Most of them are forever doomed to a subsistence existence below the poverty line in agricultural communities, or to eke out an existence in the mega-slums of our mega-cities. These people have been written off by some observers as a lost generation for whom there’s no hope.  It’s only a billion people.  Better luck next lifetime.  But we believe there is a way to change this through literacy.

History

Seven years ago I stood in a field in Punjab, India, listening to the District Health Officer tell me that my Health Education program to reduce child morbidity was doomed to failure because my target audience would never be able to read my leaflets and brochures.  “But the literacy rate here is 64%”, I protested.  He fell about laughing at my naïve faith in government statistics.

Success!

So I packed my bags and moved to Delhi and built a computerised literacy program called Tara Akshar.  We used a technique nobody had used before.  The outcome was that 60,000 completely illiterate women, aged 8 to 80, were taught to read and write in a 55 hour course.   The combined drop-out and failure rate was less than 5%.   I believe these kinds of numbers are unheard of in any voluntary Indian education program.

Why it works

The secret of our success was animated Laubach memory hooks embedded in a cartoon serial.  Let me explain. Laubach was a chap in the 1930s who said you should teach letter recognition by drawing pictures in which two things happen:

• The picture is of an object that begins with the letter you are trying to teach; for example, if you are trying to teach the letter S, then you could show a picture of a snake.
• The picture looks like the letter.  So make sure the snake is in an S shape:

The purpose of this is to give a great big clue to the reader as to what sound the letter represents so he/she does not have to remember it.

It’s an obvious, really.  So we have Ws that look like waves, and Bs that look like bats, and so on.  We cannot understand why all early learning systems don’t work like this. We teach completely illiterate tribal women in remote parts of India to recognize all 30+ consonants of the Hindi alphabet in only 10 hours using this method.

So we designed a picture using Laubach principles for each letter of the alphabet (all the consonants, plus both cases for the vowels).  Then we went one stage further and animated the letter morphing into the object and back again.  In other words, the letter S turns into a snake, and then back into an S.   Then we show the animation on a laptop.  We ended up with about 50 animations of the Hindi alphabet, and make each one a character in a multi-episode story.

Every day, our students come to class, and watch the latest episode of the story.  Then we test them using video-game style quizzes on the laptop, and then they do 20 minutes writing practice while the computer shows an animation of how to write the letter.   Then we show the episode again, and test again, and writing practice again – no activity takes more than 20 minutes.  And we use flash cards, and we use posters, and we use special playing cards, as well as writing books and reading books.

After each 100 minute lesson, we send them home.  They all turn up the next day because

• It’s easy, they don’t have to try to remember anything
• It’s fun
• It’s a social event

The Indian Government has now run very successful pilots of the program and recognized it as “best practice.”

Of course, letter recognition is only one of several facets of teaching reading and writing.  After letters, we go onto syllables, then words, then sentences, then onto our reading books.  Our English language version has a full-blown phonics section of course.

After Literacy

Literacy by itself makes a huge difference to self-esteem, the balance of power in the family, the length of time children stay in school, and almost certainly the birth-rate.   (And that’s why it’s probably an excellent way of reducing carbon emissions.)  But to be really successful, all the follow-on courses to bring people back into the learning mainstream are required.  We have now built courses for numeracy, ethics, how to eradicate shyness, how to participate in an organization, how to follow instructions, how to study, how to improve memory and many more besides.

English and other languages

The efficiency of this program is so high that it easily offsets the cost of the technology.  My ambition is to get it used in every country with a literacy problem.  Which is probably everywhere but about 3 countries, I believe.

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I am Martin Mungai, a secondary school teacher in Kenya, but currently on study leave undertaking my studies at Hokkaido University of Education in Japan. I am keen on researching children and information media. I wish to share my experiment that i carried a year ago on the use of Internet in classrooms in Kenya. I am aware that not much educational research in Kenya has been done in this area.

In my school we had new software installed in the computer lab. The software allowed the teacher to control the students PCs from one location, which we would call the “teacher control centre” (TCC). The TCC allowed the teacher to view all the students’ workstations and even take over the control of the students PC without the teacher having to physically move to the particular student. The students were not informed of the features of the newly installed software.

I sampled a group of students from form 3, they fell in the age bracket of (15-16) years. They were allowed an uninterrupted 1-hour session to browse the Internet; all the while I kept an eye on the TCC, monitoring what each group was doing.

Observation

I did not give them any prior information on what websites to visit, within 5 minutes, of the twenty 21 computers that we had in the room (see figure 1), 11 had already logged in to a social website; facebook, 4 were on youtube, 3 were on popular European soccer clubs 1 was on an entertainment site 1 was on adult site and 1 was still googling. The computers were shared between 2 students and about 4 were shared by 3 students.

After 1 hour, I blocked the popular social networking sites and none of the computers could access it. I noted that a group of students affected were getting irritated and they tried logging into other sites, next I blocked youtube, the irritation now became more evident as the noise levels in the lab was raised. I next moved to block the sites of popular European teams, and the reaction was almost instantaneous, some students clicked and others started peeping at others screens, one student was even courageous to come forward and tell me that the Internet was not working. I feigned ignorance and told him to try other sites, I even suggested in passing, “try educational sites”.

The students who had initially taken over the control of the computer in their workstation gave up the mice and the keyboard and they became passive participants. For the next 1 hour I observed that students were keen to search on educational materials in science, history, computing, career opportunities and institutions of higher learning. See the table below

It was very evident that social networking services (SNS) such as facebook is very popular with students. It was not possible to establish the number of students who had registered on facebook. Of particular concern were the students who visited the adult sites. In spite of several posters displayed on the wall, and verbal instruction given to the students, some still went ahead and browsed the adult sites. I sought to know where they had got information about those sites, and the response was almost instantaneous; “From friends”. Interestingly almost all the students knew the code name of the adult sites “gwati”. This is a clearer indicator that peer influence plays a big role in motivating the students on visiting the adult sites.

Conclusion

The above case study should however not be used to make a generalized conclusion that the same effect would be observed in a different set –up say for example a girl school, or a rural school. A more comprehensive study would probably yield different results although it’s only a slight deviation that would be expected.

This clearly demonstrated that, students when left on their own to use the Internet will only engage in areas that seem to entertain and socialize. Proper supervision, control and guidance will help the students unlock their potential in looking for information that will have direct impact on their academic life. Further when 2 or more students share a computer, they are more creative in terms of the information that they look search for in the net.

As pointed out, Internet appears to have some educational effects on children’s attitude towards learning. For example, Clifford Stoll (2000) argues that multimedia systems such as computers or Internet may lower or decrease children’s problem-solving ability, intellectual curiosity and motivation for learning.

However, this can be overturned by offering guided supervision to the students on the use of the Internet. Further, implementation of “Information Moral education” is as important as using an interactive hands-on approach to moral learning. Teachers and educators should emphasize the need to balance both the positive and negative aspects of ICT.

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Mobile devices are at the centre of a revolution delivering platforms to achieve knowledge transfer and behaviour change in Africa. With the accelerating growth of mobile devices in Africa the past few years, unique solutions have been developed to address barriers to large-scale adoption of learning platforms. In particular, the specific challenges and unique problems faced in Africa have had a marked impact on the innovation in developing novel channels for providing information in a cost-effective manner.

A key barrier to successful adoption of learning platforms is mobile penetration. It is necessary to achieve at least a minimum percentage penetration amongst a community of users to exploit network effects and viral strategies which facilitate the building of vibrant communities. Africa’s recent rapid rise of mobile phones has seen mobile penetration grow in some markets to over 100% (South Africa) and to close to 500 million connections for the continent as a whole.

When evaluating markets for feasibility the following key measures of the penetration should be considered: absolute mobile phone penetration, mobile internet penetration, desktop internet penetration and Social Networking penetration.

Absolute phone penetration provides us with with a baseline measure of the lowest common denominator technologies that can be used to deliver basic information, such as Voice, SMS, USSD and Please Call MEs. Each of these channels has characteristics that make them usable for very large scale information delivery platforms, particularly the cost of usage. As is to be expected, mobile internet penetration far outstrips desktop internet penetration in African markets and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Social network penetration on mobile and desktop can be a particularly good proxy for pinpointing markets that have vibrant communities with high levels of interconnectedness. Facebook and MXit are currently the largest social networks in Africa, both of which are showing explosive growth on the continent. The launch of Facebook zero, Facebook has developed a particularly compelling offering that allows users to access a low-bandwidth version of the social network at no cost from their mobile phone. The rapid growth of Facebook in markets where it was able to negotiate a zero cost deal with network operators, proves how important cost of access is in developing markets.

Developing effective mobile learning platforms requires a deep understanding of the multiple modalities of interaction presented by mobile phones. Novel channels are viable alternatives to voice for delivering information, building communities and driving behaviour change. As part of our work in the Praekelt Foundation we explore the channels that can lower the cost of access whilst still providing enough information to enable learning experiences.

On of the least expensive, yet effective, means of large scale messaging for the base of the pyramid is Please Call Me Messages – an approach to free messaging developed in South Africa and utilised in Project Masiluleke. Most mobile users in developing countries are on pre-paid mobile packages. Pre-paid users often ran out of airtime, which can prevent them from making a call. Please Call MEs allow them to send a free message requesting a call back. Currently over 40million Please Call MEs are sent per day in South Africa alone. In Project Masiluleke, we have tagged critical information about health services and HIV/AIDS to over 1 billion messages over the last 2 years.

USSD – or unstructured supplementary data – provides a more interactive means to deliver information and learning services to low-end text-only phones. USSD was originally developed for use by mobile operators to communicate directly with subcribers and provide access to operator functionality, such as airtime updates, service status and requests. Most pre-paid subscribers access on USSD multiple times a day to obtain their account balances and to top-up airtime. USSD allows for the creation of decision trees which a user traverses to find relevant information. Typically, interaction over USSD is either free or extremely low in cost, making it possible for 3rd party developers to build rich applications that are highly interactive, yet can function on the most basic of phone. A further benefit is that the most of the interface is already well known to the many mobile network subscribers across developing markets.

Group messaging platforms like MXit and Blackberry Messenger, allow users to chat via text for very low cost or a flat rate per month (in the case of Blackberry messenger). It has enabled the development of number of mLearning innovations like Yoza, developed by Steve Vosloo with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation in 2010. The project was launched for “book-poor, mobile phone-rich” teenagers in South Africa to see if they would read stories on their cell phones. Says Steve Vosloo of the project:

“Yoza stories aim to captivate teens and inspire them to enjoy well-written stories by good authors. The m-novels are written in conventional language, with txtspeak only used when a character is writing or reading SMSes or instant message chats. Also included is prescribed school reading that is in the public domain, for example, Macbeth. There is no charge for the actual stories, but users do pay their mobile network operator for mobile data traffic. Images have been kept to a minimum to keep the mobile data charges low.”

One of the benefits is promoting behaviour change through social networks is the power of having members of a peer group providing help and advice on important topics, such as health or education. Recognising this opportunity, the Praekelt Foundation launched YoungAfricaLive, a groundbreaking mobile platform where young people learn and talk about life issues, including love, sex, relationships and HIV/AIDS.

The portal features daily blogs by young South Africans sharing their journeys through the difficult terrain of love, sex and relationships in the time of HIV. Along with relationship advice, facts on HIV, STDs, Safe Sex and more, these stories have created a safe sex-savvy community that logs on daily to give and receive support and advice. Since it launch in December 2009, the network has signed up over 400,000 users. One of the reasons for its rapid growth and success has been the stickiness of the platform, over a 1,000,000 comments have been posted and an extremely lively community has spontaneously coalesced around the topics that are important to them.

Social platforms allow granular tracking of connections between users and identifying the most influential people in a network. Since all stories can be commented on, and users can “like” each others comments, it is possible to build a very detailed map of the connections between users and thereby identifying which users have the greatest impact on opinion in the network. We can then target influencers in the network with information that we wish to deliver and track the traversal of the message through the network.

Mobile penetration and cost of data and messaging remain the largest obstacles to large scale usage of mobile platforms to improve learning in Africa. Through the use of novel low-cost channels such as SMS, USSD, and Mobile Social Networks it is possible to build compelling platforms that are available to every user of a mobile phone in Africa, and that can have meaningful impact on our users lives.

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I am grateful for the chance to contribute to the current debate on the potential for Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in education in Africa. It is clearly a debate about important issues.

Mobile phones hold out enormous promise as the single ICT most likely to deliver education in Africa, and to do so on a sustainable, equitable and scalable basis. I think however that so far, we have not often seen much progress beyond fixed-term, small-scale and subsidised pilots and it is worth exploring whether mobile phones can really deliver their promise.

