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There Are No Technology Shortcuts to Good Education

wayan — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:27:26 +0000

There are no technology shortcuts to good education. For primary and secondary schools that are underperforming or limited in resources, efforts to improve education should focus almost exclusively on better teachers and stronger administrations. Information technology, if used at all, should be targeted for certain, specific uses or limited to well-funded schools whose fundamentals are not in question.

(Caveat: Because this article was written for an audience most interested in government-funded primary and secondary education in developing countries, words like “wealthy,” “average,” and “typical” should be read with that context in mind. But, the conclusions are relevant for a broad class of primary and secondary schools in developed countries, as well.)

To back these assertions, I’ll draw on four different lines of evidence.

The history of electronic technologies in schools is fraught with failures.
Computers are no exception, and rigorous studies show that it is incredibly difficult to have positive educational impact with computers. Technology at best only amplifies the pedagogical capacity of educational systems; it can make good schools better, but it makes bad schools worse.
Technology has a huge opportunity cost in the form of more effective non-technology interventions.
Many good school systems excel without much technology.

The inescapable conclusion is that significant investments in computers, mobile phones, and other electronic gadgets in education are neither necessary nor warranted for most school systems. In particular, the attempt to use technology to fix underperforming classrooms (or to replace non-existent ones) is futile. And, for all but wealthy, well-run schools, one-to-one computer programs cannot be recommended in good conscience.

All of the evidence stands on its own, but I will tie them together with a single theory that explains why technology is unable to substitute for good teaching: Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years.

While computers appear to engage students (which is exactly their appeal), the engagement swings between uselessly fleeting at best and addictively distractive at worst. No technology today or in the foreseeable future can provide the tailored attention, encouragement, inspiration, or even the occasional scolding for students that dedicated adults can, and thus, attempts to use technology as a stand-in for capable instruction are bound to fail.

With respect to sustaining directed motivation, even the much-maligned rote-focused drill-sergeant disciplinarian is superior to any electronic multimedia carnival. (In an October 2009 ETD article, James BonTempo also highlighted the importance of motivation. But, while BonTempo suggested that we should seek technologies that motivate both teachers and students, I believe today’s technology is not up to the task. [Note: The author retracts this statement and agrees with BonTempo, as his articles actually suggest that even this is not possible if neither teachers nor students are motivated to begin with.])

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The Repetitive Cycle of Technology

For anyone concerned with high-tech in schools, two books are required reading as histories of technology and education. The first is Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, which overviews the history of films, radio, television, and computers in American education up to the early 1980s. The second is Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. Oppenheimer also focuses primarily on US education, but updates and expands on Cuban’s findings for computers in schools through the early 2000s. Both authors consider the record of technology in schools and find it wanting. They reveal that while technologies can have positive educational impact in restricted instances, successes pale in comparison to failures overall. By not knowing this past history, we seem condemned to repeat it over and over and over.

One point that both authors make is that there is a repetitive cycle of technology in education that goes through hype, investment, poor integration, and lack of educational outcomes. The cycle keeps spinning only because each new technology reinitiates the cycle. In 1922, Thomas Edison claimed that movies would “revolutionize our educational system.” In 1945, William Levenson, a Cleveland radio station director, suggested that portable radios in classrooms should be “integrated into school life” alongside blackboards. In the 1960s, governments under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson invested in classroom TV. In an irrational leap of reasoning that is symptomatic of technology in education, Johnson went from a valid lament, “Unhappily, the world has only a fraction of the teachers it needs,” to a non-solution… to meet the challenge “through educational television.”

The hubris and failures of technology projects are detailed by Cuban and Oppenheimer, but with hindsight available to all of us, we know that none of these technologies has delivered on their promises. If anything, we have become wary of their educational power. For example, on the one hand, television excels as a medium for delivering information. Seduced by this capacity in 1964, Wilbur Schramm, the father of communications studies, asked “What if the full power and vividness of television teaching were to be used to help the schools develop a country’s new educational pattern?” He was thinking, in particular, of mass media’s potential to transform education for developing countries.

