What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs
to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months,
they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on
your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of
delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no
education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional
curricula. 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.
Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom
tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with
teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it
delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia , taped shut, with no
instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it
if you want, see ya!”
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are
like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books,
no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing.
And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you
might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would
be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?
But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes
there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages
(nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language
operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the
tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas
Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No
instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes!
Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off
switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days,
they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing
ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked
Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the
camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC
really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in
English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don’t
even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but
very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all
of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for
education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have
shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and
write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.
via:
Surrogate Self
via: DVICE
Evan Ackerman, Oct 30, 2012
source: MIT
A bold experiment by
the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown “encouraging” results.
By David Talbot on
October 29, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment