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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>Valerie <br><br>Valerie M. Crawford<br>Senior Research Scientist<br>Center for Technology in Learning<br>SRI International<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Yishay Mor
</b> <<a href="mailto:yishaym@gmail.com">yishaym@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The story about kids using OLPCs to access porn is making the rounds (see links from my blog:
<a href="http://yishaym.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/mayday-mayday-kids-are-seeing-titties/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://yishaym.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/mayday-mayday-kids-are-seeing-titties/
</a> ). But is this the real story? Or is it all about Nigerian officials looking for an excuse to filter the content the web?<br><br>- Yishay<br clear="all"><span class="sg"><br>-- <br>___________________________<br> Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
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<br>-- <br>--Valerie