Like Alida, I was initially suspicious of the OLPC project too. Rich Americans helping the poor, bah, humbug. But the
harder I looked at it the more I ended up liking it. There is pages of
questions and answers (including Alida's questions) about it here:-- <br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question</a><br>
(scroll down menu on RHS)<br><br>I've included OLPC as an issues study in some of my planned 2008 courses<br><br>Tony answered some of Alida's questions - I'd like to have a go too. Substitute the word "education" for "laptop" in this sentence:
<br><br>"it would be a good idea to distribute better <laptops> to the third world"<br><br>Then it becomes a question of demonstrating that the OLPC is the best shot at jump starting education in the third world. eg. the OLPC contains many books and can be used in low power book reader mode - so the learners receive books this way as well as the other extensive functionality
<br><br>Rather than spend xxx dollars (not available) on trying to emulate a western education system in the third world is it possible to leap a generation and leverage the children directly through the OLPC project? That is the stated aim. (see Negroponte quote at end) Yes, there are some important social / cultural implications here.
<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">> Will
it use American software which has American English and uses structures
and sensibilities that are ubiquitously American (and insidious) and
therefore difficult for other cultures to understand?<br></div><br>All the software is FOSS (Linux, python, etoys, abiword etc.) and FOSS has a better Internationalisation record than proprietary software. (Roland has presented on this wrt his khmer students). Laptops going to Thailand will have a Thai keyboard, thai language etc.
<br><span class="e" id="q_115cc318f24811b3_1"></span><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">> How do we know the black market won't steal these machines
for their nefarious profit making?<br>> Corrupt governments can use them to
push their agendas online and in classrooms<br></div><br>Black market and corruption are real concerns - more so for many third world governments. <br><br>Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati has asked for (band-) aid to be stopped:
<br><br>"Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years.
If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should
finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the
most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape.
Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent
remains poor."<br><a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html">http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html</a><br><ul><li>welfare bureaucracies are financed</li><li>
corruption develops<br></li><li>creates a dependence, beggar mentality</li><li>weakens local markets</li><li>dampens spirit of entrepreneurship</li><li>food grants undermine local farmers</li><li>inhibits trade between African countries
</li></ul>Seems to me that a developmental type project (educational) is more justifiable - one that will help the poor help themselves. Not a band-aid but a fishing rod.<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">> What divide will occur
between the computer literate child and their non-savvy parents?<br></div><br>Since children are better learners than adults then when modernity is introduced into the third world generational divides will open up. No doubt about that, although it remains to be seen how well each community will manage it.
<br><br>The OLPC initiator, Negroponte said:<br><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">"You are not going to have peace in the world as long as you have
poverty. And, the only way to eliminate poverty is education. If you
focus on education, particularly primary education, along the way you
are going to have other second-order effects like the environment, like
lowering the cost of health education, lots of things. If you focus on
education you can do a great deal more than if you look other places to
solve the particular problem. </div> <p style="margin-left: 40px;">There are 1.2 billion children
in the world. Fifty percent of them don't have electricity, 50% of them
live in the rural parts of the world. The reason that's important is
that when you live in a rural part of a poor nation, even though that
poverty is a much better form of poverty than urban poverty which is
the absolute worse, it's also so primitive that children will often
have as a school a tree. </p> <p style="margin-left: 40px;">Or some of the teachers won't show
up, or the teachers will have a 6th-Grade education at best. So, if you
look at that and you say to yourself: "How do I fix that? How do I deal
with that?" It is not by training teachers, it is not by building
schools. In all due respect, it's not about curriculum or content. </p> <p style="margin-left: 40px;">It's
about levering the children themselves. Children are extraordinary - we
don't give children enough credit for what they can do. I mean, we all
know when your cell phone breaks you give it to a 12 year old, when you
don't know how to use your laptop you ask your kid. We all know that!
And yet we sort of think that they have to, after the age of 6, stop
learning by doing and learn by being told. </p> <p style="margin-left: 40px;"> And, in the best
of situations, a child in the developing world is in a classroom 2 1/2
hours a day, five days a week, which averages a lot less than 2 hours a
day over the week. So, even if you make that experience better, you're
only dealing with a small part of the problem. So what we did, we said
to ourselves: "How can we actually leverage the child for a lot bigger
part of the day, and do something particularly for the poor children in
remote parts of the developing world?" And we set to do what we call
the "$100 Laptop"."<br><a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/04/negroponte-levering-children.html">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/04/negroponte-levering-children.html</a><br></p><br>Bill Kerr<br>
<a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/</a><br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Alida Bonotto</b> <<a href="mailto:abono@mira.net">abono@mira.net
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
The OLPC leaves me cold, especially with its application in third world
countries. How do we know the black market won't steal these machines
for their nefarious profit making? Corrupt governments can use them to
push their agendas online and in classrooms. What divide will occur
between the computer literate child and their non-savvy parents? Will
it use American software which has American English and uses structures
and sensibilities that are ubiquitously American (and insidious) and
therefore difficult for other cultures to understand?<div><span class="e" id="q_115cc318f24811b3_1"><br>
<br>
Bill Kerr wrote:
<blockquote type="cite">hi Cameron,<br>
<br>
The OLPC has wireless mesh networking and a new user interface (sugar)
based on a community metaphor, which invites extensive collaboration
with each child having their own laptop. In that respect (and some
others) OLPC is superior to its new low price rivals from Intel etc.
