for the big name companies. I still have the free bags and the free jackets. So I've had goals and I've worked with global users since the 80s. So I thought maybe I could do something based on the skills and the knowledge that I had that would help us in terms of improving education. The first thing is you have to build reliability out of unreliability. Now, TCP is a protocol that all of you use. Every single one of you, when you love them to say Hotel Wi-Fi here, is using TCP-IP. Your mobile phones are using TCP-IP. Now TCP-IP, that's the two things. It's TCP here and IP down here. And one lives on top of the other. IP is unreliable. If you hack it, you'll help it get to the other end. There's no acknowledgement of IP. TCP builds in reliability and uses a little number and says, this is packet number six. Do you get number six? The man at the back is standing there. Do you get packet number six? No. Okay. Here's packet number six again. He got it. Good. It's a side of window protocol. Invented in the 60s, I think. And that's how all this stuff is unreliable. You're sitting there playing little computers is based on unreliable technology. So maybe we can design something even if the system is unreliable. The most important thing to stress is I'm like you. I'm nothing that special. I'm not even a good coder. So I'm actually building on the work of lots and lots of volunteers. A few of them get paid a little bit of money from Tom Foundation. But most of them do this free of charge in their own time. The other mess of stuff here is a bunch of content. We have lots of this. We have Karmic Avenue. How do you know Karmic Avenue? Good. Most of you should. It's Sal Karm. An Indian chap living in America who started teaching one of his nieces mathematics after she failed the test. She lived in the south. He lived in the north. They talked to each other in technology. He ended up putting videos on YouTube. He had done 304,000 videos so far and other people joined in and some people translated them. So far so good. You and I can go to KarmicAcademy.org to watch our videos. Keep track of progress. Do our little exercises. Get some feedback. You can do Spanish and English even what you can tell it through these days. What about two thirds of the world who don't have the internet? Hmm. Well, an intern two years ago said maybe I could do this and put it on a little computer. And after a weekend his work basically kind of ends up on a little computer like this. This is called the Raspberry Pi. $40. $3,000 rupees on the SP road in Bangalore. I bought one. $10. $5. Memory card 64 gigabytes. $3,000 rupees. The battery. $10. $20. So the panel, $20, $30. $3,000 videos. Wikipedia offline in English, Telugu, Hindi, etc. etc. etc. All surf from here and 25 concurrent video channels that can be served to people. So we have 25 of you watching videos in parallel from this. For about $150 you buy all the stuff. So open source or open content or a bunch of materials. And the bucket project is called Rachel. But it's building on the work of Khan Academy like the offline Khan Academy, Qx which is the offline Wikipedia reader and then Apache which you probably mostly know of and this server I don't know how to pronounce it. But it's a small lightweight server. Right. So basically what am I doing? I'm actually doing agile techniques and agile concepts and just applying them to digital education. So I started with monthly iterations. I went out to Kenya, I think I've got a slide on this, so I'll go on that in a second, and did the retrospectives each time to review and get feedback. I started all this by buying second-hand equipment from an auction company I happened to work for called eBay. So about $50 per kindle, second-hand, start that way, total outlay, apart from flights, less than $1,000. So a lot of money for some of us, but affordable. And for those of you working for multinationals, CSR programs, 2% of revenues, $1,000, most of you can afford this. And maximising learning to university, because I really didn't know what would work. So I bought Wi-Fi only Kindles, I bought Kindle keyboards, I bought different batteries, I bought different solar powers. And at first, virtually everything failed. I had so many cheap, crappy solar battery power things, stupid things, I could probably create my own nuclear waste centre at home. But don't mind. The idea is that we sort of learn to make things reliable. So this is how I started. Six schools after 20 that our charity supported gave them one device each. Some of these schools have 200 people, some have 800. You've had sharing one piece of technology with 800 people. So what do you do to create scarcity? Now they happened the first hour to Kenya that I went and saw schools, and sitting in boxes, they were completely useless. Petrol generation generators, they had the pictures of the shaking hands, never been used, two years. So I did the opposite, start with one device and say the only thing you do wrong is not use it. We'll take it back and don't use it. If you do use it, you can give me evidence, then I'll buy you another one. Now I keep doing that until eventually you get to the point you've got enough, whether enough means and instead of giving you the seventh one, I'll give it to the next school and we'll start with one there and we'll build up a little pile here and when they get to a certain number, we'll do the next school. So I'm now working with 12 schools in Kenya in two different regions. They have