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So who needs teachers?

Dropping off tablets, so that the push towards bovine media-consumer computing can reach even third-world countries. That's benevolent.

And am I the only one who finds it just a little uncomfortable that it's apparently cool to use poor foreign children as guinea pigs for your pet educational theories on the assumption that whatever the end result, it must obviously be better than what they would've had otherwise? How very Imperial Britain.
 
I am aware of it, yeah. And...not evil, but perhaps blithely ignorant. Good intentions don't automatically equal good ideas, let alone good results. The idea that dropping in locked-down devices running simpleton educational software (on an OS that actively tries to differ from anything they would ever encounter on other computers, no less) is going to somehow nebulously transform their situation, irrespective of any questions of why their situation is the way it is to begin with, smacks of isolated academics seeking validation rather than any kind of practical solution to real-world problems. It's the modern White Man's Burden, and I'm not the first or best person to say that.

I don't want to dump on Negroponte, but let's be serious, here. He's a Wired columnist and an architect, he's not someone with a background in education. Does he think that, even if these things do teach real reading comprehension to kids, that that's just magically going to make things in Ethiopia better? Are rural villages just going to spontaneously transform into cities so that literacy is suddenly their biggest problem?

I mean, yes, if you give a computer to a child, they're going to play around with it. But re-enabling the camera and customizing the desktop layout? That's the kind of stuff that happened in the first week of me having a Mac when I was eight. That's not transformative revolutions in education. The hints the article makes at actual steps in education - alphabet songs and writing "Lion" - are things that could just as easily be simple mimicry as actual learning, and they're things that one adult with a basic education and a free schedule could accomplish just as easily, with the added bonus of being able to intelligently adapt to the specific students and their actual needs in real-time.
 
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I have no problems in them dropping off computers if they were not locked down, let the locals do whatever they want with them. Even in the 3rd world there are people who know how computers work and can help the others do things with them. Without the internet those kids might actually have some fun and learn programming.

I do wonder what kind of "learning" those kids will get that will help them in day to day living they won't get from the village (hunting, cooking, shelter building, local history, etc).
 
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I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and wait and see what comes of this.

It could be that there might be a better way to educate a young mind than to cram him into a room with 30 other kids listening to a teacher work from state-approved texts. I didn't start really learning history until I was out of school, for example.
 
Chuck(G) said:
It could be that there might be a better way to educate a young mind than to cram him into a room with 30 other kids listening to a teacher work from state-approved texts.
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I think there most definitely are better ways than that - but I don't think they lie in the direction of removing the human element from teaching completely. I think maybe giving teachers more freedom to adapt to the students' needs might perhaps be a better direction.
 
I suspect the news story gilds the lily somewhat, as the sainted Nicholas has been known to do. He is, after all, a tech evangelist. Unless somebody in that village, or visiting regularly, had pretty serviceable English already, the supposedly illiterate kids would never have navigated menus or grasped settings protocols. Graphical icons can take you only so far.

One of the comments to the story tells of meeting a group of Ethiopian kids in a remote area who had a pretty good grasp of basic computing concepts, though they had never seen a computer. They had been taught in school.

I've been learning about computing at amateur level for thirty years driven by curiosity and with never a formal lesson, but I have access to manuals, the internet, and the freely shared experience of professionals and pro-ams such as those who populate this forum. Laptops have a place, but customizing desktop screens is (literally) superficial. The greatest tech boon to the least developed economies has been cellular telephony and particularly text messaging, which transforms lives dramatically through low-cost enabling human networks, markets and social services of all kinds. Teachers are important social role models in a village, not just interactive information systems.

Rick
 
So I finally was able to buy an older model and play with it a few years back. (Wish I could just buy the darned thing from them or the 1+1 deal would return, which I find sorta ridiculous that I can't).

With the older unit it's mostly pictures for icons, it's relatively word independent for that reason. It was the earlier design/OS that booted with a circular menu. I didn't find it particularly intuitive myself but I was able to get around and finally play with some of the interesting apps like a synthesizer/electronic simulation app.

From reading about it at the time that was a big goal with a newer OS they were working on to make it much simpler. It was a common complaint with recipients that I was reading, there wasn't enough time or educators out there to teach the teachers how to use the systems so they weren't feeling they could adequately make them useful for the students.

