An interesting article showing the limits of the introduction of programs such as one-laptop- per-child, without considering the pedagogical rather than merely technological challenges in the classroom.
From IPS by Cristina Canoura, July 3o, 2009:
[....]Villa García’s was the first school in the Montevideo metropolitan area to receive the computers distributed under the central government’s one-laptop-per-child programme, known as CEIBAL (a Spanish acronym that stands for Basic Computer Connectivity in Education for Online Learning, but also coincides with the name of Uruguay’s national tree, the Ceibo), which seeks to promote digital equality and to democratise knowledge.
Its pupils are among the large proportion of boys and girls who live under the poverty line in Uruguay: almost half of the child population of this small South American country of just 3.4 million inhabitants.
The aim of this innovative initiative championed by socialist President Tabaré Vázquez is to give every schoolchild and teacher in Uruguay their own personal computer, thus bringing disadvantaged communities into the digital age.
But the programme failed to include gender considerations in its contents, and as soon as kids are allowed to play freely with their computers, boys go straight to online games typically associated with their sex and girls look for doll, dress-up and fashion makeover games, Adriana Font and Karen Souza, two young teachers who work at the school, told IPS.
Gender differences are also reinforced by families. When there’s an after-school activity or field trip, girls usually participate in fewer numbers because their parents want them to stay home and care for their younger siblings and do the housework. [ read full here]
[...]Sixty percent of the children in Font’s and Souza’s classes are older than the ages stipulated for the grades they are in. This means that most of them are teenagers aged 13 to 15.
When they speak of their plans for the future, they tend to repeat traditional roles. Most of the boys say they’ll go into a technical line of work – like car mechanic – and girls mainly want to be hairdressers. [read full here]