Delivering education in Africa using mobile phones probably strikes governments, institutions and practitioners as easy and obvious because mobile phones and mobile networks are almost universally accessible and reliable in places where environment, economics, infrastructure and security might variously militate against any other ICTs and where the demographics of mobile phone ownership, access and competence, unlike most other ICTs, takes us near to the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ – the actual ‘bottom of the pyramid’ is of course populated by people who can’t even afford mobile phones! Furthermore, mobile phones are an individual ICT not an institutional or corporate ICT and are not predicated on access to colleges, business centres, cyber-cafes or maybe even cities. Therefore, learning on mobile phones should work.

The current World Bank Group and the African Development Bank study is intended “to raise awareness and stimulate action, especially among African governments and development practitioners”. These are indeed vital prerequisites but perhaps ‘critical awareness’ and ‘rigorously evidence-based action’ are even more vital. This is important debate is often characterised by simplifications, misplaced optimism and untested assertions. Hopefully this piece will strike a better balance.

My contention is that whilst many good projects using mobile devices to support learning, by definition, do good work and thus deserve to be praised and celebrated, our problems start when we try to understand these projects, when we try to reason and infer about these projects, when we try to explain and disseminate them in the hope that we can reproduce and replicate them. This is all the more worrying as we overlook the far larger number of less successful projects or when we group, organise and cluster projects in order to find common generalisable themes, forces, causes and mechanisms. Therein lies our problem with scale, sustainability and equity.

Something is wrong and we need to dig beneath the surface. What are my reasons for advocating such caution?

Firstly, of course, failure often goes unreported, unpublished, and unacknowledged, and common impression is that careers and reputations are not built on failures however interesting or thought-provoking. Furthermore, many projects are doomed to success and are reported accordingly. Funders, agencies, ministries, officials, researchers and others will have all invested much prestige and resource giving projects the necessary momentum and visibility, and failure becomes unthinkable or inconceivable.

A common saying maintains that, “if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Watching evaluations in South Africa and Kenya made me think this is true of the mind-sets we bring to our analysis and evaluation of projects. An educationalist will see educational explanations, a technologist will see technological ones, a policy-maker will see policy ones and so on. Our inferences about success are conditioned by our backgrounds.

Sometimes these predispositions are built in projects from the outset. In looking at siting or sampling, people from different backgrounds and organisations bring their own ideas about where to site their cluster of project interventions in the hope of getting maximum generality from limited resource but in doing so they bring to the fore, those variables they think significant (and thereby make them significant) and push others to the background. So class size, network coverage or educational content will appear important because they were built in that they would be!

Furthermore, the dream of successful large-scale sustainable learning with mobile devices has been haunted by high-profile successes like mPesa and Grameen. These successes create the expectation and the pressure that learning with mobile devices should be a worldwide runaway success.

On top of that, some years ago, I and Agnes Kukulska-Hulme looked back at reports of mobile learning research projects from around the world and concluded that the researchers were not always very competent and trained in project evaluation. Their evaluations were often fairly informal, disconnected from project objectives, bolted on as late extras, unfocussed and not informed by the relevant literature or expertise. Also, funders and donors are not necessarily trained or critical readers of monitoring and evaluation reports. Below the executive summary and the headlines might be many caveats and nuances that get in the way of simple prescriptions and these get lost.

Of course, in saying this, I am caught between funders who want results, policy makers who want simple robust bases for policy, the development community talking about predictable unexpected consequences, social scientists telling us reality and experience are contingent and postmodernists telling us that the grand narratives of the Western European mind, of which development is undoubtedly one, are all broken and dead.

So our first conclusion must be that our inferences about success and about critical success factors in learning with mobile devices are fairly shaky.

If we look at the mechanics of mobile learning projects in particular and ask about sustainability, things do not get better.

Firstly, funders fund projects, and understandably they try to fund good projects, and as soon as their funding finishes so does most of their influence. This makes moving projects towards sustainability problematic in practical terms. It might however be starting from the wrong perspective all along. Perhaps instead of funding good projects in the hope that they will become sustainable, funders should fund sustainable projects in the hope that they will become good.

Meaning that funders should pay more attention to the host, the target, the destination, to the culture, values and expectations of the people who will inherit and support the project and less to the concrete specifics of the projects and its innovations. Perhaps funders should actually avoid known innovators and early adopters on the basis that these people have least in common with the rank-and-file staff who will institutionalise, embed and appropriate educational change and have least in common with the ethos of their institution.

Most mobile learning projects, especially research projects, have been based on providing learners with the necessary devices, especially first generation projects when devices were rare, expensive and complex. This was sensible in producing more rigorous evidence in coming from a uniform technology platform but not in producing evidence that was transferable into the world where funds did not exist to continue to provide learners with devices.

Those mobile learning project funded by corporates, especially from within their corporate social responsibility budgets, suffered from similar problems, compounded by the shorter time-scales that characterised the corporate and commercial world. Fixed-term projects, either funded as research or as corporate social responsibility, taught us little about sustainability. By definition, they were not intended to teach us about sustainability. The fact that projects run more smoothly and produce cleaner less noisy data with provided devices rather than learner devices, that they often use the enthusiasm of project staff and the novelty of innovation, has instead created very false and contrived environments and evidence that does not transfer.

If we could produce evidence that was convincing and relevant, we then have the problem of what to do with it!

In countries of big government, where society expects government support from cradle to grave, the role of evidence is at least in theory straightforward, namely researchers take evidence to government, this impacts on policy and then releases or diverts public resources. In fact, informing policy and changing practice are much more complex than this, involving various ways of exploiting expertise as well as evidence but it is still being basically a political process underpinned by a particular set of ideals about the responsibilities of government.

In countries of small government, however, the role of evidence, expertise and experts is more complex and problematic. The players in any possible mobile learning space might include network operators, publishers, handset manufacturers, maybe government, maybe not, and possibly social entrepreneurs and various kinds of community activists. We must work towards models of learning with mobile devices that make money since this ensures that they are sustainable, big money in the case of scenarios that include corporates and small money in the case of scenarios that include social entrepreneurs.

Corporates, of course, each have a specific focus, be it handsets, content or connectivity, and so the challenge for advocates of learning with mobiles devices is moving the argument forward and fostering collaborations, with evidence and whatever else works, with these players. We must recognise however that even if a commercial operation can take learning to the mythic next billion subscribers of the global South, there will still be parts of the curriculum or parts of the population left uncovered, where governments must still recognise some responsibility and recognise the potential to build human capital and potential for the greater good, if only we knew the language, the issues and the arguments that would change their course.

The alternative is working with social entrepreneurs, those individuals embedded within their own communities, prepared to blend making a profit and delivering a social service, perhaps analogous to community teachers in rural schools in Kenya or bare-foot doctors in China. The challenge for advocates of learning with mobile devices is finding out how to design or adapt those devices or applications that hit the spot where market and education might just overlap.

A colleague recently remarked that every technology embodies an ideology; I realised that the implication was that every educational technology embodied a pedagogy, embodies a specific set of ideas about teaching and learning. This ideology or pedagogy may be that of the designers or the manufacturers; the technology may however be appropriated by users and learners and the ideology or pedagogy embodied within the technology becomes theirs not the original or intended one. This issue represents one of the challenges to transferring strategies for educational technology from one culture to another, even from one community or sub-culture to another, especially when we recognise how many slightly different communities and sub-cultures inhabit phonespace and cyberspace.

Finally, one obvious way to enhance sustainability and scale is to consciously exploit learners’ own devices, to base national or institutional strategy around the phones that individuals choose, own and carry everywhere. Of course, institutional culture and regulations may actually prohibit phones on the premises and much needs to be done in order to address issues of standards, infrastructure and performance, of access and equity, of content and training but the main hurdle is teachers’ and officials’ perceptions about loss of control and agency in the class-room, about suddenly letting the animals run the zoo. Fortunately some countries, South Africa, for example, are starting to explore these issues and make progress on a major prerequisite to sustainable learning with mobile devices.

There’s a lot going on in this blog and some prevailing assumptions and generalisations may have been addressed with just a different set of assumptions and generalisations; the aim was however not to convince but to unsettle, and perhaps to encourage more caution and scepticism. Learning with mobile devices somewhere near the bottom of the pyramid is still our best bet.

The Human Development Index, originally developed by Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Haq, places education and health as 2 key measures of human development. The founders of Mindset recognised that in order to nurture much neglected human development in South Africa and in other places on the continent, it was essential to place the focus here. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

And so, in 2002, Mindset Network was launched by Mr Mandela and has since operated as a non-profit organisation creating, sourcing and delivering high quality educational content for use in the formal education and (since 2004) health sectors where such provision can support human development. Wherever possible, access is made free or affordable to the end user.

About Mindset

Most of Mindset’s work is directed at South Africa and in this Mindset focuses on leveraging its skills and position to assist Government deliver better services rather than establishing parallel systems of delivery. In the Schooling programme, for example, it is clear that the Apartheid legacy still bedevils many attempts to improve the quality of education delivered to most children and that there remains the tendency for more affluent learners to attract a disproportionate share of the available resources thereby advantaging them and perpetuating the original income gap. Mindset actively works to assist Government to try and correct this imbalance which, if left unchecked, will result in the gaps in income and educational attainment widening.

As a non-profit organisation, Mindset relies on external funding to sustain many of its operations. To date, funding has been received in cash and in kind from South African and international businesses (including Liberty, Standard Bank, Intelsat and Multichoice) as well as multilateral donors and funding agencies. Increasing, however, Mindset is developing its own revenue streams to ensure financial sustainability and indeed an increase in its productive output. For example, all its video production and delivery capabilities have been spun out into a for-profit company servicing the needs of a range of additional clients.

Mindset Content

The development of high quality, contextually relevant content is naturally a key part of Mindset’s business. In the last 9 years, Mindset has developed over 500 hours of video content for grade 4 to 12 South African learners and teachers and approximately 250 hours of video content for the public and Healthcare Workers on issues around HIV/AIDs and TB. Allied to the video are hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of interactive multimedia and print content respectively. In all cases, Mindset creates content in these multiple formats to be mutually reinforcing and also to ensure that as many people as possible are able to benefit from it irrespective of the technology they have access to.

The key challenges in producing such content tend to be:

• developing high quality content as cost effectively as possible;
• ensuring that all content is perfectly accurate and correctly aligned;
• keeping content up-to-date in the midst of changing school curricula and shifting health policies;
• finding and investing in building the skills of suitable content developers and producers;
• understanding and correctly exploiting the educational affordances of each media format;
• and constantly measuring and evaluating the notion of high quality.

Since 2002, Mindset has developed a set of robust processes to deal with the issues and has shared its learning and skills with many other organisations. Such content production capacity development is an important part of Mindset’s work.

Content Distribution

Mindset uses several digital platforms to distribute its content including satellite broadcast, the Web, distributable media like DVDs and, increasingly, mobile devices. The choice of these digital platforms is based on the need to distribute content as widely and cost effectively as possible. Satellite broadcast, for example, while requiring high upfront costs provides significant economies of scale and exceptional reach, particularly to traditionally technologically under-serviced areas. In addition, television tends to be a familiar and non-threatening technology.

Currently, Mindset broadcasts its schooling content on 2 pay TV networks (one – Dstv – with an Africa wide reach) to over 2.5 million households and approximately 1300 individual schools and resource centres. Mindset Health is broadcast by Mindset as a free-to-air channel to over 490 clinics and hospitals through South Africa. Mindset is currently exploring opportunities to broadcast several additional free-to-air channels through its capacity on the IS17 satellite.

Broadcast television is necessarily restricted to the delivery of video content. The Web, DVDs and many emerging mobile devices provide the ability to distribute other media formats like interactive multimedia and traditional print as well as representing additional access points. Coupled with this is the web and mobile devices ability to also allow one to provide other value-add services to users. For example, Mindset Learn has recently launched a free help desk to Grade 10 – 12 learners accessible through the Learn website, Facebook and MXit.

Free Content

As an educational non-profit organisation, Mindset not only believes in providing free content in the financial sense. Especially in formal education, Mindset sees the need to give users creative freedom to use its content in ways that enhance its educational benefit. Thus, early on Mindset made the decision to release versions of all its content on its website under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence. Attribution was selected to ensure that Mindset and, by extension, its funders were appropriately credited for the original work while Share-Alike was selected to ensure the continued freedom of Mindset content.

Significantly, Mindset chose not to apply the non-commercial restriction for 2 reasons. Firstly, it seemed that by applying this restriction, users’ freedom to remix Mindset content with other content would be severely limited due to licence incompatibilities. Secondly, as part of Mindset’s vision was and is human development, it made sense to try and empower those with the ability to value-add Mindset content in ways that Mindset could not and so to create a way to keep such endeavours financially sustainable noting that the attribution requirement would always point users back to the free version thereby nullifying the business model in instances where no perceived value was being added.

Face-to-Face Meetings

In order to increase the extent and quality of impact that Mindset content has, the organisation develops and runs face-to-face workshops with teachers and community health practitioners. In the case of teachers in particular, Mindset actively encourages the use of Mindset content in locally developed resources as part of an overall effort to help teachers create their own high quality teaching and learning resources in the context of an underlying resource based teaching methodology.