slightly more tribal problems than India has with the different groups. So it was important not just to work with one tribe because sometimes she would say, oh, it's because they are that type of people that we remove those biases from this test. And we basically had content in Kiswahili which is one of two national languages, the other national language being English. In fact, a little bit of content in Lua which is a local tribal language. And that's kind of how we started. So I needed their involvement. I was in Kenya with the school for about three days for everything. So I had to get feedback from them remotely. This is an example of a report. You can see it's written on a second hand piece of paper and you can find it to write out. Which is fine. It's a monthly report. And they gave you feedback. And from there we iterated on the project. We ended up being able to buy a lot of content in January this year, which feels like about 10 years ago. But we managed to get, I think, 300 or 400 books for the schools based in the curriculum. And now they're funding half of it. Because what I wanted to do, and this is then in July, was to work out. Do you mind if I just give you a scene? Okay, you can have a kindle. What do you say? He says thank you. It's not a great surprise to say thank you because he hasn't cost him anything. So if on the other hand he's the head teacher and he's got to work out whether to make a meta-locker for the kids to put their stuff in, whether to take on the kids that are orphaned, so no one's going to pay the school fees, or whether to pay for firewood, where's the kindle for the kids? So I wanted to get some ideas up here. Is it here, or is it actually somewhere down here, which means, you know, if someone gives me toys, I'll take toys, but otherwise they're useless to me. So what I've found now is eight of my schools out of nine have made a contribution. And it's about, I'm trying to think of rupees, I'm looking about 700 rupees. Not a lot of money, but it's enough that I more than match what they do and they're now buying books. So a little picture of the schools. This is actually working the teachers with Android tablets. I'll come onto the tablets in a minute. This is the refugee camp unique in the world, the first undergraduate university campus out there. And this is near Somalia. What's surprising here is this refugee camp has been around for 15 years. So you hear about the trouble spots in the world. Well, kids have grown up here and got to university level, and they joined at five. What do you do when you're 20-year-old who's lived in a refugee camp all your life? No one wants you. What if you want to teach people? Well, this is an undergraduate campus that's been built there, and I went out to help with the technology to end up giving them a bunch of equipment and little meters. So one of the things I wanted to know is would this even survive in 45 degree air temperature in deserts? It still is running, by the way. It took six months before I got the feedback but eventually I got in touch with you and said, yet they're still doing it to one ratio between teacher and pupils. So one of the things that we're doing is finding ways to get the kids to teach the kids, and that's what I'm doing in India as well as out in Kenya. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story about tablets. There's a nice company called Google. They used to pay me as an employee. Well, recently they gave me 150 Nexus 7 tablets, and they said, where do you want them? Well, you haven't shipped to anywhere we've got office. So I had 75 shipped to India, to Kenya, and 15 ended up in Chile. And what I did is I basically gave them to different schools. Here I've got a couple projects I've come on to. I've got two in Chile, one in the capital, which is, yeah. You go try something in the capital and see what works like a big city, and then try some of the small regions to see what the differences are. In India I'm working with a rural school out near Chennai. It's about two hours drive away, and I'm working with a group who travel to India. So they basically turn up with the Kindle, the Kindle's the tablets, the Raspberry Pi, the content on, work with the school, come back with them, and go to the next one because the schools haven't got somewhere safe to feed the equipment. And they're all volunteers. So that's the model of it, trying to maximise what we're learning, maximising feedback. In Kenya I'm working with three schools, one is an official school, so the state doesn't recognise what would happen even in this environment. Right. So I've covered this a little bit. This is an example of the Raking Project on an extra seven in the Raspberry Pi. Well, this is the newer Raspberry Pi here. It was called Model B Class. What's important about this is it uses a third west power. Now I'm talking about three watts and two watts. Ah, the first time I came to India, I went to visit one of the state paid-for schools for orphans. I flew in and landed before in the morning, as you do from England, went straight out to school on Saturday morning and arrived about 8am to find where no adults. The kids actually opened the school with the keys, because the adults come by bus and sometimes arrive an hour too late. They had four classrooms, one of which was empty. Why was it empty? Well, they had computers in it, and they hadn't actually used the computers for two years, because no one knew what to do with them. They were nowadays. They