[Air-l] Fwd: [school-discuss] Self Organising Systems for mass education

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

On Sep 10, 2006, at 9:45 AM, radhika gajjala wrote:

> Such projects are always written up with a great deal of celebration.

Yes, i remain skeptical.
>
> I have seen other reports of the hole in the wall project - and
> needless to say it looks interesting and wonderful when taken fully
> out of context.
>
> Of course the utility of computer literacy for a particular kind of
> global world (with it colonizing undertones) is
> unquestionable.Somewhat like "learning English" was in previous
> decades (still is) in the so-called "developing world"....

yes, i wonder about 'whose computer literacy' we are talking about.   
given the way people related to OLPC suggested that the simputer for  
textually illiterate users was a bad approach.  human capacities  
don't always need to map into western ideations.
>
>
> but is just "computer access" the goal?
> what does it mean to be computer literate in specific contexts?

or computer literate at all, or informationally literate.   we have  
quite a few people here with clear, and well written opinions on that.

There was actually a pretty good prior post critiquing OLPC prior to  
this posting on the school-discuss list.   I'm wondering if we aren't  
seeing, much like happened here in our last set of discussions, that  
the evidence from the hole in the wall project is being used more as  
a trope than as evidence in the battle for funding/etc.

However, right now it is being discussed in the e-learning forum of  
unesco again http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forums.php   
has links ...






jeremy hunsinger
Assistant Professor
Pratt Institute
www.cddc.vt.edu
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