These face-to-face workshops also provide Mindset with invaluable opportunities to test the efficacy of the content it has developed. In addition, significant samples of Mindset content are user group tested during the development phase not only to ensure that the content is factually accurate but is also at the correct language level, that the visual cues are well understood, that it meets the educational needs of the intended audience and that it is enjoyable and engaging to watch.

Periodically, Mindset also undertakes large scale programmatic evaluations to measure the identified proximal indicators for impact and ensure that all aspects of the programme are delivering effectively and efficiently.

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Information and communication technologies (ICTs) combined with the open intellectual property arrangements of Open Education Resources (OER) and networked collaboration have the potential to change fundamental business models for the education sector in Africa. In this blog post I explore the contemporary challenges we face and the opportunities for using digital OERs to implement new models of educational provision in Africa.

The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.

Internationally, the education sector is now exploring and implementing the potential of OER to provide free learning opportunities for all students worldwide. Africa has a unique opportunity to leverage the benefits of open education and digital ICTs in providing free learning opportunities for her learners, especially those students currently excluded from the formal sector.

The problem

Today, in Sub-Saharan Africa the majority of children of school going age will not have the privilege of completing the last three years of their schooling and very often do not have access to affordable textbooks. With reference to the higher education sector, Olugbemiro Jegede, Secretary General of the Association of African Universities reminds us that even if Africa were to build one new university per month, still this would not provide a cost-effective solution for the projected 7 million applicants who will be seeking university placements over the next 5 years.

OER offers two significant business enablers for sustainable education futures:

• the marginal cost of replicating digital learning materials is near zero, and
• sharing course design and development costs among institutions is cheaper than doing this alone.

Therefore, it is possible to provide affordable access to high quality learning materials and textbooks, even for learners who may not have reliable or low-cost access to the Internet. Moreover this would not necessarily require new money or investment.

Within the publicly funded education system, the educators’ salaries who produce learning materials are already to some extent sponsored by the taxpayer. Rather than investing new money, all that is needed is a policy shift to re-license selected outputs produced by state-supported educators under open content intellectual property arrangements where the respective institutions provide permissions for others to reuse, adapt and redistribute learning materials at no cost.

• Why should taxpayers have to pay twice for their learning materials?
• Why do publicly funded education institutions restrict access to knowledge through restrictive copyright regimes when we have the digital technologies and legal tools to share freely?

We also have the technologies to produce print-based materials from digital OER repositories for learners who may not have affordable access to the Internet. In WikiEducator, for instance, educators can collate open textbooks for printing or offline editing with the added advantage of using the same digital repository for integrating teaching materials into online delivery systems for those institutions who use learning management systems.

Worldwide, there is a growing inventory of open access learning materials on the Internet. There are literally thousands of courses, research journals and OER available under open access licensing provisions, which could be integrated into selected courses for academic credit in Africa. With permissions to adapt and modify these materials, it is now easier for African educators to share and localise learning resources for the Continent.

Already Africa hosts a number of exemplary OER projects. OER Africa is a continental network supporting and driving the development and use of OER across all education sectors in Africa.

The African Virtual University has launched the OER@AVU portal which will provide 219 high quality modules of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, ICT in Education, and Teacher Education Professional Courses available in three different languages – English, French and Portuguese. Individual institutions like the University of the Western Cape and University of Cape Town in South Africa support open content projects.

The Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) project brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa working on OER in four languages to support school based teacher education and training. Siyavula is a ground-breaking project working collaboratively with school teachers to produce open textbooks for high school students.

• Notwithstanding the pioneering work of these projects, taking into account the large number of learners excluded from the formal education sector in Africa, what are the reasons for the slow uptake and mainstream adoption of OER on the continent?
• How can we scale-up and share the successes of these African OER projects for all African institutions?

As the global inventory of OER increases we are presented with new opportunities and challenges. Specifically, learners who access digital OERs on the web and acquire knowledge and skills either formally or informally, cannot readily have their learning assessed and subsequently receive credible credentials in recognition for their efforts. Open assessment and credentialisation services are needed. The Open Education Resource (OER) university concept is a new international initiative which aims to address these challenges.

The OER university concept

Existing delivery models cannot address the growing global demand for post-secondary education. Many countries do not have the resources to build the number of conventional universities that would be required to meet the future demand for tertiary education.
The OER university (OERu) is nurturing the development of a sustainable and scalable OER ecosystem for the formal sector. The OER university concept aims to create a parallel learning universe based solely on OER for learners excluded from the system to augment and add value to the formal education sector. These learners may choose to enrol at formal education institutions in the traditional way or participate in free learning provided through the OERu network. Assessment and credential services will be provided by participating institutions on a cost-recovery basis or may be funded through scholarships or grants from the respective Ministries of Education.

A Scenario

Ibrahim Omowale has worked as a carpenter for twenty years in Nigeria and is now teaching at the local technical college. He wanted to upgrade his qualifications for his new career in vocational education. Due to work and family commitments, he couldn’t pursue full-time study. Ibrahim did not have the financial resources to register in the formal system and there were no scholarships available in his home country.

Ibrahim was undecided about his preferred area for degree study but wanted to combine his work experience and interests with the flexibility to move into new subject areas. Free access to the learning materials for the OER university (OERu) courses provided a “try before you buy” scenario. Ibrahim decided to start with a Diploma of Arts which offered the flexibility to select first-year degree courses across different disciplines. He chose three business related courses combined with a course in international relations and another in communication skills.

Ibrahim did not have affordable Internet connectivity at home but was able to utilise WikiEducator’s features to download offline digital versions of the course study guides. During the week, Ibrahim worked off-line preparing portfolio assignments and noting questions. On Saturday mornings, he visited the local cybercafé, uploaded completed assignments to his online e-portfolio, consulted online discussion forums and posted support questions to the “Academic Volunteers International” website selecting the SMS message feedback option for his learner support questions. Taking the free trial examination, Ibrahim felt he was ready to present himself for assessment. Paying the assessment fee, he submitted his e-portfolio to the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and successfully completed the remote challenge examinations and graduated with the Diploma of Arts — the first step towards a Bachelor of Transdisiplinary Studies.

Ibrahim decided that he wanted to specialise in vocational education and apply for assessment of prior learning. Using the open support materials provided by the OERu website, Ibrahim prepared a portfolio of his prior experience mapped against the graduate profile of a Diploma in Construction Management (second-year degree level). He presented his assessment for prior learning at Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand and decided to continue his OERu learning in the area of Tertiary Teaching, incorporating third-year bachelor-level subjects. Ibrahim’s credits for the Diploma of Arts were recognised under the OERu’s approved Transnational Qualifications Framework and he decided to use the assessment services from Otago Polytechnic for his prior learning and tertiary teaching subjects. Ibrahim decided to complete his remaining subjects at the local national university through the conventional system and graduated with a Bachelor of Transdisciplinary Studies (Vocational Education).

Ibrahim Omowale is now Head of Department at his technical college and is leading a strategy aimed at enhancing the professional development of staff throughout the region.

Note: At the time of authoring this blog post there were no participating institutions from Africa. Therefore, I could not use African institutions as examples in the Scenario text. In time we hope to see a number of African institutions sharing in the benefits of this global tertiary education network.

How will the OERu work?

Concept for an OER university initiative (Adapted from Taylor 2007).

OERu students will gain free access to high quality courses that are designed for independent-study using OER. OERu learners will receive student support through a global network of volunteers and peer support using social software technologies. Students can be assessed for a fee by participating institutions and earn a credible credential.

From an investment-decision perspective, participation in the OERu network would not require new money, but rather a reallocation of existing staff time to releasing selected development outputs under open content licenses for the OERu network. The OERu model anticipates that no more than 1% of existing budget time would be required for release under open content licenses. The institutional costs of assessment and credentialisation services are recouped on a cost-recovery basis from student fees and/or other sources.

• Is the OER university network a viable model for widening access to learning opportunities in Africa?

I firmly believe that OER is the means by which education at all levels can be more accessible, more affordable and more efficient. OER is a sustainable and renewable resource. What do you think?

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Part 1. My Computing Journey through a PC World

I’m not typing this on a PC, but on a tablet. The screen on which the letters are appearing is the same one on which I am tapping. I’m not sitting at a desk, but on the couch while my 3-year-old plays balancing games. This location means I can still chat with and encourage her while getting work done.

The first computer my family owned was an 8086 running DOS. It was advanced with its 8 MHz processor, 3 colour screen and 512k memory, but had far less power than my current smartphone and took up a whole desk. It cost over $2000.

And so it remained for each subsequent computer I owned. An 80386 with 16 colour screen and 33 MHz processor; a Pentium 4 with thousands of colours, a 1700 mhz processor and 512 MB of memory – all cost over $2000, and … took up almost a whole desk. I next switched to a 12 inch laptop – so portable! and with a price tag of – you guessed it, over $2000.

Something changed in 2006. I bought a high end, top of the line Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). With a 200 MHz processor and 16 MB of memory, it could do some of the things that the computers I’d had so far could do, but it also had a touch screen and, as one of the first ‘converged devices’, a digital camera. It cost $1700, a huge amount still, but a price that was the beginning of a trend.

Two and a half years later and my first Smartphone (a PDA with a phone built in) cost $1100 and had 64 MB of memory and a dual-core 200 MHz processor. Then my first iPhone 3G cost $900 and had a 412 MHz processor. Finally in this history of my personal computing journey came the iPad, an $800 device with 512 MB of memory and a 1000 MHz processor.

So what’s the point of all this historical conceptualising? It’s fairly obvious that as computing power has increased, size and price has decreased. At some point however, the primary computing platform changed from a central, ‘one computer does all’ model to a multiple mobile device model that builds on the existing desktop computing network to enable computing applications never possible before.

To paraphrase Mr Jobs, CEO of the world’s largest technology company that now sells ten mobile devices for every one laptop or desktop computer, this is like the first phase of automobiles, which consisted almost entirely of trucks. Now trucks still form the backbone of our transport infrastructure, but the average automobile today is far smaller and more efficient. Similarly, car buying has long passed the stage where the absolute top speed or revs per minute was all important; we now look for efficiency and usability, and the same thing is occurring with computing.

Once a certain threshold of computing power was reached where all computers by default could have enough memory and processing speed to perform all basic functions required, other factors have come into play. Is it easy to use? Does it fit to my needs or desired location? Does it require me to learn complex commands and file systems or help me just start on the tasks I need done?

Other questions may join these ones shortly as the extra abilities of the emerging class of devices in this field become more familiar; questions not just based on what we could do with PCs but now in a new mobile way, but questions relating to what new things they can do which PCs never could. Can it tag my geo-location (GPS)? Does the device know where it is in 6 dimensional space (Accelerometer and Gyroscope)? Can it overlay information on a live view of the scene in front of me (camera and Augmented Reality)?

Part 2. A Market Analysts Useful Summary

This era then in which such new questions may be asked has recently been labeled ‘Post-PC’. Horace Dediu, a Market Analyst with Asymco (March 8, 2011) has defined what Post-PC means better than I could:

The first post-microcomputer tablets are used alongside microcomputers for tasks such as presentations and entertainment. They depend on PCs for data backup and software updates. They do not require IT support. They do not require a keyboard or a desk. They are cheaper and simpler to operate… new products rely on new input / output methods and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply.

Before we ask then what the Post-PC era may mean for education, I also want to list Dediu’s consequences of such a generational shift so that we can discuss what they may mean for learning:

• Skill required decreases
• Support required decreases
• There are new applications and use cases
• The economics are not favorable for incumbents
• The economics are favorable for new entrants

Part 3. What Does it Mean for Education?

Let’s start with the potentially bad news. Only one of the consequences listed by Dediu is negative, that being that generational shifts in computing are not favourable to incumbents. How does this relate to education? One might say that as a sector found to be the least IT intensive off 55 major US industries (Dumagan, Gill, Ingram, 2003), it’s highly likely that Education is still driving around in trucks.

As an industry that traditionally was focused on centralised knowledge, the stable, fixed model of computing of the PC era was much easier to integrate than the mobile and agile model emerging in the Post-PC one. Whether this means that Education as it stands today will suffer the same fate as the technology company Bell Labs did (hint, they went bankrupt) during the transition from pre-PC, vacuum tube mainframe computing to the microchip PC era (as Heppell, LWF Talk, 2011, thinks likely), is yet to be seen. But there would appear to be plenty of potential for ‘new entrants’ to appear. We wait and see what these may be.

On the positive side however, if the entry level barriers of initial skill level and the amount of IT support required are reduced by tablet and smartphone devices, educational institutions that have struggled to:

1. Find the time to provide basic technology skills training to staff or
2. Get past the time intensive ‘learn menus and file systems’ lessons or
3. Keep technology repaired and working so that it’s available in the first place.

