Negroponte, unlike most of his supporters, is well aware of the realities you describe in your post. He is not, however, about to address the need for curricular content or, in more general terms, how to successfully integrate the XO into classroom life. And the reason is quite simple: education is a very complex, serious endeavour that goes well beyond ownership of brand-new electronic gadget. In fact, Negroponte has tried his ideas before - using Apple computers in a New York City project - with disastrous results. He knows that computers are a very inneffective tool in the hands of elementary school kids, because they don't have the knowledge necessary to separate the good from the bad information, both of which are abundant in the online world.

Making a computer is the easy part - and Negroponte has failed at it (remember the features that were suppossed to distinguish the XO from the rest? none of them, with the exception of the display, ever materialized or worked flawlessly).

Can you see why he is so reluctant to even address the difficult part - education?

Yama,

For better or worse, education does have two (and a half) aims. The half is keeping children off the street. This day-care function is evident in the proliferation of "summer camps/schools" in times children have a vacation.

The other two, which do hold in the developing world are:
1 Teaching marketable skills
2 Socialization

The talk of many national educational institutions about "personal development" really is little more than propaganda in my eyes.

The socialization part is hardly ever more than "reliability and results, and compliance." It always includes political and religious compliance in one form or another.

The test-culture in education is as much testing marketable skills as compliance.

Looking at it this way immediately exposes the insoluble problem:
There is NO way at all, that a foreign entity can produce a curriculum that at the same time produces skills the local market requires AND instills the expected level of social, religious, and political compliance.

Take some village in the Andes. You would know about these people. I am speculating here:
- These people have Inca roots?
- Spanish is their second language?
- They are fiercely Catholic?
- With a lot of non-Spanish influences?
- The are subsistence farmers? (growing coca leaves?)

I simply cannot see how a Boston MA non-profit can write them a useful curriculum.

And, obviously, these people from the Andes differ in everything from people living in the Brazilian favelas. Or people from the Peruvian fisher villages. And then we did not even go into Nepal and Rwanda.

I think the only productive way to get content is for the local people (eg, their MoEdu) to compile it. And as the cost of a curriculum is all manual labor, this should be much less expensive than having some MIT post-graduate trying it.

Winter

"Take some village in the Andes. You would know about these people. I am speculating here:
- These people have Inca roots?
- Spanish is their second language?
- They are fiercely Catholic?
- With a lot of non-Spanish influences?
- The are subsistence farmers? (growing coca leaves?)

I simply cannot see how a Boston MA non-profit can benefit them by selling them an under-powered, expensive computer that does not work as advertised and cannot, in any way, improve their education.

These people need what every other person needs in more advanced nations: schools and teachers. That's how they do it the world's leading nations: USA, Israel, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, China, india, Japan, etc., etc.

That's how it gets done: with schools and teachers.

Leave the experiments to Negroponte and his students. Real people need real solutions.

This article is a _disaster_ and is heavily inaccurate.

"There is no evidence they support curricular content."

Exactly _what_ research have you done Yama? Please show us.

The line above is the heart of your article and you have shown _no evidence whatsoever_ to back it.

Yes, we support, encourage and promote social constructivism. No doubt about it.

But we also make sure a wide range of types of activity and of content is available. We make sure a wide range of approaches are possible with the XO. There is a huge effort in getting conventional curriculum content on the XO -- a good part of the non-technical team @ olpc is involved in this, and you often see related discusison in the olpc-library list.

JG did a lot for us on that track and SJ is definitely a key actor there. I am often involved in it, as it is hosted or served by Moodle or other components in the XS. Some of those efforts aren't complete yet, but there is a lot of work put into it.

"if done the OLPC official way"

There is _no_ such thing. There are things we propose, promote, encourage. And we work with countries to help them build somthing that works for them.

If you did a minimum of research and looked for example at the Peru images, or the Uruguay OS images, you would see local content. And the local MoE has it very easy to make more curricular content available for the XOs -- in XO-targetted ebooks, actixities, or just websites/webpages tested to work well on the XO.

Yama:

-Do you care if what you write is correct, factual, accurate? How exactly have you fact-checked this article?

- Do you care if you misinform? You are accusing OLPC of lots of things _that are just in your imagination_.

Most of your readers will take your article at face value -- you are doing a lot of damage with this. Please do the right thing: add a note to the main article, indicating that the author is _mistaken_ and does not consider pretty important facts, and has not bothered to check with anyone who actually knows.

