OLPCorps Learning

Welcome

"One Laptop per Child is an education project, not a laptop project."

This is the main page for discussion and resources related to all learning, pedagogical and educational issues surrounding OLPCorps, and specifically OLPCorps Africa 2009.

OLPC Learning Vision

OLPC is predicated upon three basic premises:

1. Learning and high-quality education for all is essential to provide a fair, equitable, economically and socially viable society;
2. Access to mobile laptops on a sufficient scale provide real benefits for learning and dramatic improvement of education on a national scale;
3. So long as computers remain unnecessarily expensive such potential gains remain a privilege for a select few.

By providing our most powerful tool for knowledge creation, development, and discovery to children and their teachers with sufficient time and support to enable fluency, and development, and by providing high-bandwidth connectivity to enable the development of knowledge communities, we now have the means to address seemingly intractable and critically important educational issues. more

OLPC Learning Resources

This is a list of OLPC-generated learning resources. If you're planning to apply to OLPCorps, you and all of your team members should familiarize yourselves with them.

Also, OLPCorps is planning to conduct a Online Seminar on Learning sometime in late March/early April for everyone involved in OLPCorps Africa. If you're going to participate, please make sure you've reviewed these documents, so that everyone involved in the discussion is on the same page!

From the OLPC Learning Team:

• OLPCorps Learning Manual
• OLPC's Learning Vision
• http://learning.laptop.org/ Beta-Version Learning Website
  

From Community Members:

• Constructionism: the philosophy of education OLPC is based on
• Educational Activity Guidelines: an extensive review of the XO features that pertain directly to educators
• Learning Activities Database: a collection of a variety of learning activities, both previously implemented and in progress; a good place to get inspired!

For additional community resources, also see: Educators wiki page; Education Portal; XO Teachers Page

OLPCorps Africa: Testing and Metrics Debate

During to March 8, 2009 OLPCorps conference call, a debate arose about whether some sort of testing mechanism should be developed/implemented to measure improvements in students' knowledge and learning skills during the 2009 OLPCorps Africa deployment.

This is the place to discuss this issue, and related questions. Please feel free to add more questions to the ones listed below, and discuss possible answers on the talk page.

Once some more concrete ideas emerge, an Online Seminar may be planned by OLPCorps to bring the conversation into real-time.

Questions

1. Should there be a pre-deployment knowledge/learning skills evaluation?
2. Would pre-deployment evaluations be the responsibility of the partner school or the OLPCorps team?
3. Should there be incremental follow-up evaluations after the deployment?
4. How to create a evaluation model (or baseline) that could be internationally and cross-culturally applied?
5. If evaluation models are de-standardized, how can results be compared?
6. Should evaluations reflect the national standards of the school?
   1. If yes, how to ensure this?
   2. If no, what standards to measure against?
7. OLPC's educational strategy emphasizes learning skills that are largely untestable; how would an evaluation tool account for this?
8. Can we create an XO/Sugar application that would evaluate such skills?
   1. Would such an application be viable without internet access?
   2. Without internet access, how would information be gathered?

Testing & Metrics Debate Resources

Please post links specifically related to learning skills and knowledge evaluation-related strategies, studies or resources here. In particular, these should be aimed at people not familiar with some of the more theoretical or technical aspects to the debate, as that they can learn about the issues and enter into the discussion.

External Learning Resources

If you have links to resources, articles, studies, etc that relate to OLPC's Learning Vision or Strategies (ie. articles expanding on constructionism), please post them here!