were basically Windows XP and they were full of viruses, and the power was spilled from the power lines that went across the streets. So this is not very official place. And the computers drew about 200 watts of power to their old computers. That draws two. So if you look at this, it couldn't turn on more than two computers at once, because otherwise these power lines collapsed. So it can move from two computers at once to 20 with less power. So this is a good thing. These... Everything I buy is off the shelf. You can buy most of this in your favourite streets in India, wherever you buy your laptops from, the rest of this. I proved that by doing this in Bangalore, I use over four pack power chargers, your fee chargers, as a way of maximising the charging of the tablets, et cetera, et cetera. So nothing special about the hardware, trying to use open content and open hardware, experimenting, keeping it simple, and then gathering evidence all the way through gathering evidence and feedback and iterating and improving. And I'm collaborating and sharing with people around the world. So one of our developers in Mali, Mali is in West Africa, they happen to be suffering from overload at the moment. So I'm not going to see him anytime soon because of the travel restrictions. We have another one in North Germany, we have one in Uganda, and these are people who come through their time to work on these different projects and get them to collaborate in a little bit. I mentioned that I'm not a teacher, so one of the things I do is calibrate my work to make sure I'm not being destructive or harmful. So I'm working with professional teachers, two of the nations of education, one in Chile, to a less extent in Kenya, which is very hard to work with. I publish everything, and my encouragement is for people to copy the ideas, and I read as much as I can, a very good book about schooling, particularly in India, it's called The Beautiful Tree by Professor Tully, and he wanted to understand why you have private schools, even though state claims don't provide schools, and he found that even in the slums you have private schools. So just trying to understand the whole context of education from an engineering perspective, what actually happens in practice. One of the biggest challenges is teaching teachers. This is me teaching TCPIP to school teachers in rural Kenya. Why the heck am I teaching TCPIP? Because I'm leaving them with Wi-Fi devices, and if you don't know how they talk to each other, then something goes wrong and they can stop using equipment. This is a teacher, actually teaching in Chile, and this is Gautama who's the headmaster of the school near Chennai. Right, a bunch of software. Well, it's pretty simple, code does stuff, and we have a bunch of text resources that are used to communicate, the user interface communicates. The code kind of makes it all happen. Now we have the content of things like Wikipedia. They come, have mid-videos. Exercises for people to do. There's one thing to sit there and watch a video. Watch the end of the video. I must have learned everything by now. You actually have to practice and do the exercise. It's going to be useful. And then ebooks, so again people can read and study in practice. And all of this needs to be relevant quality and good enough, whatever good enough means to communicate. Now I went to Bangalore to speak to the schools and they basically said, look, our children need to learn in Canada until class five. From there they start learning English and then they move over to English at the class seven. Now they were using Edge Ubuntu. Must we do what Ubuntu is? Anyone know what Ubuntu is? So Ubuntu is a well-packed version of Linux. It's used very extensively around the world and they have a version for education called Edge Ubuntu which has lots of educational software on it. The problem is when they're doing geography the map of India is about this big. Now if you're a child in a city of Pune how good is the map of India this big for you? Oh by the way, it's in English, user interface. Not very good to study compared to having local maps, local contents, local language. So trying to solve those problems. I'll skip that stuff. A couple of case studies then. Google has this concept called Volunteer Days. It started after I left. So we had a couple of volunteers working on placing automated tests for some of the code base. Wikipedia, Hackathon in Zurich which is where I met the Qlix team which is the offline Wikipedia reader and we've been collaborating ever since. And then there's only one conference here two months ago where I met Muresh. We basically collaborated and I've got some more details on that. So we had 18 bugs filed during the conference. Just over half of those have been fixed by development teams so far. The other one is sometimes we're waiting for feedback or we're not sure what we can do about them. We even got a contribution of automated test suite. End to end including the Jenkins stuff that ran it. But everything is public and open source so I'm at URL. Since the conference it's 10 weeks roughly since I left India and came back to India. These are all from people I know personally. So we've got 41 translations in French 30 in Hindi which is thanks to Muresh. I'll shame him. Or praise him, thank you Muresh. Canada, we're doing very well at the moment, more than half the user interface is now translated to Canada. Bit of Polish and a bit of Swahili. These people are not programmers but they do work with computers so it isn't that hard to get involved in these some projects. And that's the total. 