[Olpc-open] Olpc-open Digest, Vol 18, Issue 6 - support forum, reading, computers & learning

[gnome]

I'm delighted to hear there will be a support forum!  Could we have a 
forum version of this list too?  Pleeease?  Mailing lists require way 
too much wetware processing power to keep track of the threads ;-) and 
they're a terrible way of storing any info one might want to keep track 
of. 

Re the person who said parents reading to their children was 
pedagogically preferable.  (Brave soul, btw, saying that kind of thing 
in this place.)  Aside from the practical issues raised by others, I 
vividly remember that I didn't think so when I was a child.  I was of 
the "Mother, please.  I'd rather do it myself" persuasion.  And because 
I could, I felt quite special.  That had a lot to do with subsequent 
success in school.  The feeling of being special is pedagogically 
priceless, and I would think the Green Machine will have that effect in 
heaps.  We're a long way away from computers being as common as 
flipflops, so it'll continue to have that effect for years.  (Any 
computer that functions could do that, of course, but nobody besides the 
OLPC team is working as hard at trying to get computers to places where 
there are too few.)

I'm sure many of you have already seen this.  The BBC did a great report 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7113548.stm> on one of the 
Nigerian OLPC schools.  Anyone who wonders "Why bother?" should go look 
at it.

quixote.

-- 
http://molvray.com/acid-test