One Laptop Per Child: Cultural Impact in Puru
Ivan Krsti recently returned from a grueling three-week stay in Peru, where he worked with the Ministry of Education team entrusted with the country’s 260-thousand laptop One Laptop Per Child implementation.
His story highlights how the OLPC project (which I reported on in 2006) is changing culture, getting kids to be more open and sharing as well as giving them much more meaningful avenues to both learn and teach each other.
Here’s an extract of Ivan’s Story. Go read it.
Kids started talking to each other outside of school hours over the mesh, and working together more while in school.
It’s not that the kids are starving, it’s just that they don’t have very much; what they do have, they’re reluctant to share. With the laptops, the kids had to turn to each other to learn how to use them. Then they realized it was easy to send each other pictures and things they’ve written — and it became commonplace. The sharing, asserts Mrs. Cornejo, extended into the physical world, where once jealously-guarded personal items increasingly started being passed around between the kids, if somewhat nervously.
“Children’s fathers used to seethe with fury when the laptops were passed out, because the kids no longer wanted to help work in the field all day,” he continued.
“I didn’t know how we’d stop the fathers from revolting and making the kids return their XOs,” he says, shaking his head slightly. “The kids solved the dilemma for me: they taught their fathers how to use the Internet and a search engine.”
The fathers, I later heard, all decided an education could stop their children from having no choice but to work the field all day as they did. With the laptops in place, the school was no longer a black box whose efficacy had to be taken on faith: the kids could prove they were learning. Schooling had gone open source.
http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay
