Commentary about those things I find interesting.
I have not been one to look favorably on counting children’s books in my Goodreads list. However, I am really behind on my reading.
And my kid just had me read Oscar’s Book for the 9th time today alone. I am getting in a lot of reading that isn’t going counted. So, I may just start including those books on my Goodreads when they meet certain criteria.
Find it amazing children who have never been exposed English can learn it from a kiosk with just 1980-90s computer games made available to them. That the kids worked in groups appears to enhance the effect was also pretty interesting. One child would operate with 3 advising and all 4 would test the same, so they learn as much by watching as doing.
Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”
“Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments prove that wrong.”
Linux Journal
The boy’s face says to me pure joy.
Took this a while ago, but I forgot it was still on the data card. I found it while pulling off pictures of the board from the meeting this morning.
NPR : Mother and Son Offer Transracial Adoption Insights:
Morning Edition, July 23, 2007 · When Judy Stigger and her husband decided to adopt, they chose children who very obviously didn’t look like them.
“If you’re a very private person, this is probably very hard to do because people are curious and do ask how much the baby cost and whether or not that’s one of those crack babies,” Judy Stigger says. “The questions are amazing that people feel free to ask.”
People asked those questions because the Stiggers are white. And in Chicago — almost three decades ago — they adopted two children who are biracial.
“We need more commercials which show kids being smart.” — arfore