522 phrases, 55 JavaScript strings, 7 to 7. That's the entire user interface translated. I bumped into this company called Siggity, I found them in a magazine a couple of weeks ago. Went to meet them yesterday in Hyderabad and they've taken Khan Academy videos and they translated or subtitled sorry, dubbed 250 of them. They also created 165 videos for gaps in the curriculum. They're looking at class 10 and said well Khan Academy doesn't have something on this subject. So all children need it for the produced 165 videos. And I hope you won't mind me saying they're just a bunch of techies working in the industry, mainly working for foreign clients. They're not the top address but it shows that you can make progress if you want to. And this foundation I met them in Sri Lanka, Bombay. They've created 6,000 videos and they're looking to do 3,000 hours this year. So in the next 12 months a small group run by a monk from Denmark originally who happens to be a Linux hacker links if you want to look at any more on the stuff. So that's kind of where we are now. I want to go to the future for a couple of perspectives. The commercial side most of you use Facebook. Do you know Facebook Zero? So this is a couple of people in the audience Facebook Zero is an agreement with the airtells, the Vodafones all these other companies in the world that any traffic going to Facebook you won't charge the user. So the user can use Facebook.com for free from just about anywhere in the world. There's a similar project which is Wikipedia Zero hopefully you'll get the picture of that I think that's actually the grand dialogue and this is the newer one. And the Google Loom project is where Google creates these little sort of gas filled balloons sends up to about 18,000 meters they sort of circumnavigate the globe eventually the balloon pops and it comes down and lands they work out what's wrong and they repeat that process and that provides very low cost similar to satellite-based communications around the world. And there's actually a Google story on wire.com in June this year and it's an interview with Link Larry Page and basically 12 months ago Google started this project the balloons went pop after a day they went up, they went wrong the computers failed and the rest of it 365 days they iterated by looking at the problems and learning from them so the balloons now last 100 days they go around the globe more than 100 times only in one year and with a relatively small team are basically well funded by Google but nonetheless it isn't that hard when you want to. How many of you work with American companies and American software? And then keep your hands up and European software and companies and they don't work on stuff from anywhere else in the world. Okay, one. Okay, congratulations. Two. Well, that's a different map of the world. That's a map of the world by population. So most of you are focused on that little piddly bit of pinkish-purple there and you're missing this rather large bit this blob of stuff here which happens to India and China and the rest of it. So this is where the world population is so it might be worth focusing on the future as well as the leadership that comes from the west where thankfully I've had the benefit of working with technology for a long time. One of the questions I was asked last time I gave a similar talk is how can I help? Okay, I'm a techie. Of course, you know, people can buy technology and approach the buy prize and try all these things out but you can translate the software you can localize it so translate means user interface turn it into Telugu or sorry, how do you say it? Maha Arathi? Arathi? Yes, Narathi, Hindi, etc. But also then find local content which means the map is of Pune or Mumbai or whatever it is get local content for geography, history, etc. Don't rely on the will and the conqueror which is my history. Give me recommendations for apps. I mean, every time I meet people someone will say to me, you heard about this have a look at that. Productionizing stuff so taking a Raspberry Pi which is essentially meant for people to play with experiment with hopefully not break but if they break it's no big deal to running that in the desert where no one's going to go back to it for a year sometimes is a big difference to help you productionize it including configurations how many can download 64 gigabytes comfortably from where you work? 64 gigabytes of data how many can download 64 gigabytes? Okay, not many of you so the image file is a 64 gigabyte image file in Kenya I had to drive back from western Kenya to Nairobi to download content that was about a six hour drive because it was faster than trying to download as where I was so finding ways to chunk the information up so it can be delivered and I shipped these a one terabyte drive there was about 600 gigs of content on there this is the cheapest and fastest way of shipping content but not very scalable so finding ways to do that sort of thing electronic would be quite good we're working on a farming based project if it turns out farmers could also benefit from using technology to look at diseases look at prices etc etc etc and lots of projects happening imagine just making it available on tablets and stuff at mobile apps so that kids can actually do the exercise on devices and I'm hoping the time will come when someone just has a little email saying