- may instead be able to:

1. Spend staff training time on improving pedagogy.
2. Spend valuable student lesson time on using technology not just learning to use it.
3. Spend less money on supporting existing technology and more on supporting its use in classrooms.

Most important in helping to cut through the either/or arguments that often dominate definitional discussions such as this one is another of Dediu’s statements that “The older generation slowly fades through diminished growth but never disappears”. Post-PC devices do not mean that Desktop and Laptop PCs will go away. They may replace them numerically at some point, but larger more powerful computers will not be extinguished by mobile devices any more than cinema replaced radio, or television replaced cinema, or video tapes, discs and downloads replace television.

The work of Australian schools such as Hambledon State School in Queensland, or St Aloysius College in Tasmania provide acknowledgement of this by providing students a blended selection of computing devices that spans PCs, laptops, converged mobile devices and stand-alone mobile devices. The emphasis in both of these schools is on avoiding a one-size-fits-all solution and instead expect students to understand the learning process enough to make the choice of the best computing tool for specific tasks themselves.

Interestingly though, there are some sectors who don’t have to choose a blended environment because mobile computing is their first computing experience. Only in the West has affluence been wide spread enough to afford $2000+ computers. Third-World nations, not having had the same opportunities to develop either the level of electricity supply required by larger computing devices, or the economic base to purchase them in large numbers, is well known for embracing cheaper mobile devices such as cell phones which require less infrastructure, support and skill. Indeed, the One Laptop per Child organisation that has delivered over 2 million education-focused XO devices worldwide was inaugurated primarily to target the low power and low cost needs of such nations.

Similarly there is a movement of consumers who are embracing Post-PC devices due to their simpler, more personalised nature. Generally these are older users such as the 99 year old Virginia Campbell of Oregon, USA, for whom an iPad was her first ever computer, and one she was able to use unaided. She has been writing limericks as well as reading books again after having not been able to for ten years due to poor eyesight.

So what does this mean for education? If Virginia can overcome encumbrances older than the PC era to take advantage of the lower entry level of skill and IT support that Post-PC devices provides, as well as go on to explore new applications and uses suited to her personalised needs, then anyone, including Education can.

So, what is next on the computing journey? How long until the race of increased computing power and shrinking size does lead to a world even beyond tablets of embedded, ubiquitous computing? Today’s students will find out. And they will master it, if we’ve trained today’s teachers well enough in harnessing the potential of the current generational shift in computing to give them the education they deserve.

Disclaimer:

While some references are supplied, this article acknowledges its non-academic nature and is intended to simply be a beginning, not end of discussion on this topic. In addition, all opinions are my own and not that of my employer.

References:

• Cairns school transforms for tech-savvy kids. (27.10.2010).
• What’s a Post-PC device? Dedui, H. (8.3.2011).
• Steve Jobs: Let the post-PC era begin. Fried, I. (1.6.2010).
• Apple Reports First Quarter Results. (18.1.2011).
• Stephen Heppell Learning Without Frontiers Talk. Stephen Heppell. (26.1.2011).
• How Bell Labs Missed the Microchip. Riordan, M. (December 2006).
• 99 year-old loves her first computer – an iPad. (7.4.2010).
• Digital economy report, U.S. Department of Commerce. Dumagan, J., Gill, G., Ingram, C. (2003).
• Who says Technology can’t change Africa? Hersman, E. (12.3.2006)

The opening statement of this Education Technology Debate was titled “Is ICT in education a revolution or a fool’s errand?“. This is a puzzling question. Over the last decades, there have been many studies on the introduction of ICT in education. So why is it that we can still have a debate about the usefulness of ICT in education? Why has the matter not been settled after three decades of debate?

I think the continuation of the debate is for a large part due to the fact that the question is stated wrong. ICT is not one simple “application” that can easily be evaluated once and for all. ICT is a huge and complex cluster of ever changing technologies that have extensions in almost every aspect of industry, commerce, and private life in the developed world. The question should not be “Whether ICT is useful in education?”, but “How can ICT be made useful in education?”. Not because ICT is some magic spell that will solve all problems, but because ICT is needed to provide the children of the world the education they so desperately need.

I would like to step back from the question of how to make specific ICT solutions useful in particular schools, to the question of what is required to give children the education they need. And then look into the matter of how this might be achievable by deploying the tools we have, mainly ICT.

A good overview of the scientific studies on the use of ICT in education was written by Magdalena Clara (2007) for the CERI-KERIS (2007) meeting and her paper can be seen as the background of my contribution to this debate. The other papers in this meeting give a nice overview of current thinking (CERI-KERIS, 2007)

The first question to target is what is the aim of education? It is not high grades on standardized tests. But what is it?

A global view: Wealth, health, and happiness

World wide, people spend trillions of dollars on education. Educational spending constitutes around 5% of global GDP. A “simple” question is now: Why do people spend so much money on educating children? And often other people’s children? What do they hope this money will achieve?

The aim of educational spending can be compressed into a sound bite: To improve the future Wealth, Health, and Happiness of the children.

Future income and prosperity is foremost in the mind of those who advocate education. Children that receive an education will be more productive as adults. Hence, they will be able to earn more income. This wealth will benefit the whole community.

Moreover, it is well known that both personal and family health improves with the level of education of the parents, especially the care giving parent. This health improvement comes over, and is independent of, the increase of socio-economic status that results from education (e.g., Yuyu Chen and Hongbin Li, 2006). All school curricula contain implicit and explicit health related components, like disease prevention and dietary advice. This way, schools provide a major contribution to public health.

The last item, happiness, might sound rather vague and “new-age”, but has been at the foundation of every educational system I have ever seen. A primary cause of preventable suffering is ignorance and social misadaptation. The common cure has been moral teachings. Children have been taught moral lessons under the guise of religious, political, or civic education since the dawn of civilization. To avoid the endless confusion about “morals”, “life-style”, “civic duty”, and “freedom”, I prefer to say that education promotes the future happiness of the child as a member of the community.

Globally, people consider these effects of education so important that they are willing to spend close to 5 cent per dollar earned on education. Do the educational systems of the world deliver? For many children of the world, they do. However, for far too many other children, they do not deliver on any scale of educational achievement. In the (very) long term, education worldwide could be improved to adequate levels by supplying more teachers and more resources. But in the long term, we are all dead, and these children out of school. In the short term, the only solution would be to dramatically increase teacher productivity. That is, to let each teacher educate more children better. A daunting task, indeed.

Increasing teacher productivity

Education is a service “industry”. Over human history, a single teacher has been able to handle around 30-60 pupils at a time, with no real increase of numbers over time. It should be understood that group sizes of 30 pupils and less are certainly preferable for the quality of education. The ideal seems to be adequate teacher quality (training), groups of 20-30 pupils, all at comparable educational level, with text books and some other materials available. Reality in many regions is, deficiencies in teacher training, up to 60 pupils of varying levels, and few or no text books or other materials. A description of such schools can be found in Oscar Becerra (2010).

The challenge is to improve educational quality in such schools without the ability to supply more teachers on short order. That is, to increase teacher productivity, defined as the cumulative increase per teacher of earning capacity, family health status, and happiness of the students. It is obvious that there are no practical ways to actually quantify “real” teacher productivity. Well-known proxy measures are increases in some skills, e.g., reading level and mastering of arithmetic. However, it must be remembered that these are just proxy measures.

So the challenges to improve teacher productivity are, in no particular order:

• Supply teaching materials
• Improve teacher’s mastering of the curriculum
• Improve teacher handling of groups larger than 30 pupils
• Improve teacher handling of diverse groups of pupils

The only two known ways to improve productivity in a service industry are education and ICT, i.e., networked computers. Education was the problem to begin with, so this leaves us with ICT as the only short term way to improve teacher productivity in the schools as described by Oscar Becerra (2010).

The question now that remains is, can it be done at all? Can teacher productivity be increased? Or are we forced to admit that there is only one solution: Supply more teachers? I sincerely believe that it is possible to improve teacher productivity in the short term and so improve education in disadvantaged communities at a reasonable cost.

The remainder of this contribution is an attempt to argue the possibilities of ICT4E for improving teacher productivity. As a model for this discussion, I take the OLPC 1:1 distribution model as described by Oscar Becerra (2010). In this model, every child and teacher has a personal laptop and there are network connections between the laptops, at least around the school building. There is a periodical update of library and software materials, possibly through an Internet connection of the school or by exchange of some storage medium, eg, a portable computer disk.

Teaching: drill and debate

Wayan Vota started his introduction with a reference to Plato. If we go back to classical Greece in his spirit, we can see two opposing approaches to teaching, which can be simplified as the Spartan and Athenian way. The Spartans raised their children to be good soldiers. The aim was to be practical and the tool was the drill. The Athenians raised their children to be good citizens. The aim was to become politically engaged and the tool was the intelligent conversation.

Very appropriate, the face of Spartan education is a mythical state reformer, Lycurgus, who organized all life in Sparta around military power. The face of Athenian education is a historical philosopher, Socrates, who taught by debate, or rather, guided conversation. Obviously, the above is a caricature of historical Greece. But the aim of these sketches is not historical accuracy, but to characterize archetypes floating around in the educational world.

The current debates between “traditionalist” and “constructivist” models of teaching are also debates between Spartan and Athenian models. In the end, we obviously need both. Some skills are better learned with practice, or drill. Other skills are best learned by guiding students to find their own solutions.

It is easy to envisage a hundred people doing drills in an exercise field but it is difficult to imagine more than a handful of people discussing a question at a market place in an orderly fashion. The same can be seen in a school. A classroom with sixty children can easily recite exercises together or all copy a lesson from the blackboard. However, it is difficult to see how a teacher can give personal attention and feedback on performance to all children individually in such a large group.

When teachers are strained due to large groups, little time, and few teaching materials, they will fall back to drills to get any teaching done. When the strain is relieved, it is natural that the balance will be shifted to more individual guiding at the expense of drill practice. Teachers, schools, and parents will have to adapt to this shift. There will be inertia against change as it will be initially difficult to evaluate the value of the new teaching against the known outcomes of the old methods. For instance, writing essays or organizational skills are more difficult to judge than correctly reciting lists of facts.

There is one thing missing in the above argument. That is the fact that all education requires motivation. Especially in children, the most important job of the teacher and the parents is to motivate the pupils (by stick and carrot) to learn, whether it be drill practice or not. The main motivating factor in education is relevance (e.g., Oscar Becerra, 2010).

Targeting teacher productivity: The role of ICT

The above global, birds-eye view of educational practices has been made to set the stage for a discussion on how to assist failing schools. Against this background, we can more easily discuss how ICT can be recruited to help increase teacher productivity. For simplicity, and a good sound-bite, think of ICT as the technology to deliver Information, Communication, and Tools to teachers and students.

As a starter, if there is one major role for ICT in education, it would be the distribution of Information in general, and teaching materials in particular. With current technology, it is possible to compile a mobile library that a child can take home. Electronic text books solve a lot of the production and distribution problems in teaching materials, as well as allowing easy updates. If every child has access to a computer in class and at home, it becomes very easy to supply every child with up-to-date text books and a portable library. And the library does not have to be limited to texts and pictures, but can include multi-media resources. This is an obvious application of ICT4E that has immediate effects.

Motivation
Motivation in education is to a large extend a matter of relevance of the curriculum and inter-personal relations at school and between school and parents. In general, more relevance and better contacts tends to result in better motivation and better educational results (e.g., Oscar Becerra 2010). The role of ICT is two-fold.

General office automation software can help with better student records and parent contacts. Moreover, with teaching materials and text books available in electronic form, they can be adapted more easily to local situations to make them more relevant to the children. There is a consistent trend that long term student motivation increases after the introduction of ICT in schools (Anja Balanskat, 2007; Oscar Becerra, 2010).

For a national supplier of teaching materials, it is relatively cheap to assemble additional, localized, information to supplement a standard electronic text. For instance, biology lessons could be supplemented by examples of local flora and fauna, instead of a single text with a national selection of plants and animals that might not be very relevant to the children. Such localization is expensive in the production of paper text books, but very cheap in electronic text books.

With electronic distribution and school based storage, it becomes much more practical to make teaching materials relevant and attractive to the children. Which will help improving motivation in school. Note that this distribution model also allows for easy distribution of supplementary materials for the teachers. Thus also allowing for better teacher preparation.

The Spartan model: Drill
It is a truism that to learn anything you have to practise. In martial terms, “an army fights as it trains”. In general, more practise is better to the extend that children that spend more time on a certain subject tend to master it better. This can be called the drill aspect of education. Often, it is not so important how a particular skill is practised, as that there is practise at all. There is a huge pitfall in relying on drills. The underlying assumption is that the drilled skills can be applied in real life. But any expectation that children can generalize and extrapolate from the classroom to the real world is at best a speculation waiting for proof.

The point of drill practice is that there is only a limited scope for supervision. The only condition is that the student performs the exercises correctly. If she does, no teacher or other supervisor is actually needed. So it is no surprise that “drill and test” practices were the most popular targets of educational software (e.g., Report to the Ministry of Education New-Zealand, 2000). Drill and test software comes closest to the “ideal” of relieving teachers from supervising children.

