Tomeu Vizoso wrote: > I think there's a misunderstanding here. Eben and Bert are talking > about children being able to engage other people (not just other > children) in learning, Alex (in my opinion) talks about the more broad > role of a teacher as those in conventional schools.
I meant, regardless of the model being used it's teacher's responsibility to provide direction, to make sure that students understand the goals of their study, and to keep them from abandoning the study out of frustration or because they lose interest. It's a hard task, and if teacher fails to perform it, other students, no matter how bright, are not in a position to fill his role -- they usually still lack sufficient knowledge of the "bigger picture" of the subject, can't realistically evaluate others' ability and willingness to absorb and process knowledge, and often are not in a proper social position to deal with frustration of their peers. Trying to force them into such a role does no good, and only deepens the "drama" I have described. I am not questioning the fact that when kids are interested and motivated, provided with sufficient materials and help with genuinely hard to understand concepts, and adults do not artificially place them in positions of each other's enemies or oppressors, students co-operate and enhance each other's learning. However it's teacher's responsibility to provide necessary elements for this environment -- if it wasn't, and large groups of people were naturally inclined toward co-operative self-education, the most popular online activity would be reading and editing Wikipedia instead of playing World of Warcraft or posting nonsense on Myspace. -- Alex _______________________________________________ Olpc-open mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open