I heard about what you're doing I read your blog blah blah blah and by the way I'm now working with 10 schools in wherever it is in the world and we've found a better way of doing blah is blah so that's where I think this is really going to work but a couple of examples for you this is Khan Academy these are the languages currently supported you can see Tamil, Telugu Canada Hindi will be up there I've asked them to add Morality in there so hopefully we get that up there soon this is the user interface it happens with the Polish translating the main stuff green means it's been translated blue means it's been translated someone else has approved it and chosen for it something you could do if you're not so sure about what you're doing there was someone doing Canada that was their update back to Easter so one of the things I've found is a little SC card they use a third of them have failed so far what tends to happen is a power problem occurs a little blip or something someone accidentally pulls a cable out you get catastrophic failure what used to 64 GB card is now a dead card you can't reformat it it's just driving trash trouble is sometimes that stool is two hours from it so we need to find alternatives of course driving a spare card is one way but ultimately we need more engineering solutions so we also want to reduce the effects of failure we're now running the web server on the tablets about 23 gigabytes including content it runs an Android tablet sometimes stools say well actually we've got a campus about this size and a wi-fi this is a low power wi-fi doesn't reach the stools so it couldn't connect these two together please or we've got a stool network can we plug your thing into our thing please and then looking at alternatives to pies I'm trying to I think seven different devices at the moment some take sapphire drives like most of your computers have some are powerful so you can run larger classes etc etc I've mentioned about this packaging deployment of coding content for those of you who write code you're probably familiar with Git in Github so press the little one button fork the second later you've got copy of the stuff you hacker around with it if you make some changes to it you make a branch it you send a pull request back to original project original project takes a pull request and says okay I'll apply your changes everyone benefits so do that with what I'm doing take the ideas, practice with code, materials fork it if you find something you think you can contribute back send the equipment to a pull request you know in code or in Gmail and give you feedback both here and afterwards you start doing this stuff I'd like us to move from the bias from one point of consumption and this is the sort of old fashion schooling model which is where I'm a teacher, I know everything you'll be done with pupils repeat after me A is for Apple A is for Apple well there's not much learning involved here it's just repetition, it's just wrote we can sit someone in front of a TV screen or a video or a DVD and that can be used when you learn something you're still not practicing what you know so exercise has helped us to practice but we're still doing what someone else defined we're still doing the exercise that someone else wrote the exercise so let's get to the point where the kids and the teachers are experimenting and creating and innovating this area so that I can retire and go home a little bit more often so my wife does love me and she would like me home more than I am at the moment so back to the title of my talk if not now when do you like to start if it's not you there's 150 of you here who should do this there are 1.2 billion people in India now you could just wait for someone in America to innovate or British guys to come over here and do this stuff but more seriously I'm sure you can do this and I hope they'll hear that and you'll be saying to me well thanks for the project you know give me little prompts but now we're up and running and doing this here and actually it's working quite well and this didn't quite work so I'm going to encourage you to do that after the panel session I'll be available if anyone sit down with me and do a bit of pair programming or if you'd like to sort of say how do I get started on translations I'll help you I'll be surprised if anyone who has a GMO account or a Facebook account can't be up and running but you can prove you're on so I'll do that with you I'm here tomorrow I'm available usual stuff I'm doing hearty at whatever your favourite Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blah blah blah this is kind of what I do this is the project website I apologize it's about six months out of date for articles this is one of the code projects HFC is for hackers to charity a loose group of people who are trying to make this stuff happen so I'll keep where I'm publishing all the ideas that we're trying to solve these like resilience and reliability I'll just show you there are some references and further reading all the slides will be available I've seen the videos will be available online so I'll take you back to there and I'll hand over to questions and answers the first question is always the hardest thanks for the insight Julian so what are the kind of challenges that you faced particularly in India bureaucratic, non bureaucratic the first challenge I faced which I don't think is a real challenge I think it's one that's the sort of the first argument someone gives me is Indians are too