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6-year-old self-taught pre-readers & tablet users in Ethiopia

November 5, 2012 By Anne 2 Comments

Earlier this year, some 40 digital tablets (the Motorola version of iPads) were packaged into two taped-up boxes with no instructions and dropped into two Ethiopian villages, each about 50 miles from Addis Ababa and each with about 20 “1st-grade-aged” children, MIT Technology Review reported. The goal in this experiment, which OLPC chair Nicholas Negroponte says has another 18-24 months to go, is to see if “illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves” using “preloaded alphabet-training games,” videos, e-books, and other apps.

Negroponte told the Technology Review he thought they’d play with the boxes, but “within four minutes, one kid [had] opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” the tablet’s operating system. What he meant by that, writer David Talbot said, was that they’d gotten around the “desktop” settings OLPC had locked in, having “completely customized the desktop” so that every child’s was different. Before that, they were reciting the alphabet song on the tablets and were spelling words. OLPC knows all this because “once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.” The technicians taught adults in the villages how to use solar rechargers to keep the tablets running – the only instructions anyone received.

In a blog post about this story, US educator Ben Grey called this story “simply astounding” and further wrote that “we need to think very, very seriously about this.” Among the questions he feels we need to consider are: “Why don’t we give kids more credit for their natural capacity to learn? What if we’re the ones getting in the way? Why does there remain such a fascination with teaching kids very specific technology skills in our schools today?” I have those questions too, especially the first one, but I also noted a pointed comment beneath the MIT article from international school teacher Andre de Koker in Addis Ababa saluting OLPC while also reminding them that “his part of the world needs more than just another computer or tablet.”

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Filed Under: Literacy & Citizenship, Research, School & Tech Tagged With: Android, education, learning, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, one laptop per child, tablets, teaching, technology

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Comments

  1. william sawyers says

    November 6, 2012 at 1:30 am

    this is a great idea from a children author in sunny concord, Ca.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. A teacher's view of teacher surveys about youth & tech | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    November 16, 2012 at 12:04 am

    […] illustrated in the story of the Ethiopian six-year-olds and the box of Android tablets [see this]. Kids are wonderfully capable of learning by themselves. What will we do with that information? […]

    Reply

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Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
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Center for Democracy & Technology
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Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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