[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2010-06-10

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 3:13 PM, Christoph Derndorfer
<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> 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.

Not sure who "we" is or where "we" is getting their data.

Everything I know about what is going in Peru suggests otherwise. I
worked with the M of Ed to create a week-loing teacher-training
workshop long before a single child ever got a laptop. They have a
network of regional support centers. They have a rich collection of
materials for teachers. See [1] and [2] as evidence to the contrary.
[1] comes from the ministry; [2] from a teacher.

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

I was lazy and didn't include the URL in the email... just in my blog
and the wiki. See [3].

>
> Is this report publicly available anywhere?
>
> Cheers,
> Christoph
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
> co-editor, www.olpcnews.com
> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>

[1] http://www.perueduca.edu.pe/olpc/OLPC_Home.html
[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/20189623/The-XO-Laptop-in-the-Classroom
[3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Gardner_Pilot_Academy/Final_report

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org