lazy they're sort of too bound up with tradition and respecting the elders to change the model I don't believe that but that's the common argument I get clearly from people you know we don't want to do this we the people of India don't want to do this so I don't think that's true the challenge to me would be languages I mean I don't speak any of them so I can't review Tamil and say that makes sense of course you can travelling I've made a flight so far in the last week or so I've been crisscrossing the south which is not what I enjoy doing but simply just visiting the cities is quite involved I think there's a whole question of corruption in the schooling system and you know more than I do but I do have hope that there will be some influence to reduce the corruption and the teachers probably one of the big problems I saw in the state run schools that I visited half the teachers simply weren't there and they weren't there for a variety of reasons some were smart and simply realized they got paid anyway so why turn up take the money and do something else and go and do a second job for best intentions but they got stuck on their little buses and the bus didn't arrive because the crossover bus wasn't there some of them were reassigned by the government as somewhere else the head teacher didn't necessarily know where they just weren't there and the head teacher won the school so actually I'm retiring next month and they're not replacing until the next academic year so I found that all the school where the teacher to pupil ratio was supposed to be just one so I understand that every academic year there's actually seven to one power is of course a problem I mean we're in a central city we're in a five-star hotel we've got lots of lighting here but going out into rural schools didn't with power as a problem I don't think you have many solar panels a small one so simply getting hold of the equipment is a little bit harder and prices are a little bit more expensive here than buying in Europe but that's why I actually went out to Bangalore to the IT streets but it was 3,000 rupees so I don't think it's that different so what I'm looking for is more volunteers I'll turn the question around and say if some more people are in the volunteer and do simple things like the translation as we start I think we can then start to help much more and reduce some of the problems does that answer your question? there's a question over here no? okay can you hear me? instead of translating some specific content in local languages do you think increasing English awareness may help more? ah good question and this is what I'm actually having a very live debate with so there are several perspectives on being able to master English and I forget who it is I apologize for whatever came up with the idea there's roughly two categories of English there's fluency in English so you can get a job just by anyway and you have a lot of job mobility in India and other countries if you're fluent in English so I think virtually everyone here is so I'm able to speak at this speed then you have the English which is the satisfactory English but if you're to speak to the people and the funny uniforms here the white uniforms and the orange uniforms and the bell boys and the cooks and the chefs and the taxi drivers they speak enough English to say but they're tied into their jobs because they don't speak English fluently and as we see the younger people go through and the teachers who can't speak English fluently this could be a limiting factor given that the world is moving towards English however this to me is a big however I don't want the world to speak English and only English I'm all four people speaking as many languages as they want if I speak three or four languages but you're again rather than here but we should learn in the language of our choice why should all the content only be in English or only in Spanish or whatever it is my ideal would be that the individual whether it's a child this high or a child this high or my parents, my parents are still alive they should go and say well actually I'd like to do this in German this time because I want to practice my German my mother by the way speaks a little Hindi in Gujarati so if she wants to watch herself I think good luck to her so I'd like to be able to have alternatives available to people rather than just English and the nice thing is that if say I'm learning maths in grade four or class four and I'm doing it in Canada I feel a little bit bold and I want to try it in English and go back to the video but pick English this time oh using that word in English should be number three instead of whatever it is in Canada oh now I get the two words does that make sense I'd rather be agreeing than not but let's not just have the word the word forced in English because no one else is going to help and ultimately the only people who do this in my view the only people is you next question does the content you already have is in line with the syllabus that the kids go through the educational syllabus or it's in the content itself is the whole say if somebody is in third standard a kid who's in the third standard school and does that content what we provide in line with the syllabus good question so does the content match the syllabus in what level of status or in the country so it depends if we look at the work of Signity class 10 in their states I can't remember so they're from Hyderabad I think before just the two states is one