Drill and test software can generate unlimited numbers of exercise questions and track student performance. Progress of the children to the next level can be made conditional on performance at the current level, so students can progress at an optimal pace. Teachers can easily follow the progress of students from a distance and check whether they actually practice. Unsupervised practice might ideally free up teacher time for helping pupils that need personal attention, while not hampering the progress of those who do not need personal help. Such software is already in widespread use.

The next step in using drill and test software is to delegate it to times the students are not expected in class. If teacher supervision is not needed, the practice can be done at home or elsewhere. Class time can then be used for other purposes.

The Athenian model: Guided conversations
Education does not consist of poring a substance called “knowledge” into the heads of individual students. Teaching is a social interaction. Any attempt to structure education without social interactions between teacher and students is destined to fail. The social aspect of teaching is most clearly visible in the Athenian, or Socratic, model of educating by conversation.

In the Athenian model, students are taught to argue, debate, and find their own solutions. This prepares students to the real world, where they will have to collaborate with colleagues to face problems never encountered in school. The basic assumption behind this method is that the debating, researching, and learning skills can be applied to effectively master many relevant subjects.

ICT can still help in this phase of education. The crucial part of this guided conversation is that it is about communication between students and between students and teacher. And although we know there is nothing better than a face-to-face talk, other means of communication can substitute if face-to-face time is not available. Video conferencing, conference calls, Instant Messaging (or twitter), Wiki discussion platforms, school web-sites, and email correspondence are all useful ways to communicate at a distance.

Virtual Classrooms
It is possible to extend the classroom face-to-face conversations into electronic collaborations, with electronic conferencing as communication channels. It is well known that peer guidance is the second best thing after teacher guidance. The decoupling of group work and guidance from the classroom and school times to virtual groups, or virtual classrooms, would allow children’s supervision and guidance to be shared by different teachers (if available) and peers. If network connections are available, children could be working in peer groups that could span classes or even schools and supervision could be shared over teachers and (older) students.

The main advantage of such a virtual classroom set-up would be more efficient use of teacher time. With virtual classrooms, the teacher is not restricted to a particular place, and sometimes even a particular time, for teaching. Virtual classes do not have to demand all of a teacher’s time continuously, but she might be able to distribute attention over several tasks and virtual classrooms. In some situations supervision can be partially delegated to other students.

From the student’s view, virtual classrooms separate them (from the distractions of) other children that might be present physically, but do not partake in the same lessons. Virtual classrooms can allow children to be taught interactively while not actually, physically, present in the same classroom. Thereby giving children the benefits of the Athenian educational model, while not demanding everyone to be present at the same place at the same time.

Obviously, there is no point in trying to organize all teaching in virtual classrooms where children stay at home. This is not how education works. Certainly not with small children. But many aspects of normal classroom interactions, like group work and home work, can be made much more efficient using collaborative software and simple communication channels, like email or drop-boxes. These technologie becomes more relevant when coping with situations where children have only half day lessons due to a lack of teachers and classrooms.

An important criticism of the Athenian approach to education is that leaving the actual learning of subject matter out of the classroom leads to the pitfall of the sophists. People who could eloquently argue for or against any standpoint on any random subject without mastering even a single one themselves. The real strength of the Athenian method is that it teaches students to master skills and solve problems themselves in collaboration with peers. Lifelong learning might seem a mirage in schools struggling to provide for education now. But if there is one thing that we know for sure it is that children in school today will have to learn a new set of skills at various times in their working lives. School should prepare them for this re-education, if at all possible.

Criticism: Can ICT4E actually work in the developing world?

The above is all nice and well, looking at ICT4E as an option to improve education in less developed countries. But what if there is no alternative to more and better qualified teachers? What if we simply have to give up and wait for that (elusive) moment the required quality and quantity of education can be delivered to the children the old way? What if the current generation of children cannot be helped at all and are “lost”? This is more or less the position of Kentaro Toyama in his contribution to this debate and an earlier article (Kentaro Toyama, 2010, 2011).

Critics of investments in ICT4E can point to monumental failures in introducing technology to aid in development. In each individual case, the reasons for failure are complex and intricate. Generalizing, even over-generalizing, it can be said that all the really hard problems of humanity have at their root social problems. Economic, agricultural, industrial, and technological solutions are all only effective if they are also able to solve some of these social problems. The problems of under-development and failing education are not different.

The received opinion is that technology, like any other “solution”, will only work if it is integrated in the social structure. It must become an integral part of the lives of the people. There are remarkable exceptions to this rule. Few communities have had problems with embracing tele-communications technology, i.e., movies, radio, TV, or fixed and mobile phones. If you allow people a chance to hear, view, or speak other people, they will grab it with both hands. All these communication technologies have caused revolutions in the lives of people all over the world (e.g., Charles Kenny, 2009). But in general, it is true that an externally supplied solution only works if it can be integrated in the life of those who receive it.

Criticism is generally directed towards Educational Technology (Kentaro Toyama, 2010) which is treated as some field separated from general ICT. The conclusion then is that as delivering Educational Technology has failed to solve problems in X cases, it must be dismissed as a possible solution to the problems of the developing world. However, the fact that ICT can be used in education does not create a separate, isolated field of ICT4E.

In reality, ICT are a cluster of hard- and software technologies for the control, communication, and handling of information and multi-media. This cluster of technologies is more extensive, diverse, and volatile than anything produced by humans before. These technologies have changed the face of industry, commerce, and private life the world over, e.g., it allowed the economic rise of the BRIC countries. Deciding now that none of these technologies can be harnessed for education in poor communities seems at least premature.

The question Can technology benefit failing schools? is meaningless and cannot be answered with Yes or No. In my opinion, the only real question is How can technology benefit failing schools?

Discussion: [ICT4E] is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes (Adapted from Edsger Dijkstra)

The Spartan drill delivers skilled workers, the Athenian debate produces educated citizens. We want children to be educated to become both productive workers and engaged citizens. For such an education, students and teachers need good, up-to-date information and teaching materials, good tools to work and practice with these materials, and communication channels to collaborate and interact with peers and teacher.

In this context, ICT4E becomes Information, Communication, and Tools for Education. Every school will benefit from such ICT4E, but I expect that schools that are overstretched by the limitations of the resources of their country will benefit most.

Any improvement in the situation in schools, and the introduction of new tools and possibilities in general, will lead to changes in education itself. If the implementation works out well, the balance of teaching will move from drill practise towards more “Athenian” style teaching. Children will start to learn new things. New things that might not fit easily in the existing evaluation models. Schools should be prepared for such changes. And schools should prepare teachers and parents for such changes.

In light of the quote from Edsger Dijkstra, what part can the computer, or ICT in general, play in education? I think the analogy to the telescope is very apt. A telescope is a personal access point into astronomy. A computer is a personal access point into an educational world of tools, connections, collaborations, and information. Such a computerized environment can help to raise students and teachers above the isolation and resource limitations that hold back education in so many parts in the world.

What is exactly demanded from ICT4E, and how the demands should be prioritized, is a matter of local requirements. 1:1 Laptop programs, e.g., the OLPC program, are the most thorough of such applications of ICT4E. And the paper by Oscar Becerra (2010) illustrates such a program. Many more can be found at the official site of the OLPC program, or at the independent site, OLPC News.

1:1 Laptop programs tackle all problems at the same time: Dissemination of teaching materials, communication and collaboration, and both general and specific tools useful in school. So a 1:1 laptop program is very likely to solve those local problems that can indeed be solved with ICT. But such 1:1 programs are complex and costly and not the be all and end all of ICT4E, e.g., see Magdalena Clara (2007) and this debating site itself. For a large number of reasons, 1:1 programs might not fit the requirements of individual schools. In the end, it all depends on the needs and resources of the school (Michael Trucano, 2007; InfoDev.org).

Back to the original question “Are ICT investments in schools an education revolution or fool’s errand?“.

ICT in education can be a revolution, like text books or black boards once were. But just as some text books turn out to be useless, not all applications of ICT will be revolutionary or even useful. Every human endeavour can fail. And we know that ICT4E has had its share of failures. But as I argued above, the question is not whether, but how ICT can be useful in education. Because, short of “growing” teachers on trees, there seem to be no other option to improve education for the generation that is now entering schools in the developing nations.

References

Anja Balanskat (2007). “Comparative international evidence on the impact of digital technologies on learning outcomes: empirical studies”, CERI-KERIS 2007

Oscar Becerra (2010). “What is reasonable to expect from information and communication technologies in education?” Educational Technology Debate, Computer Configurations for Learning

CERI-KERIS (2007). International Expert Meeting on ICT and Educational Performance

Yuyu Chen, Hongbin Li (2006). “Mother’s Education and Child Health: Is There a Nurturing Effect?”

Magdalena Clara (2007). “OECD Background paper ‘Information and Communication Technologies and Educational Performance’“, CERI-KERIS International Expert Meeting on ICT and Educational Performance

ETD (2009). “Assessing ICT4E Evaluations”, Educational Technology Debate

InfoDev.org. “Quick guide: Monitoring and evaluation of ICT in education initiatives”, Web Site.

Charles Kenny (2009). “Revolution in a Box”, Foreign Policy November/December 2009

Report to the Ministry of Education New-Zealand (2000). “A Review of the Literature on Computer-Assisted Learning, Particularly Integrated Learning Systems, and Outcomes with Respect to Literacy and Numeracy”, UniServices Ltd

Kentaro Toyama (2010). “Can Technology End Poverty?“, Boston Review, November/December 2010. “Response” from KT:

Kentaro Toyama (2011). “There Are No Technology Shortcuts to Good Education“, Educational Technology Debate, ICT in Schools, January 2011.

Michael Trucano (2007). “What do we know about the effective uses of information and communication technologies in education in developing countries?”, CERI-KERIS 2007

Two months ago a heated discussion took place in Educational Technology Debate after an article by C. Derndorfer described what seemed to be a hopeless outlook for the Peruvian OLPC program. What Derndorfer described were not problems with a particular ICT strategy but the daily problems you face when trying to improve an educational system in which many things have been failing at the same time for decades.

You simply don’t get three hundred thousand well educated, passionate, committed teachers overnight, nor you overhaul ninety thousand schools in two or three years. This article describes one possible way to face the challenge of improving the Peruvian public education system by using a mixed strategy:

Let children and teachers have ICT available and explore it in a non threatening way, try not to get involved in the quasi religious discussions between those who “believe” in the Wintel approach and those who interpret Negroponte as an enemy of teachers, and face what happens in the real world where there is no easy way to 100% Internet access, there is no money to give every child one computer, there is no way to “train” teachers who haven’t been properly prepared to teach, and teachers’ salaries will not improve overnight.

This article outlines the considerations for implementation of massive computing access projects aimed at systemic low impact long term improvements through what we call “Technology Resource Centers”, where teachers and students may have access to ICT and additional technologies at their own pace and in their own terms.

Several authors: Holt (1983), Kozol (1993) and Conroy (1987), have suggested that school education, as we know it, has lost its value as an instrument in the development of the individual. With different arguments and perspectives, they point out how the interest in processes and methods has shadowed the required genuine concern for the personal growth of students, transforming the educational system in a purposeless organism where everybody pretends: Teachers pretend to teach by delivering information according to established methods, students pretend they are learning by passing tests requiring repetition of the information received and society as a whole pretends this is good.

Some authors, Perelman (1992), Holt (1964) even suggest that there is no possibility for improvement in school education and the only hope for improving it is to replace traditional education with a completely new mechanism.

Gardner (2000) is more hopeful, he advocates for an Education aimed to the teaching of truth, beauty and morality and questions theorists who focus in the instrument rather than the purpose of Education. What can we do in an educational system where even the traditional is poorly performed and we are not able to attain even the modest aspirations of traditional educational settings? How can we prepare our new generations to cope with the challenges of the XXI century in a system where many want us to believe good teachers are the exception, infrastructure is poor and society as a whole seems to have been ignoring Education (in spite of discourse and writings about it) for decades? Guggenheim’s movie “Waiting for Superman” seems to be documentary aimed to demonstrate how poor is the American Public Education but has been severely criticized (also read R. Weingarten and G. Stager) for its lack of objectivity and biased point of view.

A few days ago I attended the opening of a demo center where a supposedly ideal ICT4E setting was showcased. It was really impressive in terms of the technology available: Fully wireless connected computers of all sizes, interactive networked whiteboards, etc . etc. I really got some really good ideas and information of what is available, my only objections were:

1. It was all conceived based on children and teachers as consumers of content; and
2. In order for the wonderful things described to happen great teachers in charge were needed.

