Donalð Genes: Nigerians have made me comment-less, am tired of hearing bad things in this country? nothing everly works to its finality,gosh! ah don tire my brother

Donalð Genes: Nigerians have made me comment-less, am tired of hearing bad things in this country? nothing everly works to its finality,gosh! ah don tire my brother

Donalð Genes: Nigerians have made me comment-less, am tired of hearing bad things in this country? nothing everly works to its finality,gosh! ah don tire my brother

Okija_juju: One laptop per child was a dumb idea to start with.. It's like putting the cart before the horse.. The problem with our education is not the lack of laptops. How about we start with fixing the schools and sharing one set of complete textbooks per child.

TribalEAST: It is already taking place in osun state with the introduction of opon-imo.

Up APC

Okija_juju: One laptop per child was a dumb idea to start with.. It's like putting the cart before the horse.. The problem with our education is not the lack of laptops. How about we start with fixing the schools and sharing one set of complete textbooks per child.

Okija_juju: One laptop per child was a dumb idea to start with.. It's like putting the cart before the horse.. The problem with our education is not the lack of laptops. How about we start with fixing the schools and sharing one set of complete textbooks per child.

Okija_juju: One laptop per child was a dumb idea to start with.. It's like putting the cart before the horse.. The problem with our
education is not the lack of laptops. How about we start with fixing the schools and sharing one set of complete textbooks per child.

The Failure of One Laptop Per Child



The Failure of One Laptop Per Child

by AUDREY WATTERS on 09 APR, 2012

"25 million laptops later," Mashable announced today, "One Laptop Per Child doesn't increase test scores." "Error Message," reads the headline from The Economist: "A disappointing return from an investment in computing."

The tenor of these stories feels like a grand "Gotcha!" for ed-tech: It's shiny stuff, sure, but it offers no measurable gains in "student achievement." So while the OLPC project might have been a good idea, so the story goes, it is not a good investment.

One Laptop Per Child was a good idea, a noble and ambitious one at that. Originally proposed in 2006, OLPC aimed to build an inexpensive laptop that would be sold to governments in the developing world and made available in turn to the children in those countries via their respective ministries of education. Easier said than done. Over the course of the past 6 years, the OLPC has fussed with hardware and software specs, finally building a laptop (and now, a tablet) that costs $200 (twice that of the originally promised price).

In the meantime, much of the developing world has experienced its own mobile computing revolution. There are now a number of manufacturers working on low-cost devices for that market. There's the Intel Classmates PC, for example (with similar hardware, but more expensive software than its OLPC coursin); there's the Worldreader project (it delivers villages a library full of e-books via Kindles); and there's the now-infamous Aakash tablet (which was sold in India for $35 but with its reliability and functionality very much in question).

Arguably more significant than the competition OLPC faces from these low-cost tablets and netbooks: 95% of the world's population now owns a cellphone, by some estimates (See Wikipedia's list of mobile phone penetration, broken down by country). Of course, a clamshell phone is hardly the same as a laptop. One has SMS; the other, a command line. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of the cellphone makes it clear that the value proposition of the OLPC device needs to be more than just "access" and "connectivity."



The mission of the non-profit organization always stressed something broader, bigger -- One Laptop per Child meant empowerment, engagement, and education:

We aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.
No mention of improving standardized test scores in there, you'll notice. No talk of "student achievement." "The best preparation for children," according to the OLPC website isn't test prep. It is "to develop the passion for learning and the ability to learn how to learn."

Standardized test scores in math and in language do not reflect "the ability to learn how to learn" -- they don't even purport to. But we fixate on test scores nevertheless. It is worth noting here that the study that prompted today's headlines about OLPC's "disappointing" test results -- one conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank using data collected from some 300 primary schools in rural Peru -- did find some improvement in students' cognitive skills (as in, "the ability to learn how to learn".

The study links that boost in cognitive skills to "increased interaction with technology." Make of that what you will. The study also found that having access to computers increases your access to computers. To quote Keanu Reeves here, "Whoa."

TribalEAST: It is already taking place in osun state with the introduction of opon-imo.

Up APC

Donalð Genes: Nigerians have made me comment-less, am tired of hearing bad things in this country? Nothing Everly works to its finality, gosh! ah don tire my brother, Most of our problems in this country seems to come from either the North or South east, you heard hear bad things from the south-south apart from pockets of bad news emanating from Edo state poli-tricks,

I think we peeps fro Akwa Ibomites Cross Riverians, Deltans, Port Harcourt and Bayelsans are just tired of some Geo-political Zones and their silly political Jiggery-pickery How i wish we are rivened

Donalð Genes: Too many old people ruling us in this country might be the problem, I think it's high time we send them to sleep, It's either Tukur, Tinubu, Oshiomole, Buhari, Obj, Babangida, Atiku, Amaechi, and so on,but people like Gen Adulsalam Abubakar hardly get on the wrong side of the news, I like that man,he seems disincline to all this Nigerian politics