[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2010-06-10

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Am 10.06.2010 19:34, schrieb Walter Bender:
> ==Sugar Digest==
> 
> 1. In their humorous treatise on political double-speak, ''Aristotle
> and an Aardvark go to Washington'', Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein
> define 'contextomy' as "a subtle variation on the straw-man argument"
> where you ''yank'' your victim's words out of context. A straw-man
> argument attributes an opponent to a position that in fact they do not
> hold. Contextomy adds the twist that you de-contextualize a quote in
> order to misstate (or overstate) their position.
> 
> An example of contextomy is Mark Warschauer's post,  ''OLPC: How Not
> to Run a Laptop Program''
> [http://edutechdebate.org/one-laptop-per-child-impact/olpc-how-not-to-run-a-laptop-program/].
> The premise of Warschauer's article is that the 'OLPC model' is
> "simply passing out XOs and getting out of children’s way." No
> planning, no training, no teacher engagement... He goes on to say that
> this is an ill-advised model that does not work. In the article itself
> Warchauer never cites evidence that this is in fact the 'OLPC model',
> but in a comment he refers the reader to the OLPC mission statement as
> justification for his straw-man argument. Contextomy.
> 
> I am not aware of any OLPC (or Sugar) deployment that in any way
> resembles Warshauer's straw man, in the United States or elsewhere.

I hate to play devil's advocate here (naaa, not really;-) but one might
argue that based on what little we know about OLPC in Peru, arguably the
2nd largest OLPC / Sugar project at the moment, this ("simply passing
out XOs and getting out of children’s way.") is pretty much exactly what
seems to be happening.

> 2. Carolyn Meeks and I submitted the final report for the Gardner
> Pilot Academy Sugar-on-a-Stick pilot.

Is this report publicly available anywhere?

Cheers,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com