Classroom tools

[Y.Sonoda]

2008/1/15, Jameson Chema Quinn <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu>:

> The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom
> interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the
> focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric
> interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning.
> Raising hands

(Sorry for my duplicate mail, I unwittingly sent my post to your
personal email address. ;-P)

I think the topic you are posing here is very important and draw my
deep interest.

Partially I agree with the some lacks of powerful tools for teachers
to support the children's "learning" outside of the XO. And I also
think it is natural that the teachers who are making tremendous effort
to educate care about some kind of system or mechanism to perform
their ways of "teaching" in OLPC scheme.
I also think the collaboration tools between teachers and children you
proposed here can be "one of the support tools (or assist mechanisms)"
for many teachers who would like to commit OLPC activities with the
will.

But I guess the starting point of the discussion seems turn aside from
the main track which OLPC is aiming for.

According to "Construntionism" theory OLPC relies on, any children
have their own "model of understanding the world" (that is "shema" and
those are all different each other. As the children interact with the
real world, they learn by themselves using their shema, "assimilating"
this model to the phenomena first, and accommodating it to adjust for
better understanding next. This causes new shema, or knowledge, and
these new shema will be also assimilated and accommodated repeatedly.
Along with these series of interaction with the real world, children
"learn".  On the other hand, the opposite idea is "Instructionism" in
which teacher poses question and children answer.

So, the beginning of your discussion makes me feel some kind of contradiction.

If we respect OLPC "Learning learning" policy, what we are aiming for
as support tools for the teachers ( or children supporters, generally
) is not the tools to implement the current teaching schemes into OLPC
framework, but those develops and accelerate the collaborations among
childrens including supporters.

But let me say one more thing. Making use of "constructionism" theory
doesn't means the unnecessity of the teachers, but the role of the
teachers changes.

In the "Learning learning" world, children questions to themselves or
pose them among other children, some of them are alone and others may
get together the groups in which all of them have same questions. What
questions will be posed, in which each children have interest, and
their timing are all unsynchronized, so that it is almost impossible
to synchronize children to obey some kind of curriculum to progress
"class" one by one. Forcing something regardless of their interest
will rather lose their obsession.

But generally speaking, as you anxious about, it seems there are lacks
of supporting tools for supporters, though XO as the standalone
personal learning tool is well done. So I think it is OK to prepare
the tools you proposed as an one of varieties of supporting tools if
OLPC has enough resources ( or enough and skillful volunteers).

One thing we should care about is that the main track is to respect
"Learning learning" policy if we make some effort under OLPC, and we
need more powerful tools or systems for supporters to help children's
learning whose classroom is under the tree.

Spiky