Rebusque and minimal computing in rural Colombia: LibreEscuela, an OER co-creation project

ABSTRACT

The use of technologies is seen as a solution to provide high-quality education to the disadvantaged population in the Global South, based on the narrative of ‘disruption and revolution designed to supplant ‘broken’ educational practices at the local level’ (Gallagher 2019).

Rural schools in Colombia are the most vulnerable to a highly unequal education system. In this context the ‘Fundación para la Equidad Educativa’ (FEE) has been carrying out the project ‘LibreEscuela’ in 9 rural schools in Colombia. The project involved the delivery of Raspberry Pi with pre-loaded Open Educational Resources (OER) through Kolibri and OER co-creation workshops.

Revisiting the project retrospectively using minimal computing and ‘rebusque’ is an attempt to explore how rural teachers and FEE members negotiate and design digital educational projects in highly constrained contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Minimal computing
• Colombia
• rural education
• edtech
• OER

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).