[Olpc-open] [Its.an.education.project] Constructionism (was Re: XP on OLPC - a contrarian view)
Alex Belits
abelits at phobos.illtel.denver.co.us
Tue May 20 10:22:51 EDT 2008
Walter Bender wrote:
> The week culminated with an open-house where each teacher
> presented a project they developed that integrated national curriculum
> goals into an XO activity.
I think, this illustrated another, probably less fundamental but
practically important point -- if a country has national curriculum, the
whole educational system treats it as the foundation of their work, and
whatever tools or methods are introduced are judged by their suitability
to fit in it, or at least by being compatible with it. No one would
dare to remove a chunk of curriculum to replace it with some other
content -- it will break all kinds of dependencies, so both teachers and
education officials will be seriously unimpressed.
What, BTW, gives you the greatest argument against Windows that can be
ever made when introducing any new tools to educators. Unless the
country is slated to become the next giant outsourced tech support farm,
Windows user training is a microscopic part of the curriculum, and
existing computer classes with desktops cover it completely. No one
would buy a laptop per child just to enhance a small, unimportant piece
of a large curriculum that as a whole has nearly nothing to do with
computers in general and Windows in particular. However presenting a
laptop as a tool that supports better methods for studying things that
are already in the curriculum, a tool that is easy to adapt, that is not
tied to some predefined commercial "educational" software made for a
foreign school system, you can score major points on suitability when
faced with education officials in countries that strongly support
national curriculum.
--
Alex
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