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One Tablet Per Child Program Begins In Thailand
societyofrobots writes "Thailand has now put the first 50,000 of a planned 800,000 tablets into the hands of elementary students. Each tablet costs only $80/unit, runs Android ICS, and was manufactured in China. Opponents claim it to be a very expensive populist policy to 'buy votes', while proponents argue it could bypass the root causes of poor education in the country: outdated books and unskilled teachers."
Teach them, young, to be CONSUMERS of content; not creators of it!
Teach them, young, to be CONSUMERS of content; not creators of it!
You mean, just like the Joe Sixpacks ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I hope they have thought about infrastructre and proper teacher training before they spend this amount of money
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Even a powerful and flexible tool is useless if teachers don't know how to use it. I had the same experience with Multimedia Interactive Whiteboards at my daughter school: great potential, but teachers ignore the features and have no practice.
they have more to worry about if elementary school students are voting!
for humanity.
Even if 80% of the teachers lack knowledge, with this gear, at least the kids stand a chance of growing up with technology, and can get online somehow, and get access to vast amounts of information, the young minds so heartily crave.
Sure, a bunch of them will be sold off by poor families, and a lot will not know what to do with them, but it's a start. This is VERY forward thinking from the Thai gov. and very promising, never mind the votes, this will be great for their people. This will give the kids a taste of technology, and who knows? Maybe that's exactly what's needed to get just ONE kid off to become that great engineer in the future, if so - it's already a success.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Woo hoo, sez the pornographers! 800,000 new horny young minds for us to be purveyors of fine porn to!! What a bonanza!!!
Can we get one of the things to raffle, winner being whomever guesses how many minutes or seconds it took for them to be jailbroken?
Yes, that will vault them into an educational wonderland.
The assumption with little evidence that putting computers in classrooms at great expense is better than spending the money elsewhere is astounding. Just because alpha geeks enjoy "learning" with computers most people use them as a passive tool. This is not that such tools are good or bad as general consumer items but it is hard to claim that they are a miracle cure for an education system. It is about as a ludicrous claim as "Jesus Saves"
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If the issue is unskilled teachers, I don't think tablets can make miracles.
Rather, invest in long-distance video conferencing gear!
"...proponents argue it could bypass the root causes of poor education in the country: outdated books and unskilled teachers."
Let me get this right: Outdated books and unskilled teachers won't matter if we give the children tablets?
That's like saying lack of food and water won't matter, as long as we have internet access and air conditioning.
At any age only a small fraction of students can truly learn well on their own. And any student has a better chance with a good teacher. To quote Isaac Asimov (from a differrent matter) this is like trying to cure diarrhoea by modifying the plumbing; it's not dealing with the real problems.
...that's what the children will have, for better or worse.
wikipedia does quite nicely replace either outdated/beat-up textbooks or overcomes a text book shortage.
even if the teachers are not replaced, those who can and want to learn, can do so with the tablets :D
Tablets and other IT stuff are merely tools. Just by giving kids a tablet won't change anything.
Give some random stranger who never played music in his life a Stradivari and he won't be any better.
1. Educate your teachers and make them good. (or fire them)
THEN 2. You can educate your kids using tablets.
The caption in the Bangkok Post article reads 'A worker loads boxes labelled "One Tablet Per Child" on to a truck at the Education Ministry in Bangkok. The ministry sent off trucks on Wednesday to deliver the first batch of 55,000 tablet computers to primary schools in eight provinces.'.
Are they saying that all 55,000 boxes are currently sitting at the Education Ministry in Bangkok? Such logistical half-assedness would add at least a dollar a unit to the final cost I should imagine. Or more likely it was just a photo op and the Bangkok Post didn't properly attribute it as such. This being Thailand, and this being the Bangkok Post (establishment ring kissers), we can never be sure.
This isn't a magical silver bullet; nothing is. But these tablets cost $80 and are planned to last for three years; that's less than $30 per year, and then the student gets to keep the 3-year-old tablet. The tablet can serve as a textbook, or can run interactive lessons, and the article says the Thai education ministry is developing tutorial content that will run on the tablets.
Like the OLTP XO computers, these tablets will have no moving parts, and no cooling fan. If they are well-made, they should be reliable even in Thailand's climate; and they may be more cost-effective than paper textbooks.
P.S. It's amazing to me how so many people here can speed-read a summary and go straight to the dismissive comments about how this won't solve anything, etc. Presumably the Thai education ministry studied the problem and came to the conclusion that these tablets would be worth buying. Maybe you really are that much smarter than the Thai education ministry... or, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to make a snap judgement.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I live in thailand and in the last 2 years. 2 things have got done.
