OLPC4Nigeria

Well I'm back after a long break from writing. Its been an exciting month ending with a visit to Boston where I was at the One Laptop Per Child (see www.laptop.org) conference for the countries participating in the program and was part of the OLPC4Nigeria Team. We have been trying the Beta machines in a school in Abuja and were pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm and curiosity of the kids. What the conference brought out is the fact that the machines are the culmination of the theories that have come through the life work of people like Seymour Papert, Alan Kaye and others. It will be fascinating to see how this pans out because it is already starting to change the PC world with Intel announcing the classmate PC and Microsoft announcing sub $5 licenses for windows in response to the AMD chipset and Linux OS components of the machine. I wonder what is going to happen to the education systems and how the education ministries begin to understand the paradigm shift these machines bring with them. Will the school curriculum open up and shift to learning? Will the emphasis shift from teachers to children? Will the focus move from learning by rote to discovery? Well the journey has begun, lets see where it leads.