6/25/2023 0 Comments Oplc laptopOverall, the research illustrated that giving primacy to mere deployment of OLPC laptops has limited relevance to children, both in use and outcome. We situated the experiment in the social cognitive theory to demonstrate that computer self-efficacy mediates the relationship between technological literacy attained as a consequence of the Contextualized-OLPC education project and a specific learning outcome, functional literacy. We first demonstrated that technological knowledge was associated positively with functional literacy. A second objective was to assess impact of technology introduction while countering extant techno-determinist approaches of impact assessment. The Contextualized-OLPC education project utilized strategies identified by the Technology Community Management model to address contextually germane factors of teacher training, unbiased gender access, and local language use. The study objective was to prioritize local contexts during technology implementation design in order to attain educational impact in terms of improved learning outcomes for students. A longitudinal quasi-experimental design among nine rural Indian primary schools involved pre-and post-experiment measures conducted with both test (n = 126) and control groups (n = 79). We argue that the problem is not as much as a focus on the provision of affordable technologies, but the lack of consideration of deeply contextualized implementation design and the lack of understanding of psychological mechanisms at the user-level that influence learning impact. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative has been at the forefront of introducing low-cost computers in developing countries. ![]() Finally, the chapter will offer a number of suggestions for future projects so as they may avoid some of the criticisms leveled at the OLPC project. These criticisms fall into three main areas: first, that the underlying beliefs and much of the discourse surrounding the program are technological determinist in orientation and fail to acknowledge both the heterogeneity of educational situations and the possibility of other outcomes of technological deployment second, that the project seeks to impose the technology with little appreciation of local needs or conditions and verges on the colonialist in some of it terms of address third that the program focuses solely upon the technological to the detriment of the additional educational requirements that the widespread dissemination of such technology requires. The chapter will then move onto a critical examination of the program and will identify a number of issues in such an endeavor. ![]() The chapter commences with an account of the history of the OLPC, which traces the emergence of the project from the models of learning developed by Papert and others through the launch of the program at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005 and some of the problems faced in more recent times. This chapter examines the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project.
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