Hello, A few days ago, Michael Tobis brought up the New York Times article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" [1] on the OLPC Chicago mailing list. Scott Van Den Plas then responded to it with the question, "How can OLPC focus on educational reform and avoid comparison to simply placing laptops into a traditional setting?"
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html I responded to his question on the OLPC mailing list and Michael thought it might be useful for me to post it here. On 5/8/07, Scott Van Den Plas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How can OLPC focus on educational reform and avoid comparison to simply > placing > laptops into a traditional setting? Well, I imagine it's too late to change the name of the program, but to be honest the very name "one laptop per child" made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it. I think it's because of the connotations that the word "laptop" brings: it's something that, 10 years ago, was a yuppie status symbol, and I think that's significant. Imagine how ridiculous a program like "one cell phone per child" sounds--even if you try to emphasize that a cell phone can actually be incredibly useful for communication, especially for societies that don't even have land-line telephones, the fact is that the first thing that pops into people's heads (well, my head at least) when they hear the word "cell phone" is a Samsung advertisement about some new feature-loaded monstrosity that comes with downloadable ringtones. The word "laptop" comes with almost as much negative cultural baggage as "cell phone". When most people see the word "laptop", I'm guessing they usually think of Norton AntiVirus, Ad-Aware, Microsoft Office, porn, and Google. Only one or two of those is generally regarded as a really useful thing. And when the word "laptop" and "child" are put in the same sentence, all I can think of is MySpace and Alge-Blaster, which are things no nation should spend millions of dollars on. On the other hand, I *love* the term "Children's Machine", which is what the OLPC laptop was originally called. A "machine" is what I had when I grew up: it didn't help me with school in any direct way, it didn't serve as a replacement for a good textbook or a great teacher, but it served an entirely different purpose: it was my personal little lab where I could create things and tinker with the things others had created. Social scientists call it "Bricolage" or "Constructivism", and whatever it is, it's something that I wish every child in the world had some opportunity to experience. So the word "Children's Machine" brings back memories of what I had when I was growing up: it wasn't portable like a laptop, but it served many of the same goals, I think, that OLPC is aiming for. So I guess my two cents to OLPC are: drop the word "laptop". And especially don't call it "One Laptop Per Child", because that phrase alone is going to throw dozens of assumptions into people's heads and they're just going to laugh at you, like I once did. - Atul _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
