An interesting news item on Radio 4’s Today programme (31st October 2012) describes a ‘one tablet per child’ project in two villages in Ethiopia where children were each given a tablet PC, programmed in English. Within a short space of time, the children taught themselves how to use the tablets and helped each other discover how they work.
During the interview, Matt Keller of the American organisation behind the One Laptop Per Child project, Global Advocacy, described how the project was conducted and that these children learned by working things out for themselves and by helping each other.
Listen to the interview here.
The project is resonant of Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiments, first carried out in 1999 in New Delhi, which support his view that “education is a self-supporting system”.
I am part of the Learning Team and am based at the Eastbourne campus
