[Educators] World Bank study on computer use, February 2009

[Yama Ploskonka]

Earlier this year it was announced there was a momentous World Bank 
study to be published. We  were warned it might be quite negative to the 
OLPC project.

If this is that study, I find it very tame, nothing new really, and 
nothing we cannot improve - if we want and dare to see reality.
/
/*http://tinyurl.com/d3gtto*
http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165259&piPK=64165421&theSitePK=469372&menuPK=64166093&entityID=000158349_20090211111507

yes, computers in education are mostly useless, doh, unless they are 
integrated to the existing process.  Why don't people focus on that, I 
don't know. (BTW, to integrate them to the teaching process, supporting 
the teachers' work, is the approach we expect to use within OLE Bolivia) 
(another BTW, talking with an international expert of UNICEF in Bolivia 
I was told she had never seen something like that kind of integration, 
ever, anywhere - go figure, seems /*so*/ obvious!)

Just to spell out what I am talking about right here, 
constructivism/ionism is /*not*/ connected to the educational process.

My emphasis,
from the abstract,                                                       
/           "Overall, the program seems to have had little
effect on students' test scores and other outcomes. These
results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and
gender. *The main reason for these results seems to be the
failure to incorporate the computers into the educational
process.*"/

from the text,
"/ *The main reason for these results may be the implementation
of the program*. Surveys of both teachers and students suggest that the 
program increases
computer use among students and teachers by a surprising small amount, 
and most of the
use of computers by students is for the purposes of learning to use a 
computer rather than
studying language.    Additionally, the extra computer use reported by 
teachers is
concentrated in the lower grades with older students' teachers reporting 
almost no
computer use in both groups."

/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/educators/attachments/20090313/c19b87ca/attachment.htm