This text was the base of this discussion during the Learning chat for April 8, 2010.

Yesterday was the first day of the genocide memorial period in Rwanda. Words cannot convey the horrors, the pain, the suffering, and the inhumanity. Before I knew the date for this chat, I was intending to launch this chat by trying to focus on how we can use the laptops not merely to teach the same old things on computers instead of with paper and pencil, but how to introduce the more powerful uses of computers. I wanted to focus on the pragmatics of this, not merely to have a chat on abstractions and philosophy. It is rather remarkable that despite the shortcomings in schools, and despite the huge body of evidence of the lack of progress by using computers in this way, this trend continues. This demonstrates the power of what Tyack and Cuban term the “grammar of school.”

This implies that we must go beyond information delivery, and rather to focus on how we can use saturated presence of connected laptops to better facilitate learners’ construction of knowledge. As Edith Ackermann says, we must think about what should learning be when information is only a few mouse clicks away. Rather than focus on information delivery, we need to focus on building learning cultures.

I raise the topic as at this time we think about the genocide in Rwanda. How could people come to participate in such mass lunacy?

While we can think this is isolated to Rwanda, when we consider how much warfare is still being waged; how much violence there still is; how much unnecessary suffering resulting from poverty, inequality, and lack of awareness and concern still exists in the 21st century, we have to wonder why.

Dewey formulated the idea of the role of education in the functioning of a just, democratic world where choices were made not by the laws of kings or churches, but by the thinking of the citizens. We can think of the problems of violence and unnecessary suffering as being a lack of quality universal education. Dewey also was one of the earliest to recognize the value of “learning by doing” and learning according to one’s interests. Seymour Papert often remarked that Dewey formed many of the values we hold for learning environments, but it was logistically impossible before widespread access to computers creating such learning environments for all.

When we think about the genocide in Rwanda, or other violence perpetrated, the problem is not due to a lack of information that mass murder, violence, and subjugation is wrong. Everyone receives that information. Rather, we have cultures that enable the ongoing practice of such inhuman deeds. Thus, enabling the ideal of development that Dewey espoused, also requires more than information delivery.

We speak of how ubiquitous access to laptops can create an infrastructure that can help eradicate poverty. We work in Rwanda highly conscious that our major goal is to create an environment where people respect the human rights of others; where we eliminate barriers among people and learn better ways for just, equitable, sustainable life. Naturally, part of this resides in learning in the disciplines, developing literacies, and so on. However, there must be more to accomplishing this than making environments to teach low-level math skills or typing (for example).

So, to start the discussion, my question is: concretely, how can we create environments that truly support the full human and social development that are the aims of education?

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