Teenager outsmarts AT&T

George Hotz, a 17-year-old from New Jersey unlocks the iPhone and creates a great ePortfolio example...




"Some of my friends think I wasted my summer but I think it was worth it."


The punch line is a 17 year old and his community outsmarted the experts at AT&T by working collaboratively online. This embodies a lot of good ideas: an authentic project that is transparent to the world provides rich evidence of learning and teamwork. George worked in collaboration with an online community that communicated through blogs. Anyone could join or enter into the process. They all did experiments and worked on one another's problems. In this interview on NPR Hotz says, "I split away from another team exactly because they didn't want their information to be publicly available They wanted to keep it in the group and release it when they were done." Keeping the solution and the problem solving process private until "publication" is the traditional approach. Because of the public nature of his problem solving, a useful ePortfolio was created which can be used as a resource by others. Mr Hotz has 2 other blogs. They are also online portfolios of various projects: DLP Goes Down and My super N64 controller He starts the later blog with this sentence, "Okay I just lost at a super smash tournament and I don't like losing. So here is my new project. I want to build an N64 controller that you can download macros to over usb." I think this concept of starting a blog when you start a project is a good idea. It creates a package that archives the process very well.

Steven Downes hits the nail on the head when he says,
"Me, I think the lessons in all this are pretty clear. Despite the constant caterwauling about an educational crisis from the usual sources, teens working in loose networks online seem to be able to educate themselves so well they routinely outsmart major corporations."