Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Teaching The World's One Billion Marginalized Children

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Harvard Business Review is running a series on innovations in education. In this article, a clinical psychologist tells us that the efforts to use technology in education in the developing world have failed ("great expectations have repeatedly been followed by deep disillusionment... the Skinner Box, Teaching Machines, Plato and more recently One Laptop Per Child") and that what the developing world really needed was:
- digital libraries, like the Open Learning Exchange's (OLE) School BELL (Basic E-Learning Library)
- examination systems - "today's technologies can greatly increase the reliability and validity of examinations while radically reducing their cost," and
- teacher development - "Teachers in developing nations need help in moving from "repeat after me" to more problem solving, activity-based education."
Maybe a better thing to do here would have been to have had this column written by an educator working on the very real and varied educational development projects that go far beyond the three simple suggestions given here.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 11:54 p.m.

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