Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.
Krstic wrote his essay in response to the news that the OLPC might become Windows-only, with the Sugar interface ported to it. In the essay, he gives several points of criticism that seem to reflect what many others (including Eugenia and myself) have been saying for a long time now.
Firstly, he doubts the usefulness of constructionism as a learning theory. The constructionist part of the OLPC project is more or less the open source part: users can fix, improve, and translate the software themselves, which will aid massively in the learning process. While Krstic appreciates the "bright-eyed idealism", there simply appears to be no facts backing it all up. "No, we don't know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software on their laptops. Indeed, I bet they'd largely prefer the damn software works and doesn't need fixing."
As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to "decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget", he's talking about theory. [...] There sure as hell doesn't exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.
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