The transformation never occurred, probably because as motivational as television can be, it still falls far short of generating the motivation required for education. For every person who falls prey to Madison Avenue’s latest advertisement, hundreds of others just ignore it or turn the channel – if that’s true of the most persuasive television commercials, why should we expect television to be able to regularly sustain the motivation (and not just the attention) of easily distracted children to do the cognitive push-ups that education demands?

In the meanwhile, many of us have come to sense television’s shortcomings. Educated parents restrict their children’s time in front of the TV, and many households ban television altogether – at its best, television is considered a cheap babysitter to hold a child’s attention when adult attention is scarce; at its worst, television caters to our weakest impulses, glamorizes materialism, desensitizes us to violence, and lulls us into a zombie-like trance. As a result, most people today would laugh at a school system based on watching broadcast television programs, however educational. Yet, that was exactly the idea behind an experiment in American Samoa in the mid-1960s, where the “education” of 80% of students was based on watching educational telecasts. The program was dismantled several years later as teachers, administrators, parents, and even students expressed dissatisfaction with the students’ academic performance.

Computers: The Latest Technology Cycle

Today, computers and mobile phones are the shiny new technologies, and they offer an even more seductive promise. One argument goes that it was the passiveness of older technologies that was the problem, so today’s interactive digital technologies are the perfect solution.

Patrick Suppes, a pioneer in computer-aided learning suggested in 1966 that computers can “adapt mechanical teaching routines to the needs and the past performance of the individual student.” But, neither interactivity nor adaptive capacity are sufficient – the key challenge in education remains the long-term, directed motivation of the student – something which no technology today can deliver on its own, but which good teachers deliver regularly.

Of course, computers are different from radio or television, so if they are able to prove themselves in education, we should use them. Alas, the research on computers in education consistently arrives at a single conclusion, which at its most optimistic could be stated as follows:

Computers can help good schools do some things better, but they do nothing positive for underperforming schools. This means, very specifically, that efforts to fix broken schools with technology or to substitute for missing teachers with technology invariably fail.

Mark Warschauer, the foremost authority on technology in American classrooms, has spent countless hours studying computer projects. He writes of underperforming US schools, “placing computers and Internet connections in low-[income] schools, in and of itself, does little to address the serious educational challenges faced by these schools. To the extent that an emphasis on provision of equipment draws attention away from other important resources and interventions, such an emphasis can in fact be counterproductive.”

And, as for technology’s capacity to even the playing field of education, he says, “the introduction of information and communication technologies in [...] schools serves to amplify existing forms of inequality.” This is a specific instance of a broader thesis I argued recently, of technology’s role as an amplifier of existing institutional forces.

In the international arena, and using experimental methodology, economists confirm these findings. In rigorous large-scale studies in both India and Colombia, Leigh Linden at Columbia University found that while PCs can supplement good instruction, PCs are a poor substitute for time with teachers. Furthermore, large-scale computer roll-outs in these countries showed no significant educational outcomes compared against students who didn’t receive computers. He suggests that one problem is that teachers don’t successfully incorporate computers into their curricula. (Nor are teachers to blame – technology programs routinely fail to account for teachers’ needs.)

Ana Santiago and her colleagues at the Inter-American Development Bank find a similar story for a Peruvian One Laptop Per Child program. Three months after a large-scale roll-out, and despite teacher, parent, and student excitement around the technology, students gained nothing in academic achievement. Santiago also notes that even during the initial three months, the novelty factor of the laptops appears to wane, with each week seeing less use of the devices.

None of these results run counter to the few research studies that show how computers can benefit education in limited ways. But, all positive instances of computers in schools are built on strong institutional foundations that are exactly what is deficient where technology is expected to save the day. Without the institutional base, technology’s impact is zero or negative. This should immediately cause anyone hoping to fix an underperforming classroom to cross off technology as any part of the “solution.”

As Wayan Vota notes in a May 2009 ETD article, unless the institutional foundation of teachers and administrators is built and funded properly, technology is pointless. With the lens of motivation, it’s easy to understand why. Bad schools are unable to direct student motivation towards educational goals. Since technology itself requires proper motivation for its benefits to accrue, any school that can’t direct student motivation capably will fail to do so with technology, as well (or worse, allow technology to distract students).

