Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 - (Page 17)

Commentary FOR CHILDREN ONLY Can Nicholas Negroponte market his magnificent little laptop? by Wayan Vota hen you think of your Peace Corps service, who do you remember being the most welcoming when you first went to your program site? Who came running when you came back from a trip to the capital city? Who was there every day, watching your work and your play with fascination? I know the first ones to meet me in Zelenograd, my training site in Western Russia: children. Young, school-age children who ran wild most days in most places of my and your Peace Corps service. Children who should’ve, could’ve and would’ve been in school if developing-world governments organized the financial resources required to build and maintain one school per village. If they deployed the human resources required to hire and train one teacher per school. Or if the very communities themselves had the educational tools and skills to teach their children directly. And now, imagine every Peace Corps volunteer heading to site with a simple, effective, affordable educational tool that came with its own almost-unlimited resources for each community to enlighten its children. LEVERAGING CHILDREN W is is the challenge that Dr. Nicholas Negroponte–a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founder of its Media Lab and of Wired magazine, author of “Being Digital”, and brother of John Negroponte, deputy secretary of state– sees as an opportunity for change. An opportunity to leverage the very children themselves to teach each other through experiential and trial-anderror learning on a rugged yet cheap educational tool. He believes that if he can enable children to learn the very skill of learning, he can leverage education as a force to eliminate global poverty. Negroponte wants children in the developing world to “learn learning” through a controversial learning methodology called constructivism in which the learners construct new knowledge from their experiences. Based on the pioneering work of his friend, Seymour Papert, author of such books as Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas and e Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, Negroponte believes knowledge is constructed by the learner through activities not supplied by a teacher. Constructionist methodology promotes the act of self-motivated, self-directed learning to begin a lifelong quest for new skills and knowledge. Teachers are no longer classroom leaders who traditionally direct memorization or repetition drills that lead to objective testing. Teachers become co-learners who engage in exploration with the students. Papert and, in turn, Negroponte believe constructionist learning can be enhanced by youthful experimentation on computers with software programming that form the basic building block of logical thought and lifelong learning. Papert even developed the highly influential Logo programming language for children to express constructionist teaching using computers. e idea behind Logo is simple: Children like computers and computer programming because they like games and all three are related. Give children a math, science or language skills-enhancing computer program that lets them create games and traditional classrooms will be obsolete. Both Papert and Negroponte have experimented with computerfacilitated constructionist learning since their Minitel project in Senegal in 1982. ere, they used early Apple II computers with Logo to educate rural children. eir experimentation has been controversial for its “de-schooling” effect, the reduction of teaching as a top-down educational model and even a disregard for the need of an actual school. ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD In 2000, Negroponte–who is a futurist, not a computer designer–took this idea of computer-facilitated learning to design experts at his MIT Media Lab and came up with a radical idea: computer-facilitated constructionist learning on a mobile platform–one learning laptop per child. He then experimented with Panasonic laptop computers in a Cambodian village school and quickly realized that while his idea was revolutionary, the technology he had to work did not exist. One learning laptop per child needed a new computing platform with specifically designed software and hardware to enable constructionist learning in the dusty, hot, un-electrified rural schools of the developing world. A laptop rugged enough to survive a day in the life of kids not accustomed to electronics ownership, a laptop cheap enough to be purchased in the massive quantities required for a one-to-one distribution ratio and a laptop so childcentric it would not be usurped by adults. During the Davos World Economic Forum in early 2005, Kofi Annan, who was then-secretary general of the United Nations, joined Negroponte in presenting the children’s learning laptop design to the world as the $100 laptop. His idea of computerfacilitated constructionist learning on a mobile platform became an instant WorldView 17

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007
Contents
President's Note
Lafayette Park
Note to Readers
Commentary
Letter from India
Commentary
Letter from Botswana
Letter from Ha Teboho
Letter from Jumbi Valley
Letter from Mununga
Letter from Medellin
Giving Back
Community News

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

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