Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th May 2008 09:02 UTC
Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.
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Member since:
2005-07-08
As the saying goes, "it's the content, stupid!"
How about we start with a collaborative project to develop a free educational curriculum with textbooks, exercises, lesson plans, etc. under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. If there were a comprehensive education available for consumption or derivation by anyone with a computer, then there would be a strong case for deploying computers in the developing world.
The Web is a great educational resource for the reasonably educated, but a child cannot learn by exploring Wikipedia. Children need a step-by-step program, and to my knowledge, this kind of resource doesn't exist on the Web in a libre/gratis form. I propose a UN-sponsored organization headed by professional educators from around the world to coordinate the distributed development of free and open primary and secondary curricula.