The Cost Implications of Technology Investments

Educators often parrot that “technology is not a panacea,” by which they mean either:

that technology doesn’t cure all educational ills or
that technology alone is insufficient as a solution.

Though these acknowledgments are far better than a blind faith in technology, they still belie hidden, unjustified expectations of technology. The first interpretation suggests that technology cures some maladies in education. But, this is exactly what doesn’t happen – the prevailing evidence shows that technology does not cure unhealthy educational systems; at best, it only augments healthy ones. The second belief is more dangerous because it is factually correct but misleading for policy. It implies that technology can be a good solution as long as other investments are also made; what it leaves out is that if alternate investments of the same magnitude were made to support education directly (and not indirectly to support technology), the educational results could be far greater.

The issues here are cost-effectiveness and opportunity cost. Of course, if the net impact of a technology solution is zero or negative, it’s pointless to implement it however low the cost. But because many educators are tempted by technology’s supposed ability to lower costs, it’s worthwhile to consider actual costs of well-implemented technology.

The most common error in computing costs is to assume that hardware and software are the dominant costs of technology. In reality, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for information technology is comfortably several times the cost of hardware, with a range of 5-10x being a good rule of thumb. Beyond hardware, necessary costs include costs of distribution, maintenance, power infrastructure, teacher training, repair and replacement, and curriculum integration. (In a May 2010 ETD article, Sam Carlson, who unlike me believes in technology for education, nevertheless highlights just how much of an investment teacher training requires.) Additional costs often include connectivity, software development, content production, and end-of-life costs. One analysis by Vital Wave Consulting shows the TCO of an ultra-low-cost PC to be in the $2000-3000 range for developing country schools. A similar analysis by OLPCnews suggests $972 over five years for OLPC (the very optimistic advertised lifespan of an OLPC laptop), and $753 for an OLPC implementation in Nepal (cf., OLPC’s current cost of $188). These figures are per unit, so a one-to-one laptop program would incur these costs per-student.

Though figures like the ones above show otherwise, technology providers eagerly feed technology-cost misconceptions. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC, has been recently touting a $1-per-week total cost for his laptops. But, a dollar a week doesn’t even pay for the device over three years, which many observers agree is a reasonable estimate of its lifetime. It appears his accounting skills are not on par with his salesmanship. Even at $1 a week, though, the price is out of proportion for many developing-country budgets. The government of India, for example, spends no more than $200 per student per year for primary and secondary school, and most of that expense goes to teacher salaries. And, while literacy rates in India are rising, they remain around 60%. Many other developing countries spend even less, with worse results. Does it make sense to take a quarter or more of a struggling school system’s budget and allocate it to technologies that haven’t even proven themselves?

With respect to costs, it’s worth keeping in mind the opportunity cost of technology. For example, research by economists Ted Miguel, Michael Kremer, and others has conclusively shown the value of 50-cent deworming pills for education. The pills free children of parasites and eliminate one of the dominant reasons for student absenteeism in many developing countries. At a cost of only $3.50 per student (over several years), countries with high incidences of parasites can effectively add the equivalent of an extra year of schooling. Similar results can be had from provision of midday meals, iron supplements, and teaching assistants, and all at a much lower cost than that of computing technology.

As for better teaching, educator Doug Lemov enumerates a series of instructional techniques in his book Teach Like a Champion. The techniques were compiled by Lemov after studying hours upon hours of video of teachers who systematically outperform their peers. Most of the techniques are conceptually simple, but have a dramatic impact on the teacher’s effect in the classroom. For example, when asking a question, Lemov’s recommendation to teachers is to pose the question to the class at large, allow some time to think, and then to randomly call on a student. The technique motivates all of the students to think, since any of them could be put on the spot. In contrast, calling only on students who raise their hand or calling on a student before asking the question allows other students to ignore the question entirely. Such techniques require no additional technology and could easily be incorporated into existing teacher training programs with marginal additional cost.

