OLPC Australia Pushes Boundaries of Education 37
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Soulskill
from the xo-also-serves-as-a-kangaroo-defense-mechanism dept.
from the xo-also-serves-as-a-kangaroo-defense-mechanism dept.
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."
build children's education around needs, not tech! (Score:5, Interesting)
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?".
Wrong starting point (Score:4, Interesting)