So for example, to show you a _very basic_ technique in research, we'll try searching google for "curricular content" within wiki.laptop.org

Try this link:
http://www.google.be/search?q=site%3Awiki.laptop.org+curricular+content

As of today, the 2nd and 3rd links are to the Ulanbataar deployment page, and the Arahuay deployment page.

If you open the search a bit, like this:
http://www.google.be/search?hl=en&q=site%3Alaptop.org+curricular+content

you'll find some further bits of content.

Other strategies you can try is

- Checking the materials from the deployments. Hey, is that a ton of curricular content in the Ceibal website?
http://ceibalflorida.blogspot.com/2008/11/trabajando-con-contenidos-del-portal.html

- Checkign the OS images we build for each country. Do they have content? Umm!

- Asking the relevant people, if people are busy, ask nicely on a mailing list.

Just some ideas. Do what is right: stop the FUD about OLPC.

OLPCNews editors -- you should be ashamed of yourselves: every time I read the headlines here there is an article FUDding to death with stupidities that take just one quick search to debunk.

It's not even hard.

Ah, I love the smell of a heated argument in the morning... ;-)

If OLPC is involved with developing curricular content then it's indeed doing an extremely bad job of making that work known.

Martin, you point to the library mailing-list and the work done by the learning team which is apparently involved in these efforts. Yet, in the past 6 months the library mailing list has hardly seen more than a handful of e-mails per month and none of them were too noteworthy IMHO.

As far as the learning team is concerned it's by no means easy to find out just what exactly it's working on, trust me, I've tried.

[Educators] (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educators) which I'd consider the entry-page for anyone interested has seen some activity in mid-July as part of OLPCorps efforts but otherwise the site is pretty quiet and the content there leaves much to be desired. Oh, and I can't really find any curricula content there.

Furthermore, looking at the "OLPC Learning Guide" (http://wiki.laptop.org/images/9/9a/Learning_Manual.pdf), and in particular page 3 of it, it seems pretty clear to me that OLPC is focused on learning with the help of (a) activities and (b) digital libraries of books. I don't see any mention of interactive, digital learning content there.

Last but not least the learning team's official Web presence at http://learning.laptop.org is pretty anemic when you look at the number of "stories", "documents" and "projects" available there.

To cut a long story short: I think Yama's got a good point here because from where I'm standing it's indeed very hard to tell whether OLPC supports curricula content (as opposed to random collections of freely available materials such as listed on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_content_ideas) in any meaningful way.

One of the points Yama makes is that OLPC could be creating curriculum materials.

What experience in creating curriculum materials for primary schools do you have? Have you spoken with people familiar with the process?

I have worked in that exact field, working closely with teachers, graphic artists and writers. Done this in various countries, and in fact, in two notable projects that tried to build the same curricular content for more than one locale.

In one project, the locales were very related -- states of the same country. In the other, very different ethnic groups within the same country (that coexist very happily, but have different language, identity and stories).

Won't bore you with a long story. But you must know: it is a _very_ complex subject.

Just as a hint: if you think it through, you will realise that the first headline right here in OLPCNews if OLPC tried to do what you are proposing would include the term "cultural imperialism".

*Think*. Be responsible when you write. Edit your articles. Stop the FUD.

"because from where I'm standing it's indeed very hard to tell..."

You didn't do any research, you are uneducated public. So Yama writes an article, so for that he has the option: he researches or he writes from the gut.

If he writes from the gut, he is spreading misinformation. This is what we got here and now.

If he researches, he will write an informative, balanced piece. *This* is the one I want. It won't have outlandish outrageous claims. Less spectacular, sure.

But you guys are about information about OLPC, not about uninformed opinion, right?

Martin,

I am really tired of your anti-OLPCNews tirades. Once every 3-6 months you come out of the woodwork calling us FUD and misinformed, but what have you done to inform anyone, anywhere? An email now and again on a listserv ain't enough.

Why don't actually write a blog post - on any site - and let us know what you're doing.

As it is, between Yama, Christoph, and I, you have three of most informed OLPC followers outside of OLPC. If we're clueless to what you might be doing, the problem is with OLPC's lack of communication, not us.

I think Winter makes a good point that "the only productive way to get content is for the local people (eg, their MoEdu) to compile it" and Yama, who said, "deep down the problem is there - listening, and responding". The question then becomes, if we 'listen' to their needs, want them to 'compile it" themselves, then how do we 'respond' to that need.

