Two informative pieces in the 3/10/2009 Economist. The first - "Education in Uruguay - Laptops for all" - provides quite an upbeat, though "warts and all" summary of Uruguay's deployment of nearly 400,000 OLPC laptops (nearly all of the country's primary school pupils now have them), pointing out that government's ambition that laptops will improve the overall standard of education "will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects", and that the introduction of laptops should "prompt a shift away from rote learning towards critical analysis".
The second - "The boom in smart-phones" - describes the rise of the Open Source operating system Android, emphasising how Android has enabled "cut-price Chinress firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software". The article suggests that within four years half of handsets sold will be "smart", and that almost all will be so by 2015. (I think these figures relate to worldwide supply, in which case the switch will be quicker in the UK.) The changes this will cause in the role of technology in learning (and, perhaps more importantly, in its organisation and control) will be profound.
Back-links to related pieces:
- 26/9/2009 - The "mobilely accessible" Internet - global overview;
- 20/2/2009 - Using mobile technologies to promote children's learning;
- 2/10/2008 - Android: phones are PCs, only smaller and with more stuff on them;
- 4/8/2007 - Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world";
- 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
- 1/6/2007 - Test the mobile-readiness of a web site;
- 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa: a "simple sort of eBay for agricultural products;
- 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
- 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
- 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.
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