Roberto Greco (@rogre)10/31/12 12:06 AM
@fat4thought @monk51295 I have a system to sell you. ;) In other news, a little space goes a long way. dvice.com/archives/2012/…
Roberto Greco (@rogre)10/31/12 12:28 AM
@monk51295 @fat4thought Did you see "Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction"? dvice.com/archives/2012/… via @Matt_Arguello
What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/
The idea of dropping off tablets outside of the context of schools is a new paradigm for OLPC. Through the late 2000s, the company was focused on delivering a custom miniaturized and ruggedized laptop, the XO, of which about 3 million have been distributed to kids in 40 countries. Deployments went to schools including ones in Peru (see “Una Laptop por Nino”).
Giving computers directly to poor kids without any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes. “What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we give them tool to read and learn—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?”
In an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early results are promising, reaching conclusions about whether children could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets funded, it would need to continue for another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte said. “We’d have to start with a new village and make a clean start.”maybe not that long.. no?
maybe it's not so much about the scientific community accepting it - as it is about what works..
imagine we do it in the us alongside - showing both ends are currently impoverished of learning and curiosity.. of attachment and authenticity
imagine it only taking 10 months..
what tech wants.. no?
emtech-preview-another-way-to-think-about-learning/
exactly - Why I hope kids in Ethiopia can teach the rest of us something profound about education.
As we industrialized learning and created schools, we needed to measure the system’s efficacy and each child’s progress. What you really want to measure is curiosity, imagination, passion, creativity, and the ability to see things from multiple points of view. But these are hard to measure other than one on one, and even then, the assessment will be subjective. So instead, we measure what a child knows, and from that we infer that the child has learned how to learn. This is the real aspiration we have for our children: learning learning.
so true - connections are gold - who are the richest..?
our bling is keeping us from what matters most.
our obsession with proof is keeping us from what matters most.
no?
we have now turned our attention to the 100 million kids worldwide who do not go to first grade. Most of them do not go because there is no school, there are no literate adults in their village, and there is little promise of that changing soon. My colleagues and I have started an experiment in two such villages, asking a simple question: can children learn how to read on their own?
Whether this can happen has yet to be proved. But not only will the results tell us how to reach the rest of the 100 million kids much faster than we can by building schools and training teachers, they should also tell us a great deal about learning in the developed world. If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?
The message will be very simple: children can learn a great deal by themselves. More than we give them credit for. Curiosity is natural, and all kids have it unless it is whipped out of them, often by school. Making things, discovering things, and sharing things are keys. Having massive libraries of explicative material like modern-day encyclopedias or textbooks is fine. But such access may be much less significant than building a world in which ideas are shaped, discovered, and reinvented in the name of learning by doing and discovery.
Nicholas Negroponte Guest Contributor
Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab, and the chairman of the One Laptop Per Child foundation.
monika hardy (@monk51295)10/29/12 9:09 PM
unaware of the importance of attachment..amzn.com/k/6NxNZVfLTKm8… #Kindle
Roberto Greco (@rogre)10/31/12 12:16 AM
@fat4thought @monk51295 Questions I am tired of answering: What about socialization? How will they learn to be with kids their age?
Amy Lewark (@fat4thought)10/31/12 12:27 AM
@monk51295 who are the grandparents now? Born 1950's... See Sheehy's researchtinyurl.com/9bcvzbh
Amy Lewark (@fat4thought)10/31/12 12:37 AM
@monk51295 research shows that before age 3, vocabulary, IQ, and brain size determined by attachment to *adult*
gabor mate on attachment and authenticity
i'm thinking the problem is we're not addressing the two most basic needs of people:
attachment and authenticity.
gabor mate has a talk that addresses them beautifully...
attachment being the connection with one adult
[our - being known by someone - be us]
authenticity being the real you
[our - talk to yourself daily - be you]
