From a research standpoint, this decision by the Ethiopian gov is great!
Doing this in English avoids all sort of "noise" from family, etc., who
might "help" outside of the research.
In the back of my brain I recall someone doing some research here using
Klingon, for this very reason.
The half-full glass is in the Ethiopian kids gaining some English, which
eventually will be required to do as they continue their schooling. I
can't see a similar advantage for Klingon, though :-)
On 10/31/2012 08:29 PM, Caryl Bigenho wrote:
Hi Folks,
Actually, C.Scott did post the videos (it is in 2 parts) and the
accompanying slides on his blog at
http://cananian.livejournal.com/67703.html
For anyone who missed it, it is worth the time (60-90 min?) to watch it.
As you will see, it is a "pre-pilot" sort of a "proof of concept"
project. The children did not learn to
read, but 55% did show that they were "pre-literate" at the end of a
year based on getting 12/15
correct on a letter recognition test.
One huge obstacle to their learning to read is that, at the request of
the Ethiopian government, the
lessons are in English. The children speak only Amharic.
Long ago, when I was taking classes for ESL certification, we were
taught that children should be
taught to read in their home language first. The decoding skills
transfer if it is an alphabetic language
and probably other alphabets but not completely true for a character
based language such as Chinese.
That is probably why the Chinese government invented the phonetic
pinyin system.
Caryl
BTW... C.Scott and Chris describe the theory and methods behind the
project and data. It is a very well
designed study that meets all of the requirements for good academic
research.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 18:04:15 -0700
CC: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [IAEP] OLPC tablets and Nell in the wild?
Here! Here! Cheers for Chris Ball and C. Scott Ananian (a brand-new
Daddy) who were our "house mates" at Casa Sarandi in Montevideo.
Two great guys and supporters of Sugar Labs and OLPC in every way.
Caryl
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:41:32 -0400
> CC: [email protected]; [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] OLPC tablets and Nell in the wild?
>
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Oct 31 2012, Mike Lee wrote:
> > That experiment did not involve anyone from Sugar Labs or the
> > community. The article is based on an education panel at EmTech 2012
> > that, for some reason, has not been posted as video yet. Check
> > here: http://www2.technologyreview.com/emtech/12/
> >
> > But Matt Keller and the OLPC Association team who ran the project went
> > into great detail in their talks at the OLPC SF Summit over a week
> > ago. The Livestream on the subject has been archived and is viewable
> > at the these links:
>
> A minor point: I consider myself part of the Sugar Labs community
> and expect that C. Scott does also; maybe others from the team too.
>
> - Chris.
> --
> Chris Ball <[email protected]> <http://printf.net/>
> One Laptop Per Child
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> [email protected]
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
_______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An
Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected]
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
_______________________________________________
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
[email protected]
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