Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The ethical problem goes far beyond helping the disabled and impaired. Access to information and communications needs to be redefined as a fundamental human right, and fully funded. Some of this is already happening. Phone companies have discovered the village market, under the prodding of the Grameen Bank and Grameen Phone. China is building out its phone system as fast as it knows how. Africa has fiber optics going into every country in the next few years, and more undersea cables on the way. There are a billion or so children in the world. Giving each one a $200 educational netbook every four years would cost $50 billion annually, presumably decreasing with technology advances. Add in something for electricity and broadband infrastructure, and you can generate trillions of dollars of new economic activity within a generation. At that point, we can supply free text-to-speech software for the blind and visually impaired, one-hand keyboard layouts for the mutilated and otherwise physically impaired, and many other assistive technologies at no extra cost.
Source: @Mokurai
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I am new to this site. I would like to become a part of the mission to provide assistive technology to all children in the U.S. and across the world. I am a special education teacher who specializes in serving children with severe special needs. I have limited finantial resources but would like to be active in this mission.
Source: Maria K. Gaebler
In his posting Depressing study of L&D, Donald Clark quotes research by Coleman and Parkes in Spring of this year, which involved interviews with 100 key decision-makers at major UK companies. Apparently this showed that:
- 70% see inadequate staff skills as a barrier to growth.
- 40% see a risk of employee skills being obsolete.
- 55% claim that l&d are failing to deliver necessary training.
- 46% doubt that l&d can deliver.
- Less than 18% agree that l&d is aligned with business
Now I haven’t seen this research in any detail, so I don’t know how objective these results really are. But let’s suppose they’re true and my instinct tells me that they probably are. I’d be inclined to point the finger of blame (not a nice thing to do but hey) at the key decision-makers themselves:
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What on earth are you doing tolerating such poor performance (at least as you perceive it)?
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Would you sit back and do nothing if other departments performed so poorly?
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What direction have you been giving to your l&d team?
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On what basis did you appoint your l&d manager?
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How much do you understand about the process of learning? If not very much, then what are you going to do about this?
The reality in my experience is that many major organisations do well in spite of themselves. Most departments have their fair share of hopeless cases and it’s probable that l&d has exceeded its quota. But don’t blame those on the shop floor, the trainers themselves, because they’re simply doing what they’re told and, to be fair, what has always been done. Most are extremely dedicated and hard-working. The majority do get results at the level of the individual learner, but probably not results that are strategically important.
If there is a problem, and this survey indicates that there probably is in more companies than is acceptable, then this is a problem of management. L&d requires strong and assertive leadership, like any other business function. And it needs to start by educating those above to understand the realities of adult learning in the workplace, not the business of processing employees through courses.
The simple fact is that you need to utilise a selection of technology to meet the needs of a given scenario. An overall approach based opn teh concept of one size fits all is always likely to fail as it fails to take adccount of individual user variances. This is especially true in communities where users require adaptive or assistive technology to access core information and communication. If you want to look beyond the debate between mobile phones and PC's consider the functionality offered by an mp3 player or ebook reader, both are cheap and low cost and recent models incorporate web browsing etc – what is challenged is the form factor of the desktop PC in an era dominated by portability and mobility. with that challenge comes the need to explore both form and the range of functions that technology offers to meet the apsirations of the users. Technology does not and should not dominate the debate, the specification of the equipment is based upon the needs and aspirations of users, once that is defined the choice of platform is then a matter of specification
Source: David Banes
Let me posit a scenario: Suppose we take a village or several villages. Now completely “wire” the community- high speed, low/no cost access and a zero fault computer. I am not having problems imagining such a scenario even for a whole village, not just a “school”. I can imagine this in a rural village removed from easy physical access and I can see this in a barrio in a larger community. In fact I have seen both where such efforts have been promoted. I can even imagine the village copy machine able to produce 3D objects- maybe even a star trek matter converter?
What is missing from this picture? My concern is that:
a) we see the world revolving around and/or driven by technology. Humility and service seem in short supply
b) high speed knowledge movement does not equate 1:1 with social/political change. Do we have a hammer/nail vision problem?
c) time is a critical element. What is needed today and what will be needed tomorrow is a dynamic issue. How do we think about the future?
OLPC anyone?
Source: Tom Abeles