A new type of Nigerian scam?

[Valerie Crawford]

I, too, wonder about this newstory being so widely picked up from Reuters'
Oddly Enough column. Why is this the story and not stories about teachers'
and students' instructional use of computers and information from the
Internet? Educators in developed countries had (have) to grapple with the
"appropriate use" issues when laptops began to be adopted. Now the same
issues are cropping up in Nigeria -- no surprise. But the coverage is
vaguely jeering and cargo-ist -- 'we gave them laptops and look at what they
do'.  It's the typical of the racism so prevalent in news coverage of
Africa.

OLPC is a laudable program; but the instructional needs of teachers who use
laptops in the classroom should have been better anticipated.  The ICT
integration issues --both technological and pedagogical-- will be
tremendous. I've read and heard from various colleagues that do ICT and
education research in African countries that the prevailing pedagogy is
highly rote-learning and  transmission-oriented. Optimally leveraging ICT
for learning will require a huge shift in teacher preparation, pedagogy,
etc.

Valerie

Valerie M. Crawford
Senior Research Scientist
Center for Technology in Learning
SRI International


On 7/23/07, Yishay Mor <yishaym at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The story about kids using OLPCs to access porn is making the rounds (see
> links from my blog: http://yishaym.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/mayday-mayday-kids-are-seeing-titties/
> ). But is this the real story? Or is it all about Nigerian officials
> looking for an excuse to filter the content the web?
>
> - Yishay
>
> --
> ___________________________
>   Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
>    http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html
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-- 
--Valerie
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