[OLPC-Philippines] Greetings from IGDA Manila

Fri Apr 9 03:17:15 EDT 2010

Hey Ryan,

Just had the urge to quickly chime in. Alas, we are still working on the
website :) Its always on the back of my mind.

Will send you more information about eKindling - Quick note: In addition to
the XO laptop, we are exploring other education technologies
(teachermate/powerplay) and groundbreaking educational activities that we
can introduce to the Philippines.

Ciao,

Yes, my name is Ryan too. :)

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 2:57 AM, Ryan Sumo <endlessthirteen at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi Cherry,
>
> eKindling project sounds great!  Do you have any material I can forward to
> people, like a poster online or something with a schedule?  It'd make it a
> lot easier for me to spread out to people.  I found the ekindling website<http://www.ekindling.org/news>btw, which looks great but could do with a little more content. :)
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Ryan Sumo
> freelance artist/IGDA Manila chairperson
> portfolio - http://ryansumo.carbonmade.com/
> blog - http://geekofalltrades.wordpress.com/
> IGDA Manila forum - http://tinyurl.com/igdamanila
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Cherry Withers <cwithers at ekindling.org>
> *To:* OLPC Philippines/Pilipinas grassroots <
> olpc-philippines at lists.laptop.org>
> *Sent:* Friday, April 9, 2010 2:35:23 PM
>
> *Subject:* Re: [OLPC-Philippines] Greetings from IGDA Manila
>
> 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."
>> _______________________________________________
>> OLPC-Philippines mailing list
>> OLPC-Philippines at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-philippines
>>
>
>
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-- 
Ryan L.
eKindling Team and Coffee-Addict
www.twitter.com/ekindling | www.ekindling.org

" A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a flame to be kindled" - Plutarch
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