Poverty: Is there an app for that?
“Development is the gradual emergence of a problem-solving system.”
via Poverty: Is there an app for that?.
If you substitute “learning” for “development” , then you have one of the most profound and simple definitions for what it is that teachers must become–guides to the idiosyncratic and utterly customized problem solving system that is a child’s mind.
The authors are speaking from an NGO’s stance and a long term one at that. So much failure in ‘developing’ countries has been the result of what has been referred to as the ‘carpenter’s dilemma’–every problem looks like a nail. And the hammer, while tres handy, cannot cement a foundation or glaze a window or feed a mother and child.
Kentaro Toyamo, a UC Berkeley ICT development expert, critiques this single-minded strategy this way according to blogger Tate Watkins,
Anyone imagining that a day or two of hacking will produce solutions to development problems, even in some small part, is either a technologist drunk on her own self-image who believes that she’ll solve a mindboggling social challenge with technology, or a