On 26.10.2010, at 20.12, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
I watched Negroponte on the Colbert show last night. Nice. He
seems to have toned down his former "we don't need teachers... kids
will do it all" line a bit, but it is still implied.
Sugata Mitra implies the same in his TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
I think the latest TED talk of Sugata Mitra is much more interesting
and relevant:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
I personally think that OLPC and Sugar could learn a lot from Mitra's
presentation and his latest article:
Mitra, Sugata & Dangwal, Ritu (2010). Limits to self-organising
systems of learning—the Kalikuppam experiment. British Journal of
Educational Technology 41 (5), 672–688. http://suoranta.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/mitra.pdf
I think the way how Mitra orchestrates the learning situations in his
research in very interesting. The model is not 1-to-1 but rather 4-
to-1 model. He has prove that children are actually teaching and
learning from each other. On the other hand, Mitra's finding is not
really anything new in the field of learning science and psychology of
learning with the sociocultural theory of learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural-historical_psychology
) and social constructivist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructivism
) approach.
Mitra's cases are also not children learning on they own. For
instance, there are clear "assignments" for children and
"evaluation" (in Mitra's case research) taking place after the
learning situations. That way it is not learning "without teacher" but
rather learning with a different kind of teacher.
Best regards,
- Teemu
-----------------------------------------------
Teemu Leinonen
http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/
+358 50 351 6796
Media Lab
http://mlab.uiah.fi
Aalto University
School of Art and Design
-----------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
