Abstract :
In recent years, we have experienced the transformation of education landscape with the introduction of low-cost technologies – laptops, PDAs, smart-pens, cell-phones, or what not. Increasingly, and probably sooner than most of us would think of, children will have access to one (or more) of these computational devices at their hand, inside and outside school, to support their everyday (learning) activities. Great opportunities for transforming teaching and learning abound, but so do the challenges for realizing such transformations in meaningful and sustainable ways. When moving from our everyday research experiments and/or pilots to the scale of a country’s full-scale deployment of 1:1 learning, not only do a number of practical questions emerge, but the very nature of the problems changes. The questions are no longer solely about learning theories or pedagogies, but, for instance, the socio-political-economic conditions in which such technologies will be integrated into teachers’ and children’s everyday practices. In this talk, I will present and discuss our ongoing research experiences in deploying a low-cost computer solution in schools worldwide and the (research) questions/problems that emerge. In so doing, I aim at fostering an open discussion about the ways in which academic research and the industry as well could hand-in-hand define a program to help fully and sustainably realize 1:1 learning.