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Monday, April 29, 2013 - 7:48amSanction this postReply
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Thanks, Ed!
I posted a news item about the MIT Media Lab's giving laptops to kids in Ethiopia on RoR here. The story from your article linked here from MIT Technology Review carried exactly some of the commentary you warn about. Some called it colonialism or racism. Another said that Ethopia's free government schools should be sufficient. Another warned against "experimenting" on children.

I found it curious that Richard Smith (apparenlty connected with the project) was disappointed that no one showed them how to read "rightside up." For some of the applications, the kids used the tablets "upside down."
@monz We certainly would like to try and work with children at an earlier age.  However, its challenging because all of the apps available assume some sort of native or knowledgeable speaker guidance.  Let me give you an example.  During some site visits we discovered that because we weren't dealing with rotation completely correctly in one of our apps that the children would sometimes use our app upside down.  So they were seeing all the letter upside down.  Not good!  Because nobody in the village knows any better there was no one who could recognize that this was a problem.  Apps that are designed to instruct in the total absence of someone who already knows the language are difficult and require quite a bit more development work than your average educational app.  But certainly the earlier we can  begin this sort of instruction the better.
But our writing styles have used several orientations. The archaic Greeks wrote in "boustrophedon" (ox-plowing) back and forth left to right and then right to left.  Chinese and Japanese traditionally go from top to bottom, but left-right may depend on context.  When the Mongols adopted writing, they took "Persian" (Arabic) letters and turned them 90-degrees from right-left to up-down.  Being able to read upside down what is one someone else's desk can be a handy skill in an office setting.

My point is only that there is no preferred frame of reference for writing.  If you can win at Angry Birds upside down, all's well.  What I found curious was that someone with an open mind (Smith) had a closed avenue within it, just one of the many things we all have in common.

Anyway, thanks, again! As I said on another forum, last year, I sent my daughter a link to the Diamandis TED lecture on Abundance.


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