Impact of OLPC in Peru: Magic
OLPC in Peru was recently all over the AP newswire and the elite Ivan Krstić just visited that school and took away an amazing story:
- As there are few roads in and around Arahuay, the children don’t communicate much outside of school — with anyone. The teachers started independently pointing out to Mr. Navarro that this was changing once the laptops arrived: kids started talking to each other outside of school hours over the mesh, and working together more while in school. They started talking a lot more with each other in person, and conquered their previously paralyzing fear of strangers.
- 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
- 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. So their parents started having them help out only when necessary, and left them to read and write on their XO the rest of the time.
And this is lovely - spot the Aspergers kid :-)
Both Mrs. Cornejo and Mr. Navarro thought the XO would exacerbate some existing discipline problems at the school. One student, whose name I’ll withhold, commonly gets in fights with others, didn’t speak to or play with his classmates, and would normally sit in a corner of the classroom by himself. The principals anticipated the XO would make him even more territorial and isolated, but they were taken by complete surprise when he became the first kid to figure out the laptop, and then started teaching the others who curiously flocked around him. “We don’t tell these feel-good stories, these fairy tales,†Mr. Navarro responded to my unspoken skepticism. “It’s just what happened. It’s just how it is.â€
The Impact of OLPC in Peru: Magic by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
March 8, 2008 | Filed Under Personal Thoughts
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