One laptop per child One Laptop per Child Walter Bender 12 March 2008.

transcript

one laptop per child

One Laptop per Child

Walter Bender

12 March 2008

“Technology is anything invented after you were born.”—Alan Kay

a global transformation of educationIt's about giving children who don't have the

opportunity for learning that opportunity: so it's about access; it's about equity; and it's about giving the next generation of children in the developing world a bright and open future.

children lack opportunity, not capability1. High-quality education for every child is

essential to provide an equitable and viable society;

2. A connected laptop computer is the most powerful tool for knowledge creation;

3. Access on a sufficient scale provides real benefits for learning.

a vaccine is an agent of change.

Jonas Salk made the analogy between education reform and immunology: both require scale and reach in order to be successful.

a connected laptop is not a cure

but it is an agency through which children, their teachers, their families, and their communities can manufacture a cure.

They are tools with which to think, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics.

three traits we humans all share

1. we learn (and teach);

2. we express; and

3. we are social.

an expression machine

1. appropriate;

2. debug;

3. collaborate and critique.

five principles

1. child ownership—use of the laptop at home;

2. low ages—ages 6 to 12—low floor, no ceiling;

3. saturation and

4. connection—collaborative and community;

5. free and open—the child is an active participant in a global learning community.

in mathematics, our children live in a “linguistic desert.”—MinskyThe typical vocabulary of school-mathematics is

remarkably small: children learn some nouns and verbs—such as addition, fraction, quotient, divisor, rectangle, parallelogram, and cylinder, equation, variable, function, and graph.

It isn’t enough just to learn nouns; one also needs adequate adjectives: linear; discrete; isomorphic; etc.

looking beyond instruction:

expressing,

constructing,

designing,

modeling,

imagining,

creating,

critiquing,

debugging,

collaborating

exploring, expressing, and sharingweb browserebook readerchatrich media / music / video

word processingJournalwikigraphics; rich media creation

programming:Logo; Etoys; Scratch; Python; Csound; Forth; Javascript

“let them have cell phones”

ZoomInterface

friends view

home view

Collaborative InterfaceWe leverage the mesh network to enable collaborative learning—the presence of children and teachers as collaborators and critiques is always present in the interface.

Journal

Transparency is empowering. Free and open-source software (and content) gives children—and their teachers— the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply.

appropriate to appropriate

Technological incumbency —Calestous Juma

“Resistance to new technologies is strongest when it is perceived that the negative impacts will emerge in the short-run while the benefits will be realized in the long-run. The central policy challenge therefore is how to manage the interactions between new technologies and incumbent social and economic systems.”

Frederick the Great re coffee

“It is disgusting to see the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country… If possible, this must be prevented. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors. Many battles have been fought and won on soldiers nourished on beer; and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended upon to ensure hardship or to beat his enemies in case of the occurrence of another war.”

Juma’s “lessons from history”

perceptions of risks and benefits

demonization and prohibition

innovation and problem-solving

compatibility with tradition

threats to social order

trade and trust

Sometimes the riskiest path is the status quo.

Hassounah

One laptop per child One Laptop per Child Walter Bender 12 March 2008.

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