Perhaps not the most balanced and thorough review ever, but still it’s illuminating when a One Laptop Per Child XO laptop and an Intel Classmate are both given to a 9 year old boy to review (caveat: He may well be 10 now, it isn’t clear!)
See it here on the BBC dot.life blog.
OLPC clearly holds its own, though – and does prove the kids don’t really mind another operating system that isn’t Windows.
If I hadn’t fallen behind again on my RSS feeds, I might have had this last week… but I just realised that TED happened again this year – a few weeks ago, and now the videos are all online. It’s easily possible to spend a day just watching the TED videos – and I can guarantee that it wont be a day wasted, with so many fantastic thinkers and do-ers gathered together and sharing their ideas. Homepage for this year’s event is here.
Meanwhile, I’ve finally caught up with Alan Kay’s presentation from last year!.
The presentation includes some brilliant demonstrations – and quite possibly should be required viewing for everyone involved in education… with simple demonstrations which show that its quite achievable to get 6 year old children to manage to work with differential equations! (Though perhaps without the jargon)
His talk features children’s use of simulation for experiments (with e-toys) and also touches on the OLPC laptop.
Review of day 2 of the MoodleMoot conference in Milton Keynes below. Martin Langhoff reveals Moodle’s role on One Laptop Per Child; Paula de Waal on the hype and reality of Web 2.0 in the classroom; Daniela Rappitsch and an unusual scheme for marking coursework; and Ray Lawrence on effective Moodling.
And both my Sloodle presentation and Pieter van der Hijden’s one on Moodle and Gaming are now available on Blip.tv in the Learn4Life page. (Lots of other education and technology videos there too).