I am not against consuming good contents, my concern is children usually learn more when they are producing contents than consuming it, unless it is really interesting for them, which takes me to the ideas R. Bao and myself wrote about in 2004: the lack of meaning crisis in the educational system. A crisis happening in spite of a well thought sensible curriculum designed and validated to be a tool for development of competences preparing children to succeed in the XXI century. Some specific characteristics define that meaning crisis:

1. Students do not perceive the educational system, as useful, or having a purpose, and conclude education is meaningless. In many cases, failing students regard formal education as useless.
2. School curriculum requires what Spiro calls oversimplification (Spiro, 1990, 1991, 1992) or reductive bias in order to be taught in the required periods. The result is that students usually forget most as soon as they pass tests. This can be easily demonstrated by asking simple questions about any school subject to adults who have been disconnected of the school environment for a while.
3. Teaching methods emphasize memorizing and repeating information. Even when teachers try to change these methods they are not concerned about giving students reasons why it should be important for them (the students) in their real lives to acquire any piece of knowledge. Teaching should emphasize a key factor in knowledge construction: cognitive flexibility (see Boher-Mahall paper)
4. The constructivist approach, which aimed at transferring control from teachers to students and set the foundations for learning in the students’ willingness to learn, can also fail if the teacher lacks the required knowledge to become an informed guide in the quest for knowledge construction. An ignorant constructivist teacher can be as negative as a well informed behaviorist one as described by Cromer (1997).

Let’s try to describe the educational reality of Peru: There are 8.6 Million students: 75% public, 25% private; 80% urban, 20% rural, 200,000 children attend almost 10,000 one teacher schools. Of a total o 490,000 teachers 65% are public school and 35% private; 83% urban and 17% rural. There are 75,000 Schools, 75% Public 25% Private; 52% Urban, 48% Rural. Pre-K & K coverage is 66.3% . Primary (1-6) coverage is 94.4 and 76.5% for secondary school. According to 2009 reports almost 80% children 12-14 have finished primary school (6th grade) and over 60% of 17-19 youngsters have finished school (11th grade). In all cases the trend is growing.

In spite of the above the Latin-American average coverage ratios, quality remains an issue: Peru rated among the worst in Math reasoning and Reading comprehension in 2001 PISA (the last reported year available). Irresponsibly, Peru opted out of PISA and returned in 2009 (results to be reported in 2010). A census evaluation applied to 180,000 teachers in January 2007 showed 62% were below primary school level reading comprehension with 27% at 0 level; also, 92% were below primary school level in Math reasoning. Since then US$ 300 Million have been spent in teacher in-service education.

Test results on entry evaluations to teaching positions show dramatic increases since then. DIGETE alone has trained more than 80,000 teachers but it should be easy to understand these teachers need much more than training, they need to be completely re-educated. The Peruvian response is being developed in several simultaneous fronts:

1. We have developed a curriculum structure which aims to develop skills and competencies and is not based in specific items of certain disciplines to be covered (Ministry of Education, 2004);
2. A massive initiative to improve quality of teachers is being put in place;
3. Information and Communications Technology is being distributed to students and teachers to saturate the system with learning and teaching tools that are simple to use and available in a nonthreatening environment and long term.

The 1 to 1 One laptop per Child approach has been described and is being discussed globally, I will try to describe what we call the Technology Resource Centers as a first step towards 1 to 1 that allow us to get the benefits of ownership without waiting for the computers, connectivity and great teachers to arrive. We will show how this strategy can actually be a leap to better teaching and learning.

The whole idea was born one day Walter Bender entered my office and transformed my personal computer in a Sugar based machine just inserting a memory stick and downloading his Sugar interface into it. He actually transformed my workstation into his computer.

I wondered what would happen if we could find a way of making a child’s own personal computer to reside somewhere in such a way anytime they got hold of any computer it may turn into his or her computer. By then we had already developed the “portable Internet”: a 2GB memory stick with enough content from educational portals to give primary teachers and students the actual feeling of navigating the web without connectivity and more educational contents than would have been expected for their whole lives under their “normal” conditions.

We had also found that children loved to share interesting things like building artifacts with Lego bricks, making videos or solving puzzles (with or without computers). Of course these are not new ideas but would allow us to share resources in such a way that four children working with one Lego robotics kit and one laptop will have the feeling of having all the computers they need. The same thing happens when one teacher shares with the class some interesting contents using one laptop and a multimedia projector for as many as 36 children: Everyone feels they have all the computers they need.

The whole idea was to allow children and teachers to get involved in the construction of personally meaningful artifacts, whether they are graphic presentations, video pieces or computer programs as advocated by Seymour Papert.

Our approach to the project differs with most educational computing initiatives which have not necessarily helped answer the basic question: What purpose does Education serve for students? If we take into account the way Viktor Frankl (1959) quoted Nietzche in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how”, we may conclude that the educational system fails because it is more involved in supplying how’s and lacks the ability to provide why’s.

This also reinforces the findings by De Volder and Lens (1982), because seeing education as instrumental in reaching personally significant goals in the future is providing students with an answer to the basic question of why should I learn what I am expected to.

Systematic observation of schools’ outcome shows that, even for students with high GPA, most of the information acquired during school years, is lost and has to be relearned when it becomes necessary. During a series of meetings with parents associations, school boards, teachers training seminars and educational computing conferences from 1988 to 2001, Becerra and Bao (2004) attendees were asked some simple questions about concepts, facts and figures that are part of the school curriculum. The result was invariably they did not remember anything. On the other hand, skills and information not lost by students share certain characteristics:

• They were acquired in a natural learning process, what Gardner (2000) describes as apprenticeship or Stone-Wiske (2006) calls Teaching for Understanding , and we will call the natural way, i.e. the amount of time involved in learning is short, when compared with the time spent using the abilities acquired during the learning process.
• The role of the teacher during the learning process was to contextualize knowledge, i.e. provide examples of ways to use the new knowledge in solving meaningful problems or to accomplishing personally meaningful goals.
• Students had positive attachments to teachers and viewed them as resources in reaching their personal goals (Bandura (2007).

In most development economies’ school environments it is not unusual to find 45 and even 50 or 60 student classrooms which severely limit the options for school teachers to develop participatory approaches where students can use information to do things, instead of just hearing about them. Lowering the class size has not significantly impacted quality of Education in the developed economies, in spite of huge investments made towards attaining that goal.

The situation is especially critical in multi-grade one-classroom/one-teacher schools in rural zones. Peru has almost ten thousand of such schools where an average of 22 children from first to sixth grade share a classroom and one teacher. As a consequence, the perception of school education as non-instrumental in reaching personal goals for the future is reinforced.

The consequences of this situation are critical for development: Students drop out rates climb, discipline problems increase, teachers commitment decreases, community frustration reaches levels that threat social peace, just to name a few.

In a situation like this, when Information Technology is introduced in the classroom, the results are what Forrester (1971) called the counter intuitive behavior of complex social systems, with the result that the attempt to reform education using technology makes worst what it aimed to improve. 20 years of multiple educational computing projects in Peru does not seem to have improved the system as a whole, in spite of promising, but isolated, results.

Examples of the above mentioned situation are classes where students learn the parts and components of a personal computer, or spend one school year learning numberless functions of a word processor or spreadsheet or programming language, without ever having the opportunity to produce something useful with the knowledge they are supposedly acquiring.

In many development economies, this situation is aggravated by the fact that computer courses in schools are taught by technicians with little or no background in Education. It is a hopeful symptom, however, that teachers are increasingly taking control of Computer Lab’s as was the case with project “Huascarán” whose driving factors were pedagogical rather than technological.

There are almost 36,000 public primary schools. Prior to 2007, as many as 3,000 schools have been receiving computers, as part of different government programs. In 1987 there was a National Committee for Educational Computing who developed a program to introduce computers in education. The emphasis was on CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) packages and teaching programming languages.

During 1988 and 1989 a group of 200 public school teachers were given sabbatical time, to attend a program developed between the Ministry of Education and the National University of Engineering. As in most programs, the results were never evaluated or published. From the original 200, just 50 teachers concluded the program. It is very probable most of them are now working as computer programmers, since that was the emphasis of the whole program.

In 1989 the Ministry of Education announced a national contest for teachers to design CAI packages. The results were never reported, the packages were of dubious quality, mainly because the schools didn’t have the tools to make the development of such packages possible and the whole program for computers in education faded until the committee was dissolved.

During the nineties Peruvian teachers involved in ICT4E felt in love with Seymour Papert’s ideas. Constructionist projects mushroomed and the seeds of many projects still alive were sowed. G. Ruiz, who had founded INEDIC, an education research group, organized a live video conference with Seymour Papert; and the local representative of Lego Education translated the robotics software into Spanish and Quechua. Many of the kits acquired by the Ministry of Education back then, are still in use, which was an incentive to think of Educational Robotics as an important component of a Technology Resource Center.

Since those initial efforts, the number of computers in public schools by 1997 was estimated by the Ministry of Education, to be any number between 10,000 and 15,000. It was not known how many were operative and/or used. The configuration ranged from 8086 diskless machines with monochrome monitors, to some 486 processors with multimedia, the later ones acquired during 1995. There had also been a public effort to formalize the software licenses for all the computers since most of them were acquired with no software.

There was no evaluation of the official programs to provide schools with computers, but it was generally accepted the results had been poor or null. The main reason for this was the lack of support to the program, from the educational point of view. Most teachers had to improvise what to do with the computers; many of them took courses at local training centers, just to be able to use the computers for word processing and to be able to teach some programming.

In the 6 years of Huascaran, there was a strong will to improve the situation but it was not initially clear how this could be accomplished, since the results obtained had led many people to the conclusion that computers were of little or no use in education and it seemed there was evidence to support this idea.

There were also private initiatives aiming to improve the situation; in 1995, the Catholic University in Lima was the first Higher Education institution to introduce Technology in Education as part of the curriculum in the Faculty of Education and established a Research Laboratory for Computers in Education. It was expected this laboratory would be instrumental in the development of policies to improve the support for the use of technology in education.

The University Of San Martín De Porres put in place an Educational Computing strategy, which allowed a cadre of university professors to obtain their Masters’ degrees in Educational Computing and Technology at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. This seminal group served as an internal motor to transform ICT usage at the university and led to the creation (December 2003) of a Master’s Degree Program in Educational Computing in Peru. Eventually one of the members of that initial group of professors was appointed as the highest Education government officer in Peru (Mr. Jose-Antonio Chang, current Minister of Education since July 2006).

During the late 90’s, the Ministry of Education, supported by the World Bank, established several pilot programs to evaluate different approaches to integrate Information and Communications Technology in Education under an umbrella project named National Program to Improve the Quality of Education. The main approaches chosen were:

• Lego-Dacta material for primary schools
• Internet access for secondary schools

Each approach had some variations, which developed into sub-projects. This time the driving force behind the project was mainly educational not technological and the results seemed to be more rewarding. Evaluative studies showed the projects were yielding better results than their predecessors. But there still seems to be ample room for improvement, especially in the training of teachers which seems to be the critical success factor to those approaches.

It is becoming clear that a constructionist approach as the one suggested by Papert (1980, 1993) and others (Harel, 1991; Kafai & Resnick, 1994), by helping rethink the role of Technology in Education, may in fact do to Education what Reengineering has done to Business Administration (Hammer & Champy, 1993). Technology can be a powerful resource for the improvement of education, specially the development of critical thinking skills (Jonassen, 2000), and if it hasn’t yet it is because its use has not been properly directed and supported.

The emerging and increasing role of INTERNET in building school and classes networks (Lucena, 1997, 2002) with its almost infinite capacity for sharing and accessing information, paired with the availability of ever faster and more powerful computers and communications facilities is rendering the role of teachers, as sources of information, obsolete.

This of course does not mean, as some naively think, there will be no place for teachers in the schools of the future; teachers are the key success factor for learning in the classroom if they are prepared to assume a new role in the knowledge building process, because it is becoming equally obvious that students need informed guides to survive in the avalanche of information of dubious quality now available. Postman (1996) quotes several examples of utopian views of teacher-less education making it clear the proposed remedy could be even worse than the problem.

A recent report by McKinsey&Company (2007) shows how the best educational systems in the world are those with the best teachers and the best teacher selection processes. At the same time information is available, the need for critical judgment becomes a crucial necessity, in face of the vast amount of information now at the students’ fingertips. The paradox of being thirsty and unable to drink from the firemen’s pipe exemplifies the new kind of needs that education must satisfy.

As Stone Wiske (2006) explain there is a growing need to define the new role of teachers, as guides and counselors in the students’ quest for understanding; and also the role of schools as places where students will share and construct positive images of their personal futures and find ways to acquire the skills and competencies necessary to make them possible.

