2008/1/15, Jameson Chema Quinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > The idea of activity sharing supports several important forms of classroom > interaction, and can be stretched to accommodate many more. However the > focus on constructionism means there's a lack of support for teacher-centric > interactions, even ones which are useful in constructionist learning. > Raising hands
(Sorry for my duplicate mail, I unwittingly sent my post to your personal email address. ;-P) I think the topic you are posing here is very important and draw my deep interest. Partially I agree with the some lacks of powerful tools for teachers to support the children's "learning" outside of the XO. And I also think it is natural that the teachers who are making tremendous effort to educate care about some kind of system or mechanism to perform their ways of "teaching" in OLPC scheme. I also think the collaboration tools between teachers and children you proposed here can be "one of the support tools (or assist mechanisms)" for many teachers who would like to commit OLPC activities with the will. But I guess the starting point of the discussion seems turn aside from the main track which OLPC is aiming for. According to "Construntionism" theory OLPC relies on, any children have their own "model of understanding the world" (that is "shema" and those are all different each other. As the children interact with the real world, they learn by themselves using their shema, "assimilating" this model to the phenomena first, and accommodating it to adjust for better understanding next. This causes new shema, or knowledge, and these new shema will be also assimilated and accommodated repeatedly. Along with these series of interaction with the real world, children "learn". On the other hand, the opposite idea is "Instructionism" in which teacher poses question and children answer. So, the beginning of your discussion makes me feel some kind of contradiction. If we respect OLPC "Learning learning" policy, what we are aiming for as support tools for the teachers ( or children supporters, generally ) is not the tools to implement the current teaching schemes into OLPC framework, but those develops and accelerate the collaborations among childrens including supporters. But let me say one more thing. Making use of "constructionism" theory doesn't means the unnecessity of the teachers, but the role of the teachers changes. In the "Learning learning" world, children questions to themselves or pose them among other children, some of them are alone and others may get together the groups in which all of them have same questions. What questions will be posed, in which each children have interest, and their timing are all unsynchronized, so that it is almost impossible to synchronize children to obey some kind of curriculum to progress "class" one by one. Forcing something regardless of their interest will rather lose their obsession. But generally speaking, as you anxious about, it seems there are lacks of supporting tools for supporters, though XO as the standalone personal learning tool is well done. So I think it is OK to prepare the tools you proposed as an one of varieties of supporting tools if OLPC has enough resources ( or enough and skillful volunteers). One thing we should care about is that the main track is to respect "Learning learning" policy if we make some effort under OLPC, and we need more powerful tools or systems for supporters to help children's learning whose classroom is under the tree. Spiky _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
