[OLPC-Philippines] Greetings from IGDA Manila

[Cherry Withers]

I agree with everything that you said Carlos. There are a lot of education
content out there to be had. Some are even developed by non-profits like:
http://www.e-learningforkids.org/index.html or Innovations for Learning.

What I meant by contextualizing for the Philippine's is to have games that
highlight our culture and our people -> looking within and projecting
outwards. These can of course be available in English (what better way to
show off Philippines than having it in a more global language). I have seen
too many games for kids that have too westernized context that I will be
hard pressed to show when we do remote deployments (I have a hard time
recommending games with apples, pizza and a house with at least two cars in
the garage). But it goes beyond that, if we get kids to look at their
environment and its resources we may be able to gear them towards creating
solutions for our own country.

In Sugar's defense, it is a young platform and the whole OLPC initiative
also have roots from constructivist learning which is more projects based.
That's probably why most of the initial activities are geared towards that.
It is the idea that the child can use their creativity and natural
tendencies to explore and be able to participate in the creation of learning
as opposed to be just consumers of learning. What is lacking in most games
today are that the learning is just one-way. There's hardly any provisions
for the child's voice to be heard. I agree, we need to convert our stories
into e-book format. We need more stories told and read by many and like you
said not rely on big publishers for content that are often made and
distributed poorly and scarcely.

Ryan, the eKindling project with Asia Pacific College is actually for a
content creation contest. High School students from 4 different schools are
going to create content for elementary students (for this run it will be for
4th graders as this will also support the Lubang Pilot) with the use of
Etoys and Sugar on a Stick. This can be anywhere from creating dynamic
e-books to games that address items in Philippine's Curriculum. Since we're
all about creating sparks, we're trying to start early. I think it's a great
initiative to get kids involved with education and outreach very early on.
The training will be for HS teachers. Hope you can make it.

Carlos, do you have anything that we can use for our Pilot in Lubang? We are
using XO 1.5 for this pilot so flash-like content should run much better on
those. Does your group develop content that runs in gnash as well?

Thanks,
Cherry

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 10:26 PM, Carlos Nazareno <object404 at gmail.com>wrote:

> >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
>
> --
> carlos nazareno
> http://twitter.com/object404
> http://www.object404.com
> --
> interactive media specialist
> zen graffiti studios
> http://www.zengraffiti.com
> --
> "if you don't like the way the world is running,
> then change it instead of just complaining."
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>
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