[Olpc-open] Olpc-open Digest, Vol 18, Issue 2

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

> It's like many other things, such as the teacher-class blackboard method of learning, even representative democracy was
> invented a long time before we had all those telephones, televisions, airplanes, computers and the Internet.

  If you read Neil Postman, you might wonder that inventing
representative democracy was even possible if television were invented
first.

> Some things haven't changed yet even though there are new technologies that should be able to completely revolutionnize
> the way we do those things.

  Technology do stuff on people, but undo, too.  Be careful about the
direction of revolution.  (Read Neil Postman.)

> Teacher unions, archaic school managment, locked up national curriculum and education ministries that have no courage to
> experiment or make massive changes in methods. Those are the reasons children are much more productive on their
> video-game consoles, on their computers, mobile phones and ipods, which all seem to be completely illegal to use in this
> archaic 1800s century school system that we are is still the way classrooms work today: http://youtube.com/watch?v=
> UJCicBQh3HM
> 
> Schools today kill creativity:
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

  Productive on video-game consoles and iPods and mobile phones?  What
do you mean by "productive"?  Sounds like more "consumative" (if there
is such a word).

  A naive optimistism on the issue won't get us better prepared.  We
are going to see the change, yes, but like what TV did to the society,
we need to understand what kind of change it will be.

-- Yoshiki