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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.
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.
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
Nope. What you do is create a national program. This program creates experimental grades with a very low student teacher ratio to create computer based education for each grade. Once an effective model is created for each grade that model is distributed nationally starting at the lowest grades and catching up to higher grades as principles of application are established.
The easiest application is open source open e-book readers instead of text books. Then add in note taking add in direct quizzes in the open text book with correction at the end of the quiz. Now add in interactivity.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Nice American accent.