<html><head><style type="text/css"></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt"><div>To me, this is the main point. Years ago (at PARC) we decided that in any meaningful world, we needed to help 90% of the learners achieve real fluency (or judge our methods to be not good enough). Both the "90%" and "real fluency" are crucial (the latter is often abandoned when the former is held to be important). Cheers, Alan </div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><hr size="1">From: K. K. Subramaniam <kksubbu.ml@gmail.com> To: iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org Sent: Tue, November 2, 2010 7:45:47 AM Subject: Re: [IAEP] Granny Cloud On Tuesday 02 Nov 2010 8:17:34 am Caryl Bigenho wrote: > Hi All... > Here is a concise article that summarizes Sugata Mitra's work with the > "Granny Cloud." Note he says a 1 to 1 model doesn't work. He uses 4 to 1. > <a target="_blank" href="http://dnc.digitalunite.com/2010/07/29/granny-cloud-to-teach-children-via">http://dnc.digitalunite.com/2010/07/29/granny-cloud-to-teach-children-via</a>- > the-internet/ I would be wary of reaching any specific conclusion from such experiments. This is not to discourage new experiments but to highlight the fact the need of the hours are interventions that ensures that the number of students who are *not learning* should provably *decrease* during a three year window. When we throw technology X or method Y at the education problem and make the top two quartiles learn better but leave the bottom quartile out cold, then such a tech/method is a nice but unimportant development for tacking education issues we face today. Subbu _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) <a ymailto="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org" href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> <a target="_blank" href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> </div></div> </div> </body></html>