Speaking of teachers, it should be emphasized over and over that they are the primary agents of good formal education. Without good teachers, education fails; with good teachers, education succeeds. Technology is largely irrelevant to this equation. As evidence, we only need to consider world-class school systems that consistently churn out high-performing students. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the OECD’s latest instrument to measure student performance across countries. 15-year olds are assessed on their reading, math, and science abilities, and the test attempts to measure not just rote learning but some degree of deeper comprehension and critical thinking ability.

Finland is among the countries that routinely perform at the top on PISA, and it is renowned for its low-tech, high-touch approach that emphasizes educational basics and relatively few hours of school or homework. There are also school systems like that of South Korea that use a lot of technology and also do well, but analysis of PISA results fails to show any meaningful correlation between technology use and student performance. (Tim Kelly attempts to use Korea as an argument for technology in schools in a May 2009 ETD article, but that seems an unfortunate confusion of correlation with cause.) Rather, PISA summary documents highlight that the best-performing nations have a political commitment to universal education, high standards for achievement, and quality teachers and principals. Notably absent is any mention of technology as a critical element of a good school system, even though the PISA survey includes data on computers and other educational resources.

None of this should be a surprise. The world had amply demonstrated well before the invention of the personal computer that good education is possible without information technology. Most people born in the 1975 or earlier had no computing in their classrooms, and it would be hard to argue that they suffered as a result; many now lead the world in their respective spheres. Are we to believe that today’s Nobel Laureates, heads of state, and business elite received an inferior education because they were without information technology when growing up?

When Technology in Education is Justified

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should clarify that some uses of computers in education can be justified, although with the ever-applicable caution that while technology can augment good schools, it hurts poor schools.

First, in those cases where directed student motivation is assured, technology may lessen the burden of teaching. Some cases of tertiary or adult education may fall into this category.
Second, targeted use of computers in schools, for example, as an aid to teach computer literacy, computer programming, or video editing, etc., are important as long as those uses are incorporated only as a small part of a well-rounded curriculum.
Third, technology can help with the administration of schools – record keeping, monitoring, evaluation, etc. – as long as the school system is able to fully support the technology.
Fourth, in richer environments, where the cost of educated labor is relatively high, careful use of well-designed software may have value in fundamental education, particularly for remedial or drilling purposes. Solutions offered by, for example, Carnegie Learning fall into this category, although it should be noted again that effective use of these kinds of technologies must occur in the context of an otherwise well-run school system.
Fifth, again in rich environments, where the basics of education are assured, where teachers are facile with technology, and where budgets are unconstrained, widespread use of technology, even in a one-to-one format, might benefit students. Warschauer does find that certain uses of computers enhance computer literacy and writing skills, but these outcomes are limited to well-run, well-funded schools; they are notably absent in underperforming schools, even in the United States.

I underscore that the last two cases are specific to very wealthy, well-run school systems (as a benchmark, the value is unlikely to emerge for school systems spending less than US$8,000 per student per year), and that none of the positive instances above pertain to underperforming schools or to broad dissemination of technology to students.

9 Myths of Technology in Education

I’ve so far argued that technology in education has a poor historical record; that computers in schools typically fail to have positive impact (with the rare exceptions occurring only in the context of competent, well-funded schools); that information technology is almost never worth its opportunity cost; and that quality education doesn’t require information technology.

Though I’ve only presented a smattering of the evidence above, the conclusions are clear. Put together, the strong recommendation is that underperforming school systems should keep their focus on improving teaching and administration, and that even good schools may want to consider more cost-effective alternatives to technology when making supplementary educational investments.

Unfortunately, all of this evidence doesn’t provide the gut intuition required to reject seductive rhetoric. So, I end with a point-by-point refutation of frequently heard sound bites extolling technology in schools.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 1: 21st-century skills require 21st-century technologies. The modern world uses e-mail, PowerPoint, and filing systems. Computers teach you those skills.

Reality: This is bad reasoning of the kind that, hopefully, genuine 21st-century skills wouldn’t allow. What exactly are the “21st-century skills” that successful citizens need? Some people define them as the 3 Rs and the 4 Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity). But, aren’t these the same as 20th-century skills? The skills haven’t changed; only the proportion of people requiring them.

