[OLPC-Philippines] Greetings from IGDA Manila

[Carlos Nazareno]

>I concur with
> Carlos there's not enough content that's in Philippine's context.
> More needs to be done on that front.

Not just in the Philippine context, but the global context.

IMHO the weak point of OLPC support is developing educational content
itself. Most  of the concentration is on the laptops and the engine
running on the OS and how to make software for the system -- not
enough developing educational content, modules & curriculum itself.

It's true that curriculum needs to be customized for each area of
deployment/country locality, but there's global standards of education
(especially since the project came out of an ivy-league school which
is one pinnacle benchmark for educational standards). MIT has open
courseware, and there's lot of courseware available around the web
from top universities, but most of them are for college+ level.

Also, here's the thing: we're an English-speaking country, our three
official languages according to the Philippine constitution is
Filipino, Spanish & English, so technically & constitutionally,
English is a native  language for  the Philippines. One of the biggest
problems in our public education system is the quality of content
being taught (the problem being compounded by bad textbooks being
distributed to public schools with a lot of factual errors & poor
quality control and under-trained teachers on low salaries).

We already speak English. IMHO if OLPC or other international
education foundations made high quality open courseware in English of
global international standards targeted at gradeschool & high school
level, more than half the battle is already won.

A problem with that is that it goes against schools as businesses ->
curriculum is something that a little guarded among schools and the
very, very, very big business of the entire textbook publishing
industry itself (the price of textbooks is so high that in Ateneo High
School, as students, we just rent our textbooks from the school during
the schoolyear and then return them to the school administration at
the end of the year, minus fees out of our pocket for damaged,
vandalized or lost books).

-Naz

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carlos nazareno
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