I'm not sure the answer is large scale curriculum development as much as large scale development of mechanisms for professional and collegial development.
I think the problem with developing curricular content for the OLPC in the developing world is not that different from the problem of developing it on conventional machines here at home.

Every year, especially at the beginning of September, teachers are inundated by pre-packaged curriculum offers (films, software, games, etc). Most of the teachers I know just toss it out without ever reading it. Or, they go to big PD sessions where an 'expert' tells them what they should be doing, and they leave grumbling that all the suggestions were to general, and there was nothing they could "really use" in their class.

The reason is simple. Teachers aren't a blank slate. They already have full curricula, and tests/assignments they have to give. The time it takes to understand a new curricular enhancement - especially using technology - and the difficulty of fitting it into an already overloaded schedule is just too difficult. Add to that the fact that pre-fab units are rarely customized to local needs.

Then, there's also the natural inertia of teachers who are loathe to change something that is already working. Why fix it if it isn't broken?

That said, I have spent the last ten years doing exactly that kind of work: Helping teachers, especially those who are not tech savvy, incorporate digital media into their classrooms, their curriculum, and their practice. But it isn't easy or instant, and the path to new curricular development is different at each school, and with each teacher.

What does work, in my experience, is professional, collegial partnerships and initiatives that guide teachers' development. And it always seems to adhere to some basic principles:
1) Teachers need to be given an idea of the kinds of things that might be possible.
2) Participating teachers have to have a real need, either in terms of their curricular or personal professional development.
3) Teachers need ongoing support and help as they co-develop curriculum with a mentor/facilitator.

Now, this isn't always the case - obviously there are always tech whizzes and self-starters, but most teachers need a lot of collegial support and training wheels as they try something new, and in the high pressured schedule of the curriculum, risky.

That's why I think that exchanges, co-developed curriculum, blogs and one-on-one sharing is so important. Even within the state mandated curriculum that every school must adhere to, the real development of new creative lessons and units always comes down to a group of colleagues getting excited and hashing out new ideas over coffee, dinner, or a beer. The problem in development work is that very often the two parties collaborating are geographically remote from one another.

I think the challenge for OLPC, and for all of us involved in OLPC projects, is not to "provide" curriculum as much as provide and support a means to develop it. To find duplicatable structures and communication platforms (twinning schools, shared blogs, teacher exchanges, etc) that allow teachers from two diverse backgrounds and regions who, nevertheless, are excited about the idea of refreshing their curriculum, to learn from one another and to develop something new and exciting.

Hi,

This is a really interesting debate around the problem that Teachable.net is addressing - how can teachers access high-quality curriculum content to use on a laptop/netbook which takes into account varied teaching styles and cultural perspectives.

At Teachable, we believe the simple answer is 'encourage teachers to share and improve the digital resources they are already producing'. We do that through a unique system of contributor rewards, which means that teachers that bother to share (and that really is the barrier) earn money every time their file is downloaded. Plus a system of peer review and rating.

Most of the content is currently from UK science teachers, but we firmly believe the content has global relevance.

Reading through, you have all come up with points that I thoroughly agree with
1. "I think the only productive way to get content is for the local people (eg, their MoEdu) to compile it" (Winter)
2. "Teachers aren't a blank slate. They already have full curricula" (Mark)
3. "Teachers need stuff they can use off the bat, key-in-hand, grade-appropriate, localized, which includes it being culturally appropriate as well as translated. Not the jungle of the internet or wikipedia." (Yada)

You can't just point pupils to the internet and say "go learn"; teachers and home educators do need digital learning materials and they don't have the time or necessary skills (Mark's point) to make it all from scratch.

I know that this kind of initiative has been tried many times before in various countries, but I really feel that using some clever content management (i.e. allowing people to filter content by locality, style and curriculum) and more detailed reviewing (in progress) Teachable could be a cost effective way to deliver content for the OLPC project.

I'd welcome any ideas of how we can integrate our service more with your initiatives.

Edward Upton
Founder, Teachable.net

To Whom It May Concern:

My sister bought a little green laptop through the One Laptop Per Child Program for my granddaughter. We are not able to hook it up as we have misplaced the instructions for hooking to our wireless internet.

Is there a way to download the directions or receive a copy?

Thanks for your assistance.