[IAEP] Funding - Full-time educator needed for Sugarlabs

[Emma Duke-Williams]

2008/5/28 Seth Woodworth <seth at isforinsects.com>:
> I agree.  For such a large education project, there are far too few
> educators.  I'm not critiquing accomplishments and structure of Sugar,
> I just don't really understand constructionism all that well.  A
> full-time educator might be able to help translate the tech-ese and
> produce/repurpose some course outlines based on Sugar.
>

> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 6:49 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
>> Walter,
>>
>> I feel pretty strongly that sugarlabs should acquire funding to hire a
>> full-time field-educator to manage communication b/w developers and
>> teachers. This is really critical to make sure that Sugar meets "felt
>> needs" of teachers in the developing world rather than perceived needs.
>> This person would also manager feedback on activities and requests from
>> the deployments.
>>
>> It is really critical that this person be an experienced teacher who has
>> worked full-time at the primary or secondary level, ideally in a
>> developing country.
>>
>> An education Ph D from Harvard or MIT would be the wrong person. Those
>> folks tend to focus on policy and theory, and tend not to have teaching
>> experience in public schools. We need someone who is thinking about the
>> problems of teaching long division in a constructionist way and the
>> subjunctive tense in English.

Unless, of course, that PhD grew up in the majority world, and so has
a really good understanding not only of what it's like in the schools
there, but also the culture, and the way that local people work.
I can only talk about Papua New Guinea, as I've worked there (albeit
only for 2.5 years), but I have a feeling that many aspects of
constructivist education would work better there than in the UK,
simply because so much of life depends on making choices, working with
the rest of the community (across the age range), thinking as you go,
rather than expecting a set of procedures to be laid down. If the wet
doesn't come, you have to figure out some other way of ensuring the
crop grows & you have food for the rest of the year - pref with extra
to sell for the things you can't grow/ make.

Emma
-- 
Emma Duke-Williams:
School of Computing/ Faculty eLearning Co-ordinator.
Blog: http://userweb.port.ac.uk/~duke-wie/blog/