‘hole in the wall’ experiment in India showed the possibilities of Internet access for education in developing countries – sometimes called ‘minimal intrusion teaching’ which relies on children’s curiosity
The one laptop per child project has a similar aim – to support individual discovery learning by providing internet access and e-books via a laptop
Features:
- Screen is readable in sunlight
- Discoverable interface (called sugar) rather than a windows interface – zoomable between task, applications, network
- task centric
- web access
- network-centric applications rather than desktop centric - eg – sub-ether edit is a concurrent editing application that is a network centric word processor rather than a desktop centric application like Word
The children in India came to be highly proficient when:
- they worked in groups
- the laptop was in a safe public place like a playground (not a classroom)
The $100 laptop is linked to a schoolserver and will cease working if it is away from the school server for too long. The School server will have
- Moodle (will manage access with OpenID)
- Wikipedia
- Internet access
- Storage of student data and backups
- Software updates
- Enables offline use – eg with googlegears
We also had a demo of the computer and software built for it.
This presentation was more about the OLPC project than Moodle, but it was still interesting to see where this may be heading. It seems to me the requirement to have a school server is a fatal flaw, unfortunately.
