[OLPC India] Some questions

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Satish Jha <jha.satish at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of my friends from Harvard Alumni Group had the following to say:

> I'm familiar with this great initiative. The question I would have is this:
> do you have studies on how the village changes when children get the XO? In
> a poor village can the child be "only" a school learner, or does s/he have
> other roles to play? How does the XO impact those roles?
> Coming off reviewing a major book on bio-tech, I'm impressed with the fact
> that we don't see things enough as flow, as context, as ecology. The XO must
> have major impact, but is it to pull the child out of the village, mentally,
> and into the Mumbai-global economy world? Or does it lead to solving
> community problems and enhancing everyone's potential? The child connecting
> adults to resources, for instance.

An interesting place for your friend would be the IAEP mailing list [1]

For a moment let's agree on the fact that the Sugar interface and the
OLPC bits are essentially an education project. So, if that is true,
the XO (and all the benefits of collaboration that are hard-wired into
it) enables a collective learning mechanism. This, being so much
different from the current teacher-driven pace of learning is expected
to create better learners (especially because it allows to self-pace
the learning)

Having said that, it might not be out of the way to put across a
conjecture that the means to access learning content would make them
better citizens and hence have a complete impact on their
society/community/ecosystem.

The fragility in believing that the opportunities are "Mumbai-world"
(generic placeholder city name) as opposed to within the community is
fairly obvious in these economic times.

[1] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep


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