One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for all of World’s Children
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
The One Laptop per Child Foundation (OLPC)is reportedly a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education. A recent report mentions of their activity in Kandahar, in war-torn Afghanistan.
OLPC delivered 774 XO laptops to students and teachers at the Zarghona Ana middle school in Kandahar. The report adds that this brings the total of XO’s distributed by OLPC to 3,700 in Afghanistan, and 1.4 million worldwide.
The Kandahar project involves in addition OLPC, USAID/Afghanistan Small and Medium Enterprise Development (ASMED); the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology; Roshan, Afghanistan’s leading telecommunications provider; and PAIWASTOON, a local private IT company. The project is led by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education.
The XO laptops will have thousands of pages of digital content in the local languages of Dari and Pashto. Also included are acess to 150 educational mini games and interactive versions of curriculum content. Children can take the laptops home, and this means girl students can learn at home without inviting reprisals for going to school.
Read the news at: OLPC.
Tags: Afghanistan, education, laptops, OLPC
Posted in education, education delivery, information technology | No Comments »
Children Exposed to Two Languages do not Suffer Language Contamination
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
There is a common belief that if children are exposed to more than one language during early childhood, their language skills will suffer. They might have difficulty in recalling words needed in a particular language conversation, for example. A kind of language contamination is believed to occur affecting mastery of any language.
Researchers at Dartmouth College, USA, studied childen who were exposed to different combinations of languages from early childhood. They found that the children “grow as if there were two mono-linguals housed in one brain.” This apparently means that the cbildren master both languages as if these were their primary languages.
The researchers looked at 15 bilingual children exposed to two languages from varying ages. There were four groups depending on when intensive exposure to the second language began: at birth, between the ages of two to three, four to six years, and seven to nine years. The children spoke various combinations of languages, including Spanish and French, French and English, Russian and French and sign language and French.
ABC Science Online
Tags: bilingual children, brain development, cognitive development
Posted in cognitive development, language, learning | No Comments »
