Saturday, March 24, 2007

"we are impatient, we don't want to lose another generation of kids"

http://www.techreview.com/video/laptop

Video featuring Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert, Walter Bender on the educational philosophy behind the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC)

Negroponte:
The term computer literacy is deadly

There really is an image some people have that the children have to learn about computers, that they have to learn about PowerPoint, Excel because its going to help them in life and they are going to feel "included" in some way

Which is almost tragic as a point of view because children don't have to learn PowerPoint, they have to learn learning - and learning learning is what OLPC is about
Bender:
The real breakthrough is the network, we are giving the children a constant high bandwidth network to each other ...

We are building an expression machine - not just personal expression but criticism, dialogue, collaboration

The most subversive thing on the software front is the ebook reader as a wiki - you get the world's literature - some of it's great and some of it's not - then two things happen:
  • every page in every book has a discussion thread
  • every page in every book can be augmented, changed and illustrated
The long term goal is to transform school and to transform learning - that is something that takes change across the whole of society - we are impatient, we don't want to lose another generation of kids
Negroponte:
Education as being an element of security - eliminating terrorism by eliminating poverty, by eliminating the lack of communication

3 comments:

Durff said...

In watching further in the MIT videos you posted, is a really interesting one on Making Music and how that is the real Mozart effect, just not listening. Active, not passive. This is what Pappert is saying about the 1:1 project too.

Unknown said...

Thanks Bill

Interesting video and insight into the decisions being made on the OLPC. Though Constructionism was mentioned, I would be happier if the creative potential and opportunities for deep thinking had been stressed more.

What authoring tools will be provided? What game authoring tools? There is no doubt that the laptop will be used for playing games, open source games will be provided, closed source games will no doubt be played too.

The video did not convince me that they were thinking enough about authoring tools in general.

Bill Kerr said...

hi tony,

I didn't think Papert's contribution to the video was all that effective in this case. I thought Bender made the best points. At any rate, it was big picture stuff which did not address the detail you are looking for.

Here are a couple of links worth following up wrt your question:

game
development

"The XO Laptops need a true Game SDK but the bigger mission goes beyond that"

focus on grassroots innovations

"b) Software applications not otherwise available on XO that will enhance the general usefulness of XO's in every location. This could be, for example, educational games, collaborative and archiving tools, artistic, video and graphic tools."