Futurelab – Research – Publications – opening education:
This series of publications aims to open up areas for debate – to provoke and stimulate new visions for education – as well as literally ‘opening up’ education, not only bringing together ideas from educational practice and research but also drawing on the fields of creative arts, media and technical innovation. In the ideas we present we also hope to ‘open up’ the walls of the educational institution – to present models of learning that show how we can create connections between learners in different settings, how we can enable collaboration between different organisations and institutions, how we can make links between different approaches to and forms of learning.

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Future lab has two papers that are worth reading. one on open source and education and one on social software and learning. Of course… the production of these papers seems more ‘brochure’ than ‘research’ at first, but there are some ideas in there that are worth considering.

India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register :

issed the laptop as “pedagogically suspect”. Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: “We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”

Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.

Banerjee told the Hindu: “We do not think that the idea of Prof Negroponte is mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage and no major country is presently following this. Even inside America, there is not much enthusiasm about this.”

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first healthcare, then primary education, then secondary education, then computers in secondary education, then perhaps one laptop per child… if and only if, you manage to show some benefit of computers in secondary education that implies that the sole purpose of one-laptop-per-child is colonialism via technical means, by which i mean… making people dependent on foreign capital for jobs and equipment.

I’ll take a million please:

The $100 laptop, aka the One Laptop Per Child project just got its first major order – 1 million for Nigeria.

I would love to own one, if its internals were swapped with a MacBook. These things will be a serious nerd fetish item when they become available, and a serious nerd retro-fetish item in 20 years. –MM

Originally posted by Cameron Sinclair from WorldChanging: To Understand and Protect Our Home Planet, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:01 PM

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interesting. i wonder how this will actually work, we’ll see. i don’t believe that the 100 laptop will change anything on a national level other than revealing a huge hidden set of costs for the program, but i could be wrong.