I have no knowledge of OLPC, but it seems obvious to me: successfull autodidacts in societies where self-directed-learning is not commont (probably most societies...) tend to be internally motivated, so higher proportion of them are introverts, also higher proportions have at least little bit of aspergers-like traits etc. Extroverts on the other hand tend to learn most from human teachers they physically interact with!
If you'd crunch the numbers and compare them with the personality traits of "influencers", you'll likely see they are opposite. So any chance that a positive view of the device will spread via word of mouth is low, aka any change of whatever the equivalent of "going viral" would be amongst African villages is low!
By targeting the self-learners you're basically going anti-viral... you're doing anti-marketing! You'd need to try and hit the "micro-influencers", and probably only chance of that is by hitting teachers and some community leaders and local "celebrities".
We techo-focused hyper-individualistic self-learners only thrive in societies after they've been properly wired up both socially and technically. Drop us in a borderline-medieval society and we're useless and have zero influence on the people around us. Heck, "geeks" started to thrive in medieval Europe after the church managed in a primitive way to network part of the world. Probably similar patterns happened in China and the Arab world too. Most underdeveloped societies today totally lack that kind of useful networking ...otherwise they likely wouldn't be underdeveloped in the first place!
I avoid making a stronger claims bc it would require too much work to research it, do it yourself if you want do (dis)confirm, I'm just "throwing a bone here", too lazy to think or research more about it :)...
in other words, a constructionist model may work in a situation where kids are left to themselves, but it may not work if there is a competing educational system that doesn't allow the kids to take advantage of the opportunities the constructionist model provides.
personally though i am skeptical that a pure constructionist approach will enable the children to achieve their maximum potential, and any successes of it are in comparison to a failing traditional model.
EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281
>SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors. It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson.
>[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5]
Chaim Gingold wrote a section about Doreen Nelson's work in his dissertation on "Play Design":
LGR - SimCity Educational Version Unboxing & Overview
An overview of the "School Edition" Lab Pack of SimCity Classic by Maxis. Unboxing, first impressions of the package and testing of the radically rad software ensues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edXRNtuAGTga
LGR has done many other extensive reviews of SimCity, and here's his most recent retrospective:
SimCity 30 Years Later: A Retrospective (Feb 1, 2019)
But am I reading GP wrong that it wasn't constructionist education proper that failed, but a "let's do things with laptops" being retconned onto constructivism?
i don't know enough about constructionist education to know what factors ought to be present, but i can't imagine that an education system and teachers that do not understand or do not want constructionist education aren't a problem.
i also believe that OLPC didn't sell constructionist education to the buyers, nor that the buyers wanted to start using constructionist education.
i have the impression that it was rather hoped that constructionist education would not only happen by itself but also undermine the existing education system in that it flourishes despite the existing system.
in the end the failure was that the expectations of parents, teachers and others in the education system were not met.
one might argue that the failure was to not educate the buyers on what to expect, but then i can't imagine that OLPC would have successfully sold anything if they had tried to sell constructionist education along with it.
It's not straightforward just how to apply those theories, and takes a lot of experimentation and adaptation. And getting the established education system to change is a Sisyphean task.
Instead of thinking of SimCity as a way of directly teaching urban planning, or financing, or building construction, you can use it to motivate and indirectly develop language, logical argument, and debating skills. You can ask students to write about their cities, by describing their aspirations, proposals, platforms, campaign promises, then promoting and defending and discussing the issues, then holding elections and voting for which plans to implement, then implementing them, then discussing and writing about how they turned out.
https://www.constructionismconf.org/
http://www.constructionism2018.fsf.vu.lt/
http://e-school.kmutt.ac.th/constructionism2016/
https://confdriver.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/constructionism2014/
http://constructionism2012.etl.ppp.uoa.gr/
http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=607...
So, if I understand you correctly, OLPC went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out? This is hyper-relevant to what I'm working on, so: did a proper theoretical constructionist framework fail you, or was underestimating the role of teachers the main problem?
Did engaging Nepali teachers give any insights in the above?