#1 3G acesss.
#2 Tablets in the hands of kids.
That is a hell of a improvement.
The previous military goverments parlament. Keep in mind thailand is still not a democracy.
They met twice.
#1 1 time was to give themselves a raise.
#2 Start a war with cambodia.
For the record these tablets where supposed to be in the hands of the kids over 2 years ago. Before current goverment was in place.
Nuff said.
I'm still waiting for a ladyboy comment.
A free slave with each tablet? I'm fairly sure that some economic analysis would value human life in certain countries cheaply enough.
Computers are just tools, like a hammer or a gun. All tools require responsibility and skills to use properly. When used improperly they can be destructive.
"outdated books and unskilled teachers"
There is the problem, and I take it these conditions are completely ignored? So we pass out computers?
Great, more facebook users and youtube cellphone videos of flash mob rioting.
Riiiiight. /Dr. Evil
Considering you are typing this on a computer, connected to the internet. Face it Luddite, ebooks, internet, computers, tablets, are the FUTURE, and the future is now.
half of them won't last 3 months between theft, selling, or damage
I'm so old that when I read "One Tablet Per Child Program" I thought it meant there was a shortage of some medication.
I'm going back to bed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
in rural thailand 80 usd is roughly what it costs to rent a small house for a month
The USA is also moving towards one tablet per child except here it is called Ritalin.
I live in Thailand and have followed this development for the past few months. The tablets cannot access the Internet and the contents in the tablets are atrocious. I don't think it will work as an effective educational tool.
Tablets can run programming languages, drawing programs, word processing, etc. Why can't they create content on it?
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This is an excellent training tool to prepare students for later life and situations like:
1) Waiting for a train that is cancelled
2) Watching paint dry
3) Racing snails with chronic fatigue syndrome through molasses
That's what Chinese tablets running ICS are like.
I don't know if anyone has been keeping track, but there's this thing called the internet where you can get a really good education for free. Tablets will give children access to this internet.
We currently have four major players in this arena:
This is in addition to all the universities which are putting lecture videos online, along with course materials and (in a few cases) the textbook content. Oh, and youtube videos of lectures, and the zillion-and-one websites explaining whichever subject you're interested in. Google "relativity" or "tensors" sometime - see if you can find an explanation that works for you.
An experiment in India has shown that when you give uneducated, poor children access to an internet-connected computer they figure things out on their own. Complex, interesting, and difficult things that you might not expect an ignorant user to manage. (Such as typing a thank-you note without access to a keyboard.)
This is all you need, kids will figure things out for themselves. Having a teacher to nudge them in the right direction, or help them over a difficult part is just gravy.
Kids are voracious learners, and have always been. Abe Lincoln used to sit at home practicing his "ciphering" (arithmetic) by drawing numbers on a shovel with charcoal. Over and over, until he got comfortable with the math. All kids do this - it's in the nature of growing up.
Just giving kids access to material will be a huge leap over the current situation. Schools and teachers are extra.
Is it me, or are the only people who really believe tablets are useful in a professional business/school environment people who don't really understand technology? We were issued iPads at my work and I've used it exactly ZERO times in the last year. It takes longer to take notes on the iPad and it's slower than writing on a pad. Then there's the problem of synchronizing email between the iPad and the desktop. Most of the time the boss, who had the bright iPad idea, has to be guided through the most simple of tasks on the iPad by IT staff. The only reason it was a "good idea" is because the boss thinks they're cool, but hasn't actually managed to find any real use for them.
To illustrate the depths of the stupidity, the boss proclaimed the iPads as a step towards the paperless future. So what happens when she gets an email on her iPad? She prints it and brings me the paper copy. "Forward? What's that?"
"Each tablet costs only $80/unit"
Umm, does the summary really need to say "$80/unit" rather than just "$80", seeing as it already states at the start of the sentence that this is the cost of "each tablet"? Unless each single tablet can be a variable number of units...
Tablets as they are today are not and will never be reaching devices, they are media devices, period. A true teaching devices is one that has a monochrome screen and a blinking cursor.
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They have internet access but they are incredibly slow, the keyboard is non-existent and annoying, the resolution is horrendous, and the fact that it's not even compatible with PC's is a huge set-back. Unless these kids are getting a windows 8 tablet that comes with a keyboard and mouse, then i don't see a point to it.