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In Benin, the cost of a generic PC is equivalent to a teacher's salary for eight months?

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Michael Trucano

Sr. ICT & Education Specialist

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Japan

Crowdsourcing, collaborative learning or cheating?

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Wed, 05/04/2011 - 13:30

Challenges for educators in the Internet age

Wherever there are rules, there are almost inevitably people looking to break them, especially where a compelling incentive exists for those willing to risk getting caught. When I was a classroom teacher in Czechoslovakia and the United States, I often found that some of the most 'innovative' practices I witnessed over the course of a school year fell under the heading of what I (and the school) considered 'cheating'.

A (digital) library ... in your pocket?

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 15:26

are paper-bound books destined to go the way of the card catalogue? (image attribution at bottom of this blog posting)

Amazon, the company behind the Kindle, perhaps the world's most famous e-reader, recently announced an international version of its digital book reading device that will allow users to connect via 3G to download content in over 100 countries. The early success of the Kindle, together with products like the Sony Reader, and the excitement over recently announced products like the Nook and Plastic Logic e-reading devices (Wikipedia has a nice list of these things), portends profound changes to the way we consume and distribute reading materials going forward. The excellent (and highly recommended) Mobile Libraries blog explores what all of this might mean for one of most venerable of all information gathering, curation and dissemination institutions: the library. While Mobile Libraries documents issues related to how e-books and the like may transform the roles of the library in the industrialized countries of Europe, North America and Asia, there is no clear equivalent information resource highlighting what such advances might mean for developing countries. But, in various ways, many people and projects are hard at work exploring such issues.

Are they really using Nintendo in schools in Japan? (and why might developing countries care?)

Submitted by Michael Trucano on Fri, 04/24/2009 - 05:20

*Other* mobile devices in education - thinking beyond netbooks, mobile phones and PDAs

CC licensed image courtesy of diebmx via Flickr Last week's blog entry on 'What do we know about the use of mobile phones in education?' generated a lot of email. Some correspondents (rightly) noted that a variety of mobile devices in multiple form factors are being tested for use in educational settings outside of the three categories most people commonly think about: PDAs, phones and netbooks.

A case in point: Last month reports emerged in the Japanese media (English re-cap here) about the 'mandatory' use of Nintendo DS portable video gaming devices in a set of schools in Osaka. (Please note that the word 'mandatory' does not appear in the Japanese article linked to here; the English re-cap may or may not be based on other sources.) Reports about use of the DS (and before that the Nintendo GameBoy) in education in Japan appear sporadically in the press.