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Here are some awesome numbers from the FreeRice project:
On 8 October 830 grains of rice were donated.
On 15 October 6,403,920 grains were donated.
On 31 October rice grains donations totalled 59,167,790.
On 10 November the first million grain donation day happened: 122,377,240.
On 26 November the donations in one day totalled 188,457,808
And the total (as of 26 November) from the day the project started, on 8 October, is 3,993,119,570 grains of rice donated to the world’s hungry people.
This rice was all donated by a mechanism completely beyond imagining without the online commons: it's a website called 'FreeRice', which is a function of the open Internet that gives rice to hungry people, stimulates vocabulary learning practice and is paid for out of advertising budgets, making the rice and the learning essentially free.
The homepage of FreeRice.com has an interactive box in the centre. The box displays a word in bold at the top and lists four more words in regular type below. It challenges you to click on one of the four words on the list that means the same thing as the top word. These are the simple rules:
* Click on the answer that best defines the word.
* If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.
* For each correct answer, FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. (The amount donated was increased from 10 grains of rice to 20, on 28 November.)
As FreeRice has rolled along, it has attracted some notice, as you would expect. A 12 November MSN news story explained that:
"FreeRice.com, the brainchild of 50-year-old U.S. computer programmer John Breen, was launched on Oct. 7 and has produced a mountain of rice for the United Nations' World Food Programme in little more than a month.
On its inaugural day, the online game totalled 830 grains of donated rice. The Internet community quickly caught on and donated more than 77 million grains of rice on Nov. 8 alone - equivalent to more than seven million online clicks.
'Every grain of rice is essential in the fight against hunger,' Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director said in a statement.
'FreeRice really hits home how the Web can be harnessed to raise awareness and funds for the world's number one emergency. The site is a viral marketing success story with more than one billion grains of rice donated in just one month to help tackle hunger worldwide.'
The site contains a custom-built database comprising thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty: venom, insomnia, formidable, arborescent, incognizant, cronyism, fitful, etc.
Each time users choose the correct definition of the word, the site's sponsors - which include Macy's, American Express, Apple, Toshiba and Office Depot - donate funds to WFP to pay for 10 grains of rice."
The Wikipedians are following the project in a FreeRice article which includes this calculation.
"It takes approximately 20,000 grains of rice to provide enough caloric intake to sustain an adult person for one day. One month after the inception of the viral marketing program, users had earned enough points for one billion grains of rice. The United Nation's World Food Programme stated that this amount could feed 50,000 people for one day."
My strong interest in the potential of the online commons for learning turns my thoughts to the educational value of FreeRice. There is, of course, the vocabulary practice it is providing for a large number of people. That practice is most certainly useful education. But the education potential sketched here is much, much bigger. I believe that the potential for a global learning activity has been activated as the FreeRice story unfolds. For example, each person who interacts with FreeRice is part of a global-scale learning process and the iterative potential of this activity is switched on every time anyone participates in this global learning project. Visionary educators should look at FreeRice and study how it works. FreeRice is multiplying learning using a completely open and spontaneous global venue. That is a beautiful thing - and I believe it is a glimpse of the global golden age of learning that is now dawning.
tags: new-york united states education free rice hunger vocabulary open learning
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