WENCHI, Ethiopia (AP) — The kids in this volcano-rim village wear filthy, ragged clothes. They sleep beside cows and sheep in huts made of sticks and mud. They don't go to school. Yet they all can chant the English alphabet, and some can spell words.
The key to their success: 20 tablet computers dropped
off in their Ethiopian village in February by a group called One Laptop
Per Child.
The goal is to find out whether children using today's
new technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools
or teachers exist. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers
analyzing the project data say they're already startled.
"What I think has already happened is that the kids
have already learned more than they would have in one year of
kindergarten," said Matt Keller, who runs the Ethiopia program.
The fastest learner is 8-year-old Kelbesa Negusse, the
first to turn on one of the Motorola Xoom tablets last February. Its
camera was disabled to save memory, yet within weeks Kelbesa had figured
out the tablet's workings and made the camera work.
He proclaimed himself a lion, a marker of accomplishment in Ethiopia.
On a recent sunny weekday, nine months into the
project, the kids sat in a dark hut with a hay floor. At 3,380 meters
(11,000) feet above sea level, the air at night here is chilly, and the
youngsters coughed and wiped runny noses. Many were barefoot. But they
all eagerly tapped and swiped away on their tablets.
The apps encouraged them to click on colors — green, red, yellow.
"Awesome," one app said aloud. Kelbesa rearranged the letters HSROE into
one of the many English animal names he knows. Then he spelled words on
his own, tracing the English letters into his tablet in a thick red
line.
"He just spelled the word 'bird'!" exclaimed Keller.
"Seven months ago he didn't know any English. That's unbelievable.
That's a quantum leap forward."
"If we prove that kids can teach themselves how to
read, and then read to learn, then the world is going to look at
technology as a way to change the world's poorest and most remote kids,"
he said.
"We will have proven you can actually reach these kids
and change the way that they think and look at the world. And this is
the promise that this technology holds."
Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University professor, studies
the origins of reading and language learning and is a consultant to the
One Laptop project. She was an early critic of the experiment in
Ethiopia but was amazed by the disabled-camera incident.
"It's crazy. I can't do that. I couldn't hack into
anything," she said. "But they learned. And the learning that's gone on,
that's very impressive to me, the critic, because I did not assume they
would gravitate toward the more literacy-oriented apps that they have."
Wenchi's 60 families grow potatoes and produce honey. None of the adults can read. They broadly support the laptop project and
express amazement their children were lucky enough to be chosen.
"I think if you gave them food and water they would
never leave the computer room," said Teka Kumula, who charges the
tablets from a solar station built by One Laptop. "They would spend day
and night here."
Kumula Misgana, 70, walked into the hut that One Laptop
built to watch the kids. Three of them had started a hay fight. "I'm
fascinated by the technology," Misgana said. "There are pictures of
animals I didn't even know existed."
He added: "We are a bit jealous. Everyone would love this opportunity, but we are happy for the kids."
Kelbesa, the boy lion, said: "I prefer the computer
over my friends because I learn things with the computer." Asked what
English words he knows, he rattled off a barnyard: "Dog, donkey, horse,
sheep, cow, pig, cat."
Kelbesa, one of four children, is being raised by his
widowed mother, Abelbech Wagari, who dreams the tablet is his gateway to
higher education.
While the adults appeared grateful for the One Laptop opportunity, they wished the village had a teacher.
Keller said that Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT pioneer
in computer science who founded One Laptop, is designing a program for
the 100 million children worldwide who don't get to attend school. Wolf
said Negroponte wants to tap into children's "very extraordinary
capacity to teach themselves," though she said she has no desire to see
teachers replaced.
The goal of the project is to get kids to a stage
called "deep reading," where they can read to learn. It won't be in
Amharic, Ethiopia's first language, but English, which is widely seen as
the ticket to higher paying jobs.
Keller and Wolf say they are only at the beginning of
understanding the significance of how fast the kids of Wenchi have
mastered the English ABCs. The experiment will be replicated in other
villages in other countries, using more targeted apps.
One might wonder whether the children of Wenchi need
good nutrition and warm clothes rather than a second language and no
teacher — a question Wolf said has given her some sleepless nights.
She thinks she has arrived at an answer.
In remote regions of Africa and elsewhere, she said,
"the mother who has one year of literacy has a far better chance to make
sure her child can live to five years of age. They are savvier when it
comes to medicine, to basic health, to economic development."
"So at 3 a.m. when I'm thinking, if I can do one thing
... using my particular knowledge, which is in reading and brain
development and thinking — this is my shot; this is my contribution to
the nutrition and health of a child."
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
N.B. Children should not browse sites unsupervised
No comments:
Post a Comment