Just to reiterate, I think the very
concept upon which the idea is based is flawed.
Basically, the goal is to make it possible for the kids to learn. The problem is that the "Give them all a tablet" approach is a narrow-minded attempt to reach that goal. While school supplies- Pencils and paper, at the very least- are important, They are only a small part of the larger tapestry that needs to be woven for a working school system. It doesn't matter how fancy or technological student's supplies are if their teachers are ill-trained for the task of teaching, and even the best teacher isn't going to be able to teach very well if the curriculum is flawed. Not to mention, a tablet, laptop, or whatever is still an ill-fitting replacement for standard school supplies; it amounts to nothing more than an expensive magna-doodle.
The idea seems to be to replace expensive(in such areas) consumables like paper, pens, and pencils, with a- ideally sturdy- tablet or other device. This has several problems, though.
How do students hand in their assignments? Clearly they cannot simply pass their super magna-doodles to the front of the class. This would require removable storage, such as flash drives, SD cards, etc. I am fairly certain that these are not something you can pick up at the local markets in those areas. And, they are still limited in how much they can store; so we're back to the fact that there are consumables involved. I have no doubt that supplies like paper and pencils are hard to come by in some areas, but I'm fairly certain that it's still easier to get a couple reams of paper than it is to get a 2GB storage device. Which brings me back to the fact that the entire thing is rather likely to be politically motivated. There are a lot of blogs and posts and articles about this, but for some reason I cannot seem to find a straight answer to it. Some of them say that it is silly to decry the project as a success or a failure at this juncture. Obviously, it's impossible to know what would have happened if instead of pushing some piece of technology as a snake oil solution to the problem of education in third world countries we actually gave them
the same type of stuff first world countries are using- paper, pens, pencils, so forth. Since the only thing the super magna-doodle replaces is paper, pens, pencils, and possibly a calculator, I personally am not sure why the project is heralded by some as a cure-all panacea to the educational problems in the third world. If these devices were so damned useful,
OUR schools would be using them too. The fact that schools are still using pens, pencils, paper, and actual physical books says a lot about the actual economic and logistic feasibility of the concept.
Thing is, in all my searching, I cannot find a single proponent of the idea that doesn't meander on about nonsense. One post/article I found says this:
We have a possible path to preventing global ecological, economic, and military destruction, by bringing a billion children and their families and friends into the search for solutions.
What does this even mean? It's utter nonsense. How is giving them a super magna-doodle going to make them "search for solutions" and solutions to
what? How would them getting a few tablet PCs prevent ecological, economic, and military destruction? It doesn't. The fact that many of the proponents of the project can't go a single paragraph without spewing some FUD like that gives me pause, particularly paired with the fact that their reasoning behind sending these devices rather than paper/pencils etc is ill-thought out.
