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[1] GIVEN TABLETS BUT NO TEACHERS, ETHIOPIAN CHILDREN TEACH THEMSELVES
[2] A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown “encouraging” results.
[3] With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child
[4] (OLPC) organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages−simply dropping off tablet computers
[5] with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.
[6] The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves,
[7] by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings,
[8] and other programs. Early observations are encouraging, said Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder, at MIT Technology
[9] Review’s EmTech conference last week.
[10] The devices involved are Motorola Zoom tablets−used together with a solar charging system, which OLPC workers
[11] had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, an OLPC worker visits the villages and swaps out memory cards
[12] so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used.
[13] After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and
[14] had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with
[15] animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.”
[16] The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50
[17] miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is
[18] called Wolonchete, in the Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even
[19] packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.
[20] Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I
[21] thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off
[22] switch… powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were
[23] singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot
[24] in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked
[25] Android.”
[26] Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, ED McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the
[27] kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop−so
[28] every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And
[29] the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think
[30] is essential to learning.”
[31] “If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn,” Negroponte said (see “Emtech Preview: Another Way to Think
[32] About Learning”).
[33] In an interview after his talk, Negroponte said that while the early results are promising, reaching conclusions about
[34] whether children could learn to read this way would require more time. “If it gets funded, it would need to continue for
[35] another a year and a half to two years to come to a conclusion that the scientific community would accept,” Negroponte
[36] said. “We’d have to start with a new village and make a clean start.”
[37] Giving computers directly to poor kids without any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes.
[38] “What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we
[39] give them tool to read and learn−without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?”
[40] Technology Review published by MIT, 29/10/2012
[41] Adapted from http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children teach-themselves/
Em relação às sentenças abaixo, é correto afirmar o seguinte:
I. Para acompanhar o desenvolvimento das crianças beneficiadas pelo programa, o cartão de memória de cada tablet é trocado uma vez por mês para possibilitar que pesquisadores observem como as máquinas são utilizadas.
II. As crianças do programa descrito no texto jamais haviam tido contato com materiais impressos, sinais de trânsito em rodovias ou mesmo papel de embalagem contendo algo escrito.
III. Contrariando expectativas, em apenas quatro minutos, uma criança participante do experimento já descobriu como ligar o tablet.
IV. Um dos dirigentes do Programa, ED McNierney, preocupado com o que se pode fazer para as crianças sem acesso à educação, questiona-se se é possível fornecer apenas a ferramenta para as crianças aprenderem a ler e a aprender, sem professores, escolas e livros.
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