November 17, 2011
FSI Stanford News
Paul Kim, the Assistant Dean for Technology & CTO for Stanford Graduate School of Education, led the 5th liberation technology seminar series on "Global Inequalities, Achievement Gaps, and Mobile Innovations."
Kim has been re-conceptualizing the whole education system, with a particular focus on the education of children in deprived areas.
Kim firmly believes that education, as is expressed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, is a basic human right that should be available to all children, but the fact is that a large number of children are out of school, and many receive a poor quality of education. In this context, technology could enable the realization of the right to education.
Kim argues that donation of computers in a large scale was the main mode of introducing technology in education, but this model has its problems. Often computers are donated to schools but are not used either because people do not know how to use them or there is no access to electricity. Kim emphasized on the importance of creating tools that are simple and likely to work in highly challenging conditions. With this in mind, he has started focusing on the use of mobile phones as a learning tool, given their low power consumption, low cost, ubiquitous availability and increasing capabilities.