Our initial experience in Arahuay as reported by Carla Gomez (Arahuay Chronicles) and Businessweek journalist Gerry Smith (slide show) showed how lives of children could change if we provided them an environment where they could work with tools allowing them to reach personally meaningful objectives whether they were recording their favorite singer from the scarce radio receivers available in town, making digital pictures of their families, reporting the local festivities in video or finding out the meaning of words in the “Real Academia Española” dictionary available in Internet. Even the apparently trivial task of copying what teachers wrote for them in the blackboard acquired a new meaning because all involved felt their school was getting into the future. This kind of feeling and improved self esteem is the first step of any growth project.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in Peru responds to the growing demand for quality and equity in education. It is aimed to provide one laptop to each child living in areas of extreme poverty countrywide. These are mostly rural areas with high rates of illiteracy, social exclusion and human development in general. An April, 2010 study published by OECD (Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade?) has found a positive correlation between frequent home use of computers and no positive correlation between frequent school use of computers. This finding was a really welcome boost to our approach of letting children and teachers use the computers in “their own ways” and gave more confidence to the team who had worked on the framework for the Technology Resource Centers.

The pedagogical approach is Constructionist as described by Papert (1980, 1993). Students have access to a set of technology components, much in the way kindergarten teachers set their classrooms in special interest areas (“rincones de interés” is the Spanish name). The Technology resource Center is comprised of:

• A group of XO laptops enough to allow individual work by children at least two hours a week during class time and free access during off school hours. The XO is a versatile tool that enables them to use individual learning styles, offering a variety of learning applications, ranging from visual tools (still-image and motion camera with sound recording) to advanced programming environments of easy usage, to sophisticated music production software that is accessible to children as young as 5 years old. The laptops’ collaborative tools and immediate networking capabilities foster cooperation among students and between them and their teachers, thus contributing to raise students’ self-esteem and social skills. As mentioned earlier each of the 1.7 million students in connected schools will have an individual environment defined in the Internet Cloud (we use Google Apps and Microsoft Life@edu). Non connected students will have their environments defined at the “local cloud” residing in a school server.
• One Educational Robotics module enough for a group of 16-20, allowing children to work in teams of 4-5 kids sharing one computer. The idea is children will enjoy building models while learning teamwork and curriculum matters will be built into the construction process. Sensors will allow to explore science in a recreational way.
• One server to function as the “local cloud” and access point to Internet where connectivity is available. The offline portal is loaded at the server where there is no connectivity.
• One conventional laptop and a multimedia projector to allow teachers to project contents when required.

The strategy is completed with Technology Resource Centers being provided to every public higher education institution in order for them to provide pedagogical and technical support. The Technology Resource Centers will also leverage local government initiatives, like the one in place at Los Olivos where children produce TV programs that are broadcasted through Internet. By mid 2011, more than 800,000 XO laptops equipped with webcams will have been deployed so the 1,7 million children in connected schools, the Los Olivos pioneering experience of learning through video producing will be expanded nationwide.

The Technology Resource Centers will allow the integration of ICT taking into account fundamental capacities: development of creative thinking, critical judgment, problem solving and decision making, as established in NCD.

The initial experience which began in May, 2007 with ten schools around the country will by 2011 have expanded to 100% of K-11schools countrywide. By then, the longer running school will be “Apostol Santiago” in Arahuay, at 2,600 meters above sea level in the Andean mountains 4 hours from Lima. In general terms there is a new work dynamics at the school: teachers’ attitudes have moved from resignation to enthusiasm and development of new teaching strategies.

The sense of self control given by the ownership of laptops helped teachers plan more carefully and better organize class time. Of course this is not a panacea; the complete overhaul of the Peruvian education system will take 10 to 15 years of multiple strategies consistently put in place, meanwhile there will probably be many schools where the impact will be far from expected but we like to compare our strategy to Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) The Star Thrower story.

Perhaps the most surprising and unexpected result was the impact on the community as a whole as reported by Associated press journalist Frank Bajak in the Herald Tribune, where a wide commitment to support children development has emerged and a inner sense of proud can be noticed widely.

Apostol Santiago School has three levels: Pre-School, Primary and Secondary. 110 students are enrolled in those three levels, 47 of them in primary:

• First-Second grade: 8 students
• Third-Fourth grade: 21 students
• Fifth-Sixth grade: 17 students

Most students are required to help their parents with agricultural chores and this means they miss school several weeks a year when their crops require more attention. Since many of them live more than 4 hours away from school (walking time) a board house has been implemented where children spend from Monday to Friday in order to be able to attend school.

The secondary section of the school participated in Huascarán project and one computer classroom with a VSAT connection is available. It should be noted how technology guided the localization of the classroom because it was placed far away from the school (for technical and security reasons) and its usage is very limited and isolated from NCD.

From the beginning, OLPC was different from the previous approach:

• Students would be given the laptops to own them as an educational resource (same as textbooks or notebooks), they would take them home and bring them back to school every day. Intentionally, no special care instructions were given in order to test the laptops ruggedness.
• Teachers were offered limited and only basic operation training, in order to validate a model that might be easily replicable countrywide.
• The computers use would not have specially allocated time slots. Each teacher and student will use them as they think it best fitted their style, need or willingness.

The initial laptops used to implement the project were B4 prototypes of the XO laptop which by now have long been replaced by the 1.0 version, designed by OLPC foundation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. 120 units were donated by OLPC to the Ministry of Education in April, after an evaluation visit to their headquarters by a research team of the University of San Martin de Porres. The computers were equipped with several Linux based applications:

• Abiword (basic text editor)
• Paint (drawing tool)
• Video and camera (digital photography and video recording)
• Web navigator
• Calculator
• Tam Tam (music creation)
• E-Toys (multimedia programming environment)
• Block Party (logical game)
• News reader and PDF visualizing software

Prior to the beginning of the project a baseline evaluation test on reading comprehension and mathematical skills was applied. Data on the December 2006 national evaluation to second grade students is also available. A survey on attitudes towards ICT was applied to students and teachers.

The initial teacher training session was one day long and teachers were left with the laptops for one week without supervision. After one week a second session was held and the laptops were distributed to children during a special meeting with parents and authorities present. The principal reported it was the first meeting with 100% attendance in the school history. The objective of the meeting was getting everybody’s commitment to help the project succeed. Each child received a XO laptop and the whole community celebrated the event with a traditional ancient Inca meal. This kind of meetings has been replicated in over 10,000 towns since 2007.

The first day after receiving the machines, students had already explored them on their own and were eager to find out what could be done. Teachers kept on teaching, letting children explore their new laptops and encouraging them to do the class work. The children did all the activities. Some would put away the laptop while writing on the notebooks. Some others would write quickly on the notebook and then start punching here and there on the laptop.

Still others were totally into the laptop and so excited that they would be doing something totally unrelated to the class and calling the teacher to come and see what they had discovered. Teachers were pleasantly surprised by the little attention they had to pay to disciplinary problems so usual before.

The electric layout was not prepared to support so many devices connected simultaneously and some kids got entangled with the cables and some machines felt down, a few of them stopped working but students were able to fix them with their teachers help and the little training teachers received from the deployment team. Eventually, secondary students were trained as “support team” and they learned how to disassemble and reassemble the computers in order to fix minor problems.

Some software and hardware glitches were found and reported to the development team in Cambridge to be fixed in ulterior versions. About a month after the initial deployment, an OLPC server arrived and was installed at the school, making it the first OLPC server installation worldwide. It worked seamlessly and allowed easier communication and smoother Internet access.

Of course the initial enthusiasm has since then faded and the work done has settled to a more nature one with new teachers being trained by the senior ones and their students on the different ways they find the XO’s useful for school work.

Really important and unexpected collaboration came from international graduate and undergraduate students. The OLPC foundation helped the Ministry team to promote support missions to the Andes among American universities. Since 2008, about 100 students have gotten funding to spend 5 weeks in rural communities helping them take advantage of the XO’s received. Among them was former IBM Thinkpad University World Program manager Man Bui and his son who spent 5 weeks travelling through the Peruvian Andes helping students and teachers find their way with the XO. The French Peruvian Mision Andes Foundation has also supported more than 50 French students support missions to Andamarca in Ayacucho. German, Finnish, Spanish and Argentinian volunteers have also participated in support missions throughout Peru.

Some important considerations to engage in a project like the one described that we have found important are:

Students:

• Absenteeism and dropout rates in rural schools tend to be high. As a result of OLPC projects, a dramatic reduction in these rates should be expected and planned for in terms of machines availability and school service level.
• Students’ interest level in school matters increase and, as a variety of new class activities emerge, a robust support structure to capitalize on it is required.

Teachers

• The 24×7 availability of a personal computer will modify pedagogical strategies. Teachers will be able to personalize curriculum development planning. It was important that the new NCD allows for great flexibility in terms of localization and introduction of new resources. A rigid curriculum would definitely jeopardize the outcome of an OLPC initiative.
• Teachers’ engagement in discovery of new tools will require a support team to help them master them in their classroom settings.
• Time for student teacher interaction should be planned. The improved communication between teachers and students will require more teacher time than the traditional class schedule. Not planning for it might result in frustration. Rural schools will probably be better of than urban schools where teachers could be part time or have double jobs.
• Increased attention from students will mean additional pressure on teacher class preparation quality. Teachers should be prepared to expect more questioning and engaged participation in their classes and prepare accordingly.
• Improved peer to peer communication among teachers will help cope with the challenges posed by the new technology and must be encouraged and supported.

Technical Aspects

• Internet connectivity is a very important factor; when not available, a local server or a memory stick with the offline Internet application is used instead. A periodical refresh process is planned based on teachers’ feedback and request. Since most rural school teachers travel periodically to urban centers, their visits are ideal refreshment vehicles we are planning for.
• Electricity tends to be scarce and poorly reliable in rural areas. Plug outlets are scarce and one per classroom in the best cases. Children are not used to electrical devices and it is important, at least in the beginning, that teachers organize the battery charging to ensure safety. Community involvement in cabling and connectivity improvement is encouraged though there is a long way to go, mainly due to limited resource availability in extreme poverty areas.
• Solar power is an option for places where regular supply is not available. Location and scheduling becomes critical in this case and require special attention.
• Rural schools are usually isolated and hard to reach. Maintenance of sophisticated equipment could become a burden to any attempt of improving Education with technology. The special design of the XO laptops deals with this issue by allowing self maintenance service by students and teachers, however, lack of confidence is still a major obstacle in this area which we expect will reduce in time and with the involvement of nearby higher education institutions.

Other factors

• Many stakeholders’ interests are being affected by large scale project deployment. Lobbying and public arguments take significant amount of time and many times jeopardize the implementation. Hardware and software vendors advocating for particular products may and in fact attempt to affect the outcome of the project. A solid educational and technical deployment team is crucial to cope with these issues. We have to keep working on this matter.
• Educational theorists and opinion leaders who did not have a direct role during the planning process usually question the pedagogical approach or implementation. A sensible communication strategy is necessary to ensure all genuinely interested parties’ contribution will be capitalized and taken advantage of. So far we have failed on this, the project execution has taken most of our energies, leaving little time for “advertising”.
• The focus on fixed features and decreasing prices that is behind the XO laptop design guidelines goes against the ICT industry trend of increasing features and more or less constant price. Since these affect major players’ bottom lines, an aggressive reaction from their sales teams has been an important factor. Careful attention to common and conflicting interests between Public Education and commercial enterprises is hard to implement. We have partially succeeded in this, with Microsoft being a specially committed partner whose approach has been able to balance a genuine interest in education support with their logical expectations of market share. We try to work in order to ensure mutual gain whenever possible and minimizing of conflict in other cases.

In summary, the OLPC experience has renewed our hope that school education has not lost its value as an instrument in the development of the individual. Committed teachers can benefit of ICT availability and, without abandoning their concern for processes and methods, they can improve their performance with genuine concern for the personal growth of students, resulting in improved learning outcomes and commitment levels to school.

We are convinced the educational system can abandon the image of a purposeless organism where everybody pretends and get involved in a meaningful system providing not only instruction but the most important ingredient to success: Hope in a better future that may be beginning to be built now. December, 2007 seems long ago now, but we still remember our surprise when we found sixty Arahuay children reading comprehension level had risen 100% above the national average when the base line showed 0% performing at the expected grade level. Initial intrinsic motivation measurements in 139 schools showed dramatic improvement after the first year, though the results are not statistically reliable. The Interamerican Development Bank has committed the funds for an impact study which is underway. As expected no significant results have been found after 6-12 months and we are waiting for the second year evaluation which will be available by March 2011. So far, a more critical student body and increased community self esteem are on the positive side, while need for more teacher training is on the negative side. The last can be explained in the poor quality of teacher education, which has been an endemic problem in Peru for the last decades and cannot be solved with ICT training to in service teachers.

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After providing an overview of OLPC in South America as well as compiling in-depth articles about the current status of the projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru it’s now time to wrap things up.

Hence the 5th and last article this month will look beyond the three countries I described in the past few weeks to see what other OLPC initiatives are doing when it comes to the six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries which have guided this article series. Additionally I will also highlight some lessons for other ICT4E projects which can be extracted from the South American OLPC experiences.

What seems worth pointing out is that the three countries I visited cover a significant range of the broad variety of different approaches, contexts, and projects which can be found around the world under the unifying “One Laptop Per Child” name.