I think this article is emphasizing that change in the layout and ease of use/productivity which hopefully is good for the cause. They do have a nice emulated environment you can download and see how it runs or use to develop other apps. I apparently know the person in charge of their computer check-out library here in Austin and he was willing to check me out one but I let him know as interesting as it is I really wouldn't have time to develop stuff for it. Maybe in the future. I certainly would like to see the newer models though. I know mine and probably the newer ones aren't really upgradeable (can't upgrade ram which I find odd) so it does limit the function they can serve a bit. I imagine like other *nix appliances they end up obsoleted and unsupported by newer versions of the operating system that the current system can't handle. While mine was cool it did lag here and there with the audio/synth program which was a bit annoying. Not sure what that's about or if it was a beta app or perhaps I just have a low end system even for that model.
 
I found the article interesting. Does it stink of a technogeek going "ooh?" Of course! But is it also possible??? Yes... I think so. Though probably not in all cases, certainly.

It's been proven over and over again that the art of learning and the art of teaching are ever-evolving processes. During the 13 years I was in school from the 80's through '96, I saw the shift from teaching by training students to regurgitate memorized information to teaching by immersing students in the subject with auditory and visual aids to go along with the text, as studies had proven that people retain the information more easily and have a better understanding of that information when it's presented in multiple manners. Now, it's further continuing... or at least trying to if we would get our priorities past standardized tests and overpopulated classrooms. I'm all for using new methods, and if that means dropping some tablets on some poor village kids in Ethiopia to use as Guinea pigs who wouldn't have the opportunity to learn otherwise... why not? So long as we're up front about them being Guinea pigs, I mean.
 
I believe they're learning at a steady pace due to the fact that each individual "student" begins and learns at their own pace. When learning is forced upon them in a controlled classroom, some will fall behind and not have a clue of what the "teacher" is trying to get across. Then the student gets discouraged and falls into a seemingly endless cycle of cluelessness and loss of faith in any motivation to move foreward.

Then again, I think there should be a group of them that have a teacher giving instuctions on how to use the device and having a cirriculum to go along with the learning objective. Then we can really compare to see the learning pace of kids without teachers vs kids with teachers.
 
personally, I look forward to the day they can implant a tiny chip in my head that gives me complete access to the sum of human knowledge. I would be very disappointed if it doesn't happen in the next 20 or so years. I also want my flying car while I'm at it...
 
Yeah but are you going to still get the implant when the government decides what knowledge is allowed to be shared or filtered? ;-)
 
barythrin said:
Yeah but are you going to still get the implant when the government decides what knowledge is allowed to be shared or filtered? ;-)
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It won't matter, he'll have already gotten it by then. They'll hold off on the control at first until adoption is high enough that they can count on a significant degree of control. You know, like they did with the Internet.
 
The whole idea, drop the tablets, step back and see what happens is like they dealing with monkeys in the zoo, not with humans needing a practical education. It's an experiment on children.

Anyway, they used Motorola Xoom tablets, they costs more than 500$, so I dont know if its even economic...
 
Exactly. It's just the kind of thing you'd expect from a bunch of futurists who think that "bridging the digital divide" is the solution to all the world's ills because it happens to be the thing they write books about. Which would just be inane if they were handing these things out from their own funds, but they're getting the governments of these countries to help foot the bill with funds that could be going to help address more crucial needs...
 
Homunculus said:
The whole idea, drop the tablets, step back and see what happens is like they dealing with monkeys in the zoo, not with humans needing a practical education. It's an experiment on children.

Anyway, they used Motorola Xoom tablets, they costs more than 500$, so I dont know if its even economic...
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Maybe not Xoom, but there's competition:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-india-tablet-idUSTRE7940YV20111005

The point of all of this is that the kids would normally be getting no education. Even a little bit of learning, such as basic literacy and arithmetic would give them a huge boost in life. If you can do it with tablets, where you could ordinarily not afford teachers, I say why not?
 
Well, the original article said Xoom tablets, but yes it makes more sense to use cheapo tabs.

The biggest problems in Ethiopia are the lack of food and the health problems. They basically starving and dying from easily curable infections.
It sadly wont change just because they can read.
 
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