state and most children learn intelligence they look at class 10 syllabus for the states and they identify which videos on Khan Academy suit of class 10 then realise there are a bunch of gaps and I think they translated 250 videos creating 165 there you go so that's what they did now there's a project with Wikipedia called Wikipedia for Schools actually done by a charity called SFX Children based in the UK who operate in various countries now and they basically looked at the whole of Wikipedia which in English is massive and said kids don't need to learn about a bunch of these subjects so let's pick out stuff that's relevant to the UK curriculum 1000 articles I think it's 12 million words and a bunch of other content and that was packaged as a single sort of cohesive mini Wikipedia and that's now distributed with all these projects so that's what we've done for English SFX Children are open sourcing the tool they use to stitch together the curriculum so that then means that I'll say anyone, but anyone with the interest and the skills in the background can then do the equivalent for whatever the state is so that's what's happening what do we bundle at the moment but if you want the Tamil version of Wikipedia you get all of it but because the Tamil, the Hindi and any of the other Indian languages is a relatively small file we're looking at less than a gigabyte of content then it's shippable it's not ideal because both the teachers and the parents and the pupils they all really would like curriculum content for better or for worse guess what, your kids like my kids and I go through an examination system so the schooling system kind of drives us towards examination curriculum content I'm all for people learning more broadly in the curriculum but it's important to know what's in the curriculum so that's one of the challenges and what Signature did is they hired a school teacher someone who'd been teaching in schools knew the curriculum pretty well and she basically was very good at helping select the content and say that this makes sense and that's the benefit does that answer your question? yes it does one last question and then we can jump to the panel anyone for the last question right over at the back there and no, we just went I'm just going to do this which is, most of you wouldn't know what this is five clocks phone bought in Snapheel second challenge of actually buying one the first one they took too long to deliver that or the equivalent is getting to the price point that we can buy things and I think it's Snapheel it's one of your two e-commerce sites is now putting kiosks in the rural villages I think they're putting about 10,000 out there and they found that in their trials that the rural users spend almost as much as the city users I think it's spending about 1,500 rupees per order so we're getting to the point where parents parents in rural areas the same as you and I I guess do well so when that device comes down to 1,500 rupees it becomes affordable sometimes two or three can get together and buy one and I don't want to be the one giving out like candy here's your iPad, here's your this, here's your that I can't afford it with nothing else ultimately people including the parents and the schools and the state need to take responsibility for these projects not me your question how can a manager such as myself who only speaks one language which I think is an American thing how do you obviously most people here have translations but there's those of us and you know my colleagues from the states this should be very impressive but how can we help them software development so the code base or paragraph in my supply is in Django the code for Qwits is Java, the Android app and many C++ for everything else we're staffed for people working on the code we're staffed for engineering resources so someone's going to say right I want to do a deployment model I think we can win it we can help us do deployment models we've got a project up here to be a content recommendation if I were to look into a place it's got some of my equipment with my little tablet with content on here they talk to each other and this one comes next then and I get a usage data on this one so that's an open source project I call that a two because we're not at Antoine yet so someone could develop that for instance you could say you could say I want to fund something we've got a thousand dollars fair but with trust in school somewhere else in the world which could be in the Philippines it could be in the Midwest and I should stress I'm not charity I sell funds and that's my way of doing it so I'm all for people just copying the good bits of this not building a charity I've seen too many charities have gone wrong but if I spend it for charity I'll do the work but I say thank you again I'm on the panel so you can ask me questions on the panel I'm available at the end of the time if you're going to do hacking I'm here tomorrow is it fair to say you were very disappointed after the Seligian conference that we didn't start we didn't hackathon and not much happened since there's excitement today people leave the conference so we repeat talking about what can we do differently so if you have ideas what can we do differently so that when we leave this we don't forget this please find one of us and we would love to hear your ideas about how we can make this sustainable this is great we all clap and we forget about it so let's do something one little bit different thank you