With the project in Paraguay being run by an NGO and the ones in Uruguay and Peru by governments the two most widespread organizational models found in OLPC implementations were covered. In terms of scale the spectrum also goes from Paraguay’s current 4,000 (soon to be 9,000) XO laptops all the way up to the 300,000 respectively 400,000 machines which have so far been distributed in Peru and Uruguay.

When it comes to the context such as infrastructure and current status quo of the education system there are also significant differences between for example Peru – where only a single digit percentage of the OLPC schools have Internet access and literacy in rural areas is estimated to be around 80% – and Uruguay – where 98% of the primary schools now have Internet connectivity and literacy is also around 98%~99%.

Similarly Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, ParaguayEduca, and Peru’s Una laptop por niño have also taken a variety of different approaches when it comes to aspects such as maintenance, community involvement, educational content and materials, teacher training, and evaluations. To me personally seeing this range of ways and solutions to address challenges and issues was one of the most interesting aspects of my journey.

A brief look at other OLPC efforts

However of course people and organizations working on OLPC efforts in other countries and contexts are coming up with yet different approaches in every area of their project. Therefore in this section I’d like to briefly highlight some examples of countries which are taking different routes than the ones described in this article series.

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan the OLPC project is the result of a cooperation between OLPC, the IT company PAIWASTOON, the Afghani Ministry of Education, Ministry of Communication and IT and USAID’s Afghanistan Small and Medium Enterprise Development. So far the consortium has distributed approximately 5,000 XOs and is actively seeking to significantly increase the project’s size in the forseeable future.

Two key components of the Afghani OLPC efforts are content and evaluations.

On the content side PAIWASTOON is working hard on improving and adapting eXeLearning an open-source authoring tool originally developed in New Zealand. The goal of eXeLearning is to provide a simple tool which allows teachers and educators to quickly and easily develop interactive lessons based on wide-spread Web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript. Apart from making modifications to adapt the resulting content to the XO hardware and Sugar software PAIWASTOON is also adding new templates which can be used by teachers and educators. It is also important to point out that PAIWASTOON wants to go beyond traditional subject materials and school-focused content and also enable the creation of materials related to health, personal finances, or related matters which are deemed important within the Afghani context.

When it comes to evaluation the Afghani OLPC project isn’t just interested in evaluating the educational and social impacts but also comparing these impacts against what the result provided by other, potentially non-technical, interventions in the education system. To that end people have also closely looked at the current status quo of education in Afghanistan and subsequently try to address what are perceived to be particular deficits with specific approaches based around the XO laptops. The results of these efforts are then planned to be compared to (a) schools without any interventions and (b) schools where other projects unrelated to OLPC are taking place.

While it’s early days for OLPC in Afghanistan it seems clear that the people and organizations involved in it are taking some interesting approaches to content creation and evaluation. The experiences and knowledge collected in the process could certainly prove to be very useful for other OLPC initiatives as well ICT4E in general.

Nepal

If one had to describe the OLPC project in Nepal in a single word then “content” is probably the best choice. It’s safe to say that similarly to the efforts in Afghanistan the Nepali project is very much driven by developing high quality interactive learning content.

For context let’s take a step back for a quick overview of the Nepali OLPC efforts. First of all it’s important to point out that they’re run by an NGO called OLE Nepal (Open Learning Exchange Nepal) which was started in 2007 and currently has approximately 40 employees. The organization’s goal is to

…improve the quality and access in Nepal’s public education system. It seeks to fulfill this mission by developing and disseminating high quality open-source Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based educational teaching-learning materials that are accessible and available free of cost to all.

To date OLE Nepal has distributed roughly 2200 XO laptops in 26 schools across 6 different provinces of Nepal.

The two content components which sit at the heart of OLE Nepal’s efforts are called E-Paath and E-Pustakalaya.

E-Paath is a collection of interactive learning materials which currently consists of more than 200 units in the subjects of English, Mathematics, and Nepali. The individual learning units are developed to align with Nepal’s national curriculum and learning objectives and the development process is driven and led by education specialists and former teachers in collaboration with programmers and designers. Additionally all of these learning units come with support materials and guides for teachers which contain information on how to integrate them in the classroom, ideas for homework built around them, and laying out what the specific learning goals for each interactive lesson are.

The second component, E-Pustakalaya, is an education focused digital library which currently contains more than 1,200 materials in categories such as children’s books, classic and contemporary literature, newspapers, maps, and photos. Not all of the schools have yet been connected to the Internet thereby making it impossible for pupils, teachers, and other to access the online version of E-Pustakalaya. As an intermediary step until Internet connectivity is possible each school has been equipped with a server which contains a copy of the digital library which is regularly updated via USB flash drives.

Given the relatively small size of its team the amount of high quality content and materials that OLE Nepal has created and curated in the past three years is nothing short of impressive. By combining the content itself with support documentation for teachers it also facilitates the in-classroom use of the XO laptops as a learning tool.

It’s clear that content and materials are only one component of a successful ICT4E initiative and their relative importance will also depend on a projects educational approach. However I do believe that many efforts within the OLPC or larger ICT4E context can learn a lot from OLE Nepal’s work in this area.

Nicaragua / Nigeria

In most countries it’s either the government and its respective institutions, such as Uruguay’s CITS, or an independent NGO, such as OLE Nepal or ParaguayEduca, which is implementing an OLPC project. What is interesting about Nicaragua and Nigeria it’s non-profit entities started by large companies which have initiated the respective OLPC projects in these two countries.

In Nicaragua the LAFISE BANCENTRO Financial Group and its owners decided to create the Zamora Terán foundation to kickstart the OLPC project. On top of the initial seed-funding of US$1,000,000 the foundation is reporting having collected an additional US$4,000,000 from other companies, organizations, and governments since its launch in early 2009.

These external donations are partially the result of a “give a school” model which Daniel Drake, who among many other OLPC projects has also volunteered with Zamora Terán, describes like this:

The foundation has a significant stock of laptops in the country and other organisations can make a donation to cause the project to land in a specific school; the donor covers the cost of the equipment and infrastructure, and the foundation does the rest (logistics, connectivity, laptop handout, teacher training, followup and repairs, etc.).

Somewhat similarly Nigeria’s OLPC project is run by Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development (SEED). Schlumberger is the world’s largest oilfield services provider and describes SEED as:

…a volunteer-based, nonprofit education program focused on underserved communities where Schlumberger people live and work.

At the moment both projects are of similar size – roughly 7,500 XOs in Nicaragua and 6,000 XOs in Nigeria – and it will be interesting to see how they develop over the coming months and years. Particularly when it comes to scaling it will be worthwhile observing if and how these organizations operate compared to the OLPC projects run by more “traditional” NGOs.

Closing thoughts

Last but not least here are some closing thoughts and possible things to consider for ICT4E projects in general.

ICT4E in developing countries is here to stay

One of the things that I’m convinced of is that as a topic ICT4E in developing countries isn’t going to go away anytime soon. While I previously saw a slight chance for the development of somewhat of a hype – followed by a significant decrease – in the interest of implementing ICT4E solutions in developing countries I now believe that it is here to stay. Five years from now we’re going to see more people, groups, organizations, and governments wanting to work in this space.

One of the strongest indicators of that development is that the broader discussion within academia as well as the media, NGOs, and communities of practice about ICT4E in developing countries has shifted from “should it be done” to “how should it be done” in the more recent past. In parallel the discussion also seems to have moved beyond the previously hotly debated question of “which ICT should be used” to the more interesting (and more difficult) point of “how do can whatever ICT is available be used”.

Additionally, and I strongly believe this is a factor which mustn’t be underestimated, the implemention of large-scale ICT4E projects such as Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal also creates somewhat of a pull-factor for these kinds of initiatives. Particularly within South America we are starting to see local and regional authorities approaching entities such as Plan Ceibal to see how similar efforts can be implemented in their respectives areas.

It’s within this context that I recently wrote an article explaining why I think that “Montevideo will be the OLPC capital of the world“. In the past where it was often organizations such as One Laptop per Child itself or other NGOs which were the driving forces behind ICT4E projects. However now it increasingly seems to be local, regional or national entities interested in ICT4E who are approaching organizations and countries such as Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal to learn about their experiences.

The hard part of ICT4E is the “for education“

Especially for someone with a technology background, like yours truly, it’s often easy to overly focus on the “ICT” part of ICT4E. However I strongly believe that the significantly harder as well as interesting part of the equation is the “for education” aspect. Hence the broader question is how to effectively and efficiently integrate technology, and not just laptops, in the teaching and learning processes taking place inside as well as outside school.

At the moment it seems like many ICT4E projects are primarily technology-driven rather than focusing on the education part. As a result technical challenges often receive more attention and resources than education ones. Yet given that the primary purpose of ICT in ICT4E is to serve as a tool to improve learning rather than as a goal in itself, I think that in many cases more resources and people need to be dedicated to the education side of things.

You can only learn so much from a pilot

Another lesson from the South American OLPC projects, particularly the large ones in Uruguay and Peru, is that there’s only so much one can learn from a 200 XO pilot project. In general within ICT4E small pilots often only seem to be regarded as a way to learn about the biggest mistakes early on before significantly increasing the size of an initiative. However there’s a broad variety of issues which will only appear once a project reaches a certain size and hence scaling a project such as Plan Ceibal from 200 to 400,000 XOs within 2 1/2 years leaves relatively little time to address deficits in the planning or implementation. This then results in problems being amplified by the sheer size of a project, and regardless of how tiny it may seem at first most things become difficult to address once you multiply them by 400,000.

Hence what I would suggest is more of a staged and iterative approach. So instead of going from several hundred straight to several hundred thousand devices and participants one could imagine a project starting with 100 machines, then being increased to 1,000 or 5,000, up to 50,000 or 100,000 in the next stage before finally reaching an even bigger scale. Given enough time each of these iterations will yield interesting results and insights which will in turn help improve the next iteration. In combination with extensive monitoring and evaluation this approach could help detect and subsequently address issues which only start appearing once a project reaches a certain size.

However I do realize that such an approach, a saner approach as one could call it, will often run into political realities such as elections and people going out of office. In Uruguay for example then-president Tabaré Vázquez who had initiated Plan Ceibal wanted the program to be his legacy hence the distribution of the laptops had to be completed before he left office.

Context matters

More often than not information on paper and in databases is a simplified representation of the real thing. As a result two schools which might both be considered to be “rural schools” could differ significantly and in fact require quite different resources and approaches to successfully implement an ICT4E project such as OLPC.

An example here are two schools which I visited during my time in Peru. They looked sufficiently similar on paper however in key areas such as size, electrical infrastructure, or availability of a teacher with extensive knowledge about computers the differences were quite significant. The first school had a sufficient number of power outlets the electricity itself wasn’t very reliable whereas in the second school very few power outlets were available in the classrooms yet the electricity was generally reliable. Of course these issues require different solutions catered to the specific requirements so a one size fits all approach for “rural schools” might actually miss addressing the specific problems.

Details, details, details

Similarly to what I wrote above I strongly believe that details really matter. It’s not just about the broader context of a school but also about things such as the number of power outlets which are available in a classroom. While this might seem hardly worthwhile thinking about at first it actually has a lot of impact on aspects such as the seating arrangements in a classroom, how often pupils can use the laptops, and whether they can consistently use the laptops.

In my mind this also aligns well with the staged approach implementation mentioned above. It is impossible to draw up the perfect plan on day one and ICT4E projects are very likely to run into issues that the people behind it, who often don’t have a clear understanding of realities on the ground, never even considered. So one way to address this is to have extensive on the ground and first-hand experience about the specific environment and its characteristics an ICT4E project will be implemented in. An alternative here is to have close feedback loops with a project’s stakeholders, in the case of OLPC for example pupils, teachers, parents, principals, and administrators.

Don’t reinvent the flat tire

It was Alan Kay who used the expression “reinventing the flat tire” within the context of computers and education in an e-mail discussion within the OLPC and Sugar communities and I think it really hits the nail on the head.

In my mind one way to avoid reinventing the flat tire is to learn from mistakes which others previously made. Therefore I think it’s important to point out that on top of a lot of information about best practices there’s also a wealth of knowledge about worst practices out there which ICT4E projects should take into account. Michael Trucano’s Worst practice in ICT use in education can be considered a must-read in this area. Particularly given that ICT4E is supposedly about learning, it never ceases to amaze me how little many individuals, organizations, and projects learn from what is already out there.

Though it may sometimes seem like it’s a brand-new thing ICT4E and the whole concept of using computers in education and learning has actually been around for quite awhile. There’s a wealth of information out there about things that don’t work at all or don’t work well within a certain context so there’s really no excuse for often making the same mistakes over and over again.

In the end I hope that you found this 5-part article series as well as the resulting discussions interesting and relevant to your own involvement in OLPC and ICT4E. I’m looking forward to your comments, critique, questions, and feedback below.

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