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OLPC Australia Pushes Boundaries of Education
angry tapir writes "Slashdot recently discussed some of the problems with the One Laptop Per Child program in Peru, where, in general, teachers did not make creative use of the technology by just regarding the laptops as an end in themselves. In Australia, the local OLPC organization is attempting to address similar issues by creating an educational framework around the laptops that involves training students how to teach others about the technology and even conduct hardware repairs on the XOs. Some of the early results at XO-equipped schools, which in Australia are generally in remote and disadvantaged schools, have been impressive."
OLPC will "...build an educational ecosystem around the laptops". Fail. Don't build children's educational frameworks around a particular device, or an operating system, or any other single technological artefact or format.
Imagine if I turned up to a job interview and said "employ me - my education was built round the ZX81 microcomputer - so I am the person for your job!". I think it would be hard work to persuade my prospective employer that this in itself was reason enough to employ me.
Build the children's pedagogical framwork round a set of educational principles and skill sets that will help them become well developed members of society, with critical abilities and able to respond flexibly to the world and the workplace ten and twenty years from now.
You don't need laptops to develop well rounded adults. They may help, and by all means include them in the tools you use, and even develop a critical skill set partly based on computer hardware and software knowledge, but when you become fixated on them being the sole mechanism for teaching children, I think you've taken a useful tool too far and could blind yourself from the greater picture.
Twenty years down the line their future employers might ask "what's a laptop?".
If every child gets a laptop, that's great as long as they're used. Microsoft did a study at my school in the 90's, giving half the students in the first year a laptop and not the other. The net reault was half the students carried on being taught the normal way and the other were also taught the normal way but had to carry a laptop about too. Essentially they were expensive bricks that did not get used. I often noticed the students with the laptops being taught in the PC rooms, using up desktop computers and with their laptops left in their bags on the floor beside them. When one of the most computationally ahead schools in the UK in the 90s couldn't think of anything to do with the laptops, do we expect people with no computer skills to do anything other than check email and play angry birds? Perhaps what's really needed is staff awareness, a curriculum and then laptops - in that order.
G'day, dingo! Heard yer like learning, so I put a school in your school so you can learn while yer learnin'.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Excelently put. Though if I went for a job and the interviewer didn't know anything about recent history I'd be a little worried about what they thaught the future would hold. Perhaps the laptops should be issued to all students who do all their homework and appear to be giving school a go. Don't have to be good, but should try and be rewarded for it.
so...
ever been given a book as part of a curriculum and hated it because of the way the subject area was taught ?
so much depends on the leaders at 'grass roots' otherwise known as "teachers" if they use tools in interesting and informative ways then it helps...
have fun
John Jones
This and the previous article, highlight the folly of pushing technology without support. There is absolutely no point in giving someone - in this case the teachers - a new gadget to use if you dont tell them how best to use it. I have seen this time and time again in my 30+ years as an educator - the kids will latch on quickly, the teachers not so. Not because the can't, but because the life of a teacher is busy and complex and the last thing they want to do is learn something that will likely end up as the latest expensive fad, and sit in a cupboard until someone takes them to the tip. Geeze, you can see this in your own house I'll bet. Your kids learn much faster than you, and your wife or SO - assuming you have one, just wants it to work without stuffing around. Not that this is a rant about OLPC by the way - I think the heart is there but the implementation sometimes leaves a lot to be desired.
Maybe now they'll stop eating your kids!
That any OLPC deployment like this also deploy with a redundant server, accessible by the devices, and containing at a minimum these three things:
(1) A copy of the Khan academy course materials
(2) A copy of the current Wikipedia
(3) A copy of the current Project Gutenberg
For a large enough installation of OLPC machines, it's possible that at least the second and maybe the third could be installed in distributed form on the devices themselves, rather than requiring a server, although that almost also requires redundancy and mesh networking to deal with lost/damaged/stolen devices..
-- Terry
I'd rather all that money provided books and proper teachers.
Hint: proper teachers need proper salaries, otherwise you get the teaching monkeys you find in schools today, save for the occasional inspired teachers who do it because it's their vocation. Money spent in useless laptops = more crap teachers.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Imagine if I turned up to a job interview and said "employ me - my education was built round the ZX81 microcomputer - so I am the person for your job!"
My first computer had a Z80 in it, i tried to teach myself assembler on it.
Should i be ashamed of that now ?
"Assembler"? Luxury. We had to program our Z80s in hexadecimal.
No sig today...
I know you are joking, but I didn't have an assembler when I learned z80 assembly (using a ZX Spectrum+), and had to translate the op codes by hand to decimal using tables, and then entering them into memory using a for loop.
(4) Open Street Map (a slippy map server perhaps)
(5) Some satellite image of the Earth (NASA WorldWind, maybe)
I had it easy with my 6502.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't build children's educational frameworks around a particular device, or an operating system, or any other single technological artefact or format.
You misunderstand the choice here. It's not choosing to base a program base on one device or many but having a laptop program to expose the kids to computer and tech skills or take 3 to 8 years to find the funding and develop a well rounded curriculum for multiple devices while the children complete their education never having used a computer at school.
