01 Nov 2012

Maybe They Should Try This in American Inner City Public Schools

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Dvice.com has a story of an educational experiment confirming the optimistic point of view with respect to human curiosity and ingenuity.

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa. …

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

    “We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
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3 Feedbacks on "Maybe They Should Try This in American Inner City Public Schools"

JKB

Dropping some of these tablets off at an inner city school would be an interesting experiment. Have the benefits of a Progressive education damaged the kids’ abilities to learn without being spoon fed?

“In spite of the fact that schools exist for the sake of education, there is many a school whose pupils show a peculiar “school helplessness”; that is, they are capable of less initiative in connection with their school tasks than they commonly exhibit in the accomplishment of other tasks.”

That quote is from 1909. The earliest I’ve seen such discussion of how classroom education dulls the children’s ability to think was in a book published in 1886.



amanda

This restores my hope in humanity! I believe this might be the Montessori method.



ZOOM! « Guffaw in AZ

[…] Never Yet Melted recently blogged about an experiment wherein a corporation dropped boxes of solar-powered Motorola Zoom Tablet PCs into an isolated Ethiopian village.  A village without electricity or even written words.  No books, no street signs, no streets.  The boxes weren’t even opened.  And they sat back to watch what would happen. […]



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