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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/
O pronome “them”, destacado na linha 28, refere-se a