<br>
<a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/05/community-user-interface.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/05/community-user-interface.html</a>
<br>
<br>
If each child owns the laptop then that open up potential for home use
- as well as the clearly important "sense of personal ownership"
<br>
<br>
I agree with you that if the laptops are introduced and teachers keep
to their old techniques and lesson plans then its not going to work
very well at all<br>
<br>
That is sort of the point of this discussion - where would / should it
lead?
<br>
<br>
Papert has argued for years that maths could be transformed with one
laptop per child but that it doesn't work with other ratios. The
pencil argument, it would be poor education to chain up pencils in a
lab or to insist on sharing of pencils<br>
<br>
As you say:<br>
<div style="margin-left: 40px;">The laptop struggles to break out
from being
a glorified word-processor, file storage and email client to the off
the shelf tool that gets used as needed, to develop a solution for the
problem at hand.<br>
</div>
<br>
With OLPC the laptop does or should develop or appear to develop some
sort of agency of its own, it demands to be used in new and different
ways - are the teachers up to it?<br>
<br>
btw I attended a conference at Methodist Ladies College (Melbourne) in
circa 1980 when every child had a laptop and they were using logo
extensively (David Loader was the Principal). <br>
<br>
Your points about forcing collaboration are interesting and I'd like to
hear more about the tool you mention that facilitates a process whereby
students "produce work that reflects their own knowledge, not the
groups
knowledge"<br>
<br>
I'm wary of formalising collaboration in an institutional sense. I
think learners have the right to choose their time and place for
collaboration. When setting up groups I often do permit a group of
one. I'm aware of one very good educational blogger who has been
arguing this for some time: <br>
blog of proximal development<br>
<a href="http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/</a><br>
(I will dig up some of his posts about this particular topic if you
want)<br>
<br>
cheers,<br>
-- <br>
Bill Kerr
<br>
<a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Cameron Bell</b> <<a href="mailto:bell.cameron.p@edumail.vic.gov.au" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
bell.cameron.p@edumail.vic.gov.au</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">But Bill, lots and lots of
schools have implemented laptop programs -
some for many years now. We have found that you don't need one laptop
per child - in fact, I believe that insisting each child having their
own laptop can stifle pedagogical progress. When each child has their
own laptop or they are working in a lab, the teacher is generally just
using the same teaching techniques and lesson plans they always have,
insisting on personal work, students working in isolation
(communicating, but in isolation) with the whole class doing the same
activity at the same time. The laptop struggles to break out from being
a glorified word-processor, file storage and email client to the off
the shelf tool that gets used as needed, to develop a solution for the
problem at hand.<br>
We have run with a one-between-two program here for the past couple of
years (I was skeptical as I had just come from a 1-1 school) and apart
from a couple of dedicated labs, we now deliberately aim for
one-between-two for all our technology infrastructure. It means
students <u>must</u> collaborate as teams on producing work and we are
being forced to develop methods for students to be able to collaborate-
but then produce work that reflects their own knowledge, not the groups
knowledge. It's tricky but I have found a very useful little tool that
enables that to happen in my classes and the rest of the staff have
adapted too! Some of us are creating digital portfolios, this requires
group prac work, but individual reflections. How do you do this with
one-between-two? You are forced to examine individual learning plans,
multiple lesson plans within a lesson, rather than the
one-size-fits-all approach that we have always done. (Primaries have
done this for years!) While 1/2 the class use the laptops for part of
an activity, the other 1/2 are doing another part. For us, this is also
essential to break up a 72 min period and help keep the students
focussed.<br>
One between two is cheaper too! <span><span>
;-) </span></span><br>
Cheers<br>
Cameron<br>
<br>
Bill Kerr wrote:
<blockquote type="cite">
<div><span>There is a large
elephant in the room that no one has
referred to so far: the OLPC<br>
<br>
The one laptop per child non profit project not only plans to deliver
millions of laptops to third world children but has also become a hand
grenade in the commercial world - and has succeeded in forcing down the
price of other laptops now on offer <br>
<br>
<div style="margin-left: 40px; font-style: italic;">"... the
whole
global mind-think around technology has changed. </div>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-style: italic;">No
longer is low cost computing in education a fantasy, no longer
are big technology companies secondary, and everyone wants to sell
technology into classrooms. Intel introduced </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/brazil/olpc_classmate_mobilis.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
Classmate
PC</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> to Brazil, Asustek is </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/intel/negroponte_100_laptop_asus.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
selling
Eee PC's</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> in the USA, and even
thin-client manufactures </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/competition/stephen_dukker_anti_olpc_campaign.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
compare
themselves to OLPC</a><span style="font-style: italic;">."</span><br>
<a href="http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/countries/sales_inhibiting_xo_distribution.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/countries/sales_inhibiting_xo_distribution.html
</a></p>
How will schools and education departments in the wealthy west react to
the fact that in a few years we will have the capability for every
child to have their own laptop? <br>
<br>
Will we treat them like mobile phones and ban them or try to figure out
a way to utilise them for optimal educational development?<br>
<br>
The use and misuse of computers in schools has up until now been based
around the idea that computers mainly belong in labs and / or that
access is limited. The fact of limited access has acted as a powerful
brake for many teachers not to extend their knowledge much beyond the
basics. <br>
<br>
Most (all?) of the maths curriculum could be taught using laptops. In
fact MIT produced a series of books in the 80s for teaching much of
maths and aspects of language and art using logo.<br>
<br>
Shouldn't we factor this potential into the discussion? If we are
talking about the future it might be incorrect to assume that the
pattern of distribution of computers in schools will remain similar to
the present. <br>
<br>
-- <br>
Bill Kerr<br>
<a href="http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/</a><br>
<br>
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