An interview with Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O’Reilly Media and MAKE magazine. Tim O’Reilly sums it up:
“When you see kids at Maker Faire suddenly turned on to science and math because they want to make things, when you see them dragging their parents around with eyes shining, you realize just how dull our education system has made some of the most exciting and interesting stuff in the world.
Dougherty explains in detail the promise of the maker movement in education (and government). Pretty inspiring.
I’ve heard this before in MOE:
When Singapore’s Education Minister was asked last year about his nation’s reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: “We’re not as bad as the Koreans.”
But I had no idea it was this bad:
On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them.
Fascinating, and more than a little depressing.
We are already at a point where the ratio of professionals to computers is 1:2. A laptop and a smartphone are standard equipment in our society. With the advent of the tablet, we may be moving towards or beyond three computers per person. The fact of the matter, though, is that this ubiquity of computing devices is not reflected in most schools.
(There’s also a bit about how Stallman showed up to heckle him at his lecture. Wha?)
Article by Fraser Speirs on iPad 2, who might know a thing or two about using the iPad in education.
I know the iPad has already made its way into Singaporean schools, but does anyone know how schools like Crescent, which pioneered 1-to-1 Tablet PC ownership way before its time, are responding?