>I concur with > Carlos there's not enough content that's in Philippine's context. > More needs to be done on that front.
Not just in the Philippine context, but the global context. IMHO the weak point of OLPC support is developing educational content itself. Most of the concentration is on the laptops and the engine running on the OS and how to make software for the system -- not enough developing educational content, modules & curriculum itself. It's true that curriculum needs to be customized for each area of deployment/country locality, but there's global standards of education (especially since the project came out of an ivy-league school which is one pinnacle benchmark for educational standards). MIT has open courseware, and there's lot of courseware available around the web from top universities, but most of them are for college+ level. Also, here's the thing: we're an English-speaking country, our three official languages according to the Philippine constitution is Filipino, Spanish & English, so technically & constitutionally, English is a native language for the Philippines. One of the biggest problems in our public education system is the quality of content being taught (the problem being compounded by bad textbooks being distributed to public schools with a lot of factual errors & poor quality control and under-trained teachers on low salaries). We already speak English. IMHO if OLPC or other international education foundations made high quality open courseware in English of global international standards targeted at gradeschool & high school level, more than half the battle is already won. A problem with that is that it goes against schools as businesses -> curriculum is something that a little guarded among schools and the very, very, very big business of the entire textbook publishing industry itself (the price of textbooks is so high that in Ateneo High School, as students, we just rent our textbooks from the school during the schoolyear and then return them to the school administration at the end of the year, minus fees out of our pocket for damaged, vandalized or lost books). -Naz -- carlos nazareno http://twitter.com/object404 http://www.object404.com -- interactive media specialist zen graffiti studios http://www.zengraffiti.com -- "if you don't like the way the world is running, then change it instead of just complaining." _______________________________________________ OLPC-Philippines mailing list OLPC-Philippines@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-philippines