Thursday, November 1, 2012

empowerment

Too often it is assumed that education has to be structured and that learning has to be taught.  A recent experiment with technology reveals just how much this proposition is a fallacy.

The One Laptop Per Child project decided to side track educational structures and, instead, just dropped off sealed boxes of Tablet PCs in two Ethiopian villages.  The results are inspiring to all who subscribe to the strength of the human condition and innovative spirit:
  • 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.