Learning how to operate one device is a huge head start for real tech training than never having spent any meaningful time in front of one of them. The employer also knows that they are technologically capable and are likely to be able to learn on the job. They are being used for primary and and secondary not tertiary education.
No. Assembler is still a useful language.
Try fitting a timing sensitive C program on a PIC10 series MCU and you'll see what i mean.
It just comes down to how you wrote the hex-loader
;)
10 DATA "ED5B60EA"
Decimal wasn't a requirement....
I'm not a school teacher, but I think there are many advantages when children learn how to write with their own hands.
The way we face math problems drawing and sketching things is not an ability just to solve math problems. We developed a way to think and then show our ideas for others to understand.
I think it's a phenomenal idea to have "Computer Class" some hours every week, but make the education system around computers is absurd.
OLPC will "...build an educational ecosystem around the laptops". Fail.
Depends on how closely, and what exactly, them mean by saying 'around the laptops'. That could mean as little as "Given that the laptops are there, and can be assumed as a resource in the hands of students, we can now plan a series of etexts, electronic assessments, educational websites, etc. That seems reasonable enough, albeit subject to the usual pitfalls of making computers in education work.
Even some level of customization(ie. it'd be pretty painless to whip together a default CSS stylesheet for maximum readability on a known-model screen) isn't necessarily bad.
If they have a bunch of x86/linux/sugar native binaries that'll be dated in a year planned, they should strongly consider thinking again. Especially if they've managed to commit the unforgivable sin of building a 'computer education' curriculum that revolves around "These are the buttons to press in product XYZ that will be obsolete before you graduate..."
I think that is why the OLPC software is all about sharing between students and teachers. ie one student can start an application and other student can join him/her with his/her XO and see the problems being solved or help solve them. It's not like you sitting at home in the back room figuring things out and unless you save and sent the application and file nobody can see what you did.
I agree that manual skills need to be taught but the OLPC XO and Sugar software was designed for sharing and solving problems with others. Lots of work went into designing the Mesh networking which allows devices to connect to each other in a one-to-one configuration and a many-to-many configuration.
The original XO did have an area for use with a drawing pencil/pointer but it didn't work well but the next gen of XO is supposed to be a tablet so even manual input(hand drawings etc ) will be possible.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
There's no single method that will work for all education settings but the widespread introduction of computers would benefit a lot of kids - particularly early on. For example, the coordination to use a pencil with any degree of accuracy simply isn't there for a fair percentage of kids starting school. For them it would probably be beneficial to start with a computer. That way they can concentrate on improving their literacy using a keyboard without being held back because they simply haven't reached a certain stage of physical development. When their fine motor control improves they can apply what the already know in learning to write. If integrating computers into the classroom means that a reasonably intelligent kid doesn't fall behind because their brain is still mastering making everything move like it should or allows teachers to engage with a wider range of learning styles then I'm all for it.
The fact that a computer is being fully integrated with the curriculum doesn't mean it will be used exclusively or all the time - it needs to be that way to be any use in the classroom. If you can't match it up with what you're supposed to be teaching it's useless. It is then up to the teacher to decide how and when to best use it. A good teacher will use the most appropriate medium to teach the subject matter. Obviously things like writing, drawing, and certain practical elements of science are poorly suited to being done on a computer but that doesn't make the presence of the computer any less useful.
Perhaps the laptops should be issued to all students who do all their homework and appear to be giving school a go. Don't have to be good, but should try and be rewarded for it.
Both you and the grandparent are completely missing the point. The world has changed and Reading wRiting and aRithmetic are no longer sufficient. Every single person needs to properly understand computation and computers otherwise they will never understand the world around them and will believe in Voodoo like voting machines and terrorist profiling. If you only give the bright kids computers they will be stigmatised as different and the others will fall behind. Even normal things, like writing a letter, have completely changed and are becoming as valuable as Latin*. Normal jobs for normal people are now advertised on Facebook and for most people's lives; definitely those that are educated today, writing a social network posting may be a more important skill that normal writing. That's a really scary world for people who have only a traditional education and haven't made the shift to computing.
Something has to be done. Previous attempts with standard computers have failed with either the students simply playing games (given Windows computers at home) or with Teachers simply repeating old subjects on a computer and without getting much learning benefit at all. OLPC may be misguided, but it isn't misguided in the way it's primitivist critics seem to think; it has at least attempted to identify and address most of the real practical and educational problems that other projects have failed with.
* Which is to say; Doctors and some other people really need Latin. A person who doesn't know a little Latin or at least recognise it as Latin is in trouble in lots of situations. Latin is actually pretty surprisingly useful, for a dead language. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if physical Letter writing doesn't become almost completely restricted to specialists like lawyers soon. Just like Latin.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Imagine if I turned up to a job interview and said "employ me - my education was built round the ZX81 microcomputer - so I am the person for your job!".
Actually, if I needed to employ someone to program a modern microcontroller (PIC or AVR), I'd consider 8-bit micro experience a bonus.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I know you are joking,
Um, no. I really did write programs in hexadecimal, on Z80 and 6502 (using Commodore PET hex monitor).
No sig today...
Nope. I wrote a program to edit the memory directly.
No sig today...