{"id":7796,"date":"2012-11-12T05:00:41","date_gmt":"2012-11-12T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=7796"},"modified":"2012-11-10T08:35:56","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T13:35:56","slug":"swedow-on-steroids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/7796","title":{"rendered":"#SWEDOW on Steroids"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0One Laptop Per Child\u00a0organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages — simply dropping off tablet computers with pre-loaded programs and seeing what happens.<\/p>\n

The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.<\/p>\n

Early observations\u00a0are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC\u2019s founder, at MIT Technology Review\u2019s EmTech conference last week.<\/p>\n

The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets — used together with a solar charging system, which OLPC workers had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, an OLPC worker visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.<\/p>\n

From a Mashable\u00a0article<\/a> published at the end of last month and titled “Given Tablets But No Teachers, Ethiopian Kids Teach Themselves,” no less.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Allow me to be skeptical about this wanton distribution of SWEDOW. The acronym stands for “stuff we don’t want:” the used t-shirts, shoes, glasses, and other things we don’t want, which we send to developing countries because hey, at least we have good intentions and doing something is better than doing nothing, right?<\/p>\n

Right?<\/p>\n

Allow me to be skeptical about the effects of the “experiment,” which is being evaluated by an OLPC employee. That’s about as incentive compatible as if I were to put my students in charge of assigning their own grades.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Tobias Denskus gives his less snarky, considerably more learned cultural-anthropology take on the whole thing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE 2: Tate Watkins has a new post<\/a> about how #SWEDOW soccer balls can (wait for it…)\u00a0save lives<\/em>.<\/p>\n

HT: Marcella McClatchey for the picture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0One Laptop Per Child\u00a0organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages — simply dropping off tablet computers with pre-loaded programs and seeing what<\/p>\n

Continue reading#SWEDOW on Steroids<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,30,53,71,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-commentary","category-education","category-ict","category-impact-evaluation","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-21K","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7796"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7810,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7796\/revisions\/7810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}