Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Learner Matters, not the Device

I saw, thanks to OLPC News, these two videos.

iPad first day, used by 9 & 4 year-olds from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.



Isaac (4yo) using the XO laptop from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.



Of course, they make me want to have an iPad, and they let me ponder what might be possible with the proposed XO-3.

But they also made me think that what is great about these videos, and about what I have seen with our 5th graders working with the XOs and SOAS and other technologies is that it is the learner that matters, not the device. The device can call something forward in the learner (which, I believe, is there naturally), but the device is NEVER going to be the thing.

How, then, do we allow this natural learning to become unleashed?

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