What would happen if you handed a thousand Motorola Xoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never seen a written word? Well, for starters, they might learn to teach themselves English and how to circumvent an operating system.
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization delivered several boxes of tablets to two remote Ethiopian villages, where the literacy rates are essentially zero. Technicians only showed the adults how to connect the tablets to solar chargers. Once a week, a technician would come and swap out the memory cards so that researchers could study how the tablets had been used.
OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte commented, “We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
Ed McNierney, the chief technology officer, added, “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that. And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”
McNierney continued, “What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school? Can we give them tools to read and learn—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?”
Although these results look promising, tablets aren’t a direct substitute for basic human necessities. Building a case for them requires time and thoughtful consideration to how certain developmental, cultural, and technical components influence the tablets’ effectiveness value. In the least, the experiment shows that education can develop through self-learning, which perhaps fuels the curiosity of a life-long learner.
Creative Commons Love: Evgeni Zotov on Flickr.com
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