Of course, the tools that people use at work and at home have changed, but the use of these tools is easy to learn compared with the deep ability to think and work effectively. As far as I know, not in the 500+ years since Gutenberg invented the printing press did anyone suggest that every school, to say nothing of every student, needed a mini-printing press to learn printing skills. (From the 1960s through the 1990s, schools incorporated typing half-heartedly into their curricula, but even that was relegated to a one-year elective.)

Today, any idiot can learn to use Twitter. But, forming and articulating a cogent argument in any medium – SMS text messages, PowerPoint, e-mails, or otherwise – requires good thinking, writing, and communication skills. Those skills might be channeled through technology, but they hardly require technology to acquire. Similarly, any fool can learn to “use” a computer. But, the underlying math required to do financial accounting or engineering requires solid mathematical preparation that requires working through problem sets – Einstein didn’t grow up with computers, but modern physics would be delighted to have more Einsteins.

We need to distinguish between the need to learn the tools of modern life (easy to pick up, and getting easier by the day, thanks to better technology!) and learning the critical thinking skills that make a person productive in an information economy (hard to learn, and not really any easier with information technology). Based on my own experience trying to teach undereducated English-speaking adults how to use Google, I’m quite certain that what limited their ability to capitalize on the Internet was reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, not computer literacy skills.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 2: Technology X allows interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, [insert educational flavor of the month (EFotM) here] learning.

Reality: All of that may be true, but without directed motivation of the student, no sustained learning actually happens, with or without technology. Good teachers are interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, and capable of EFotM, but on top of all of that, they are also capable of something that no technology for the foreseeable future can do: generate ongoing motivation in students. If education only required an interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, EFotM medium, then the combination of an Erector Set and an encyclopedia ought to be sufficient for education.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 3: But, wait, it’s still easier for teachers to arouse interest with technology X than with textbooks.

Reality: Maybe a little bit at first. But, the novelty factor of most technologies quickly wears off, and those which don’t tend to turn viewers into zombies rather than engaged learners.
In addition, this comment is a real insult to good teachers everywhere. Good teachers are exactly those who can engage students creatively, regardless of the aids available to them. Technology might amplify the impact of good teachers, but it won’t fix bad teaching.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 4: Teachers are expensive. It’s exactly because teachers are absent or poorly trained that low-cost technology is a good alternative.

Reality: Low-cost technologies are not so low cost when total cost of ownership is taken into account and put in the economic context of low-income schools. Furthermore, technology cannot fix broken educational systems. If teachers are absent or poorly trained, the only proper solution is to invest in better teachers, better training, and better administration… even if it’s expensive. As they say in KIPP schools, there are no shortcuts!

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 5: Textbooks are expensive. For the price of a couple of textbooks, you might as well get a low-cost PC.

Reality: Anyone who says this is using American predatory pricing of textbooks as a guide. In India, a typical text book costs 7.5-25 rupees, or 15-50 cents. For $1-3, you could buy all the textbooks a child will need for the year. It can be more expensive in other countries where printing costs are not as low as in India, but there is no reason why a textbook needs to cost more than a few dollars. Please, let’s stop propagating this myth.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 6: We have been trying to improve education for many years without results. Thus, it’s time for something new: Technology X!

Reality: Technology has never fixed a broken educational system, so if anything is getting old, it’s the attempt to patch bad education with technology. If other efforts aren’t working, maybe the school system needs to be thrown out and rebuilt from the ground up, as Qatar recently did with its education ministry. There are plenty of new things to try that don’t require new technology. (Though, novelty for its own sake doesn’t make sense, either. There are plenty of old examples of good education, too.) It should be cautioned though, that efforts to improve teachers and administrators is itself a multi-year, if not multi-decade effort. Again, there are no shortcuts!

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 7: Study Z shows that technology is helpful.

Reality: Technology can be beneficial. But, it’s always worth looking at two things more carefully: First, how good was the educational environment in Study Z without the technology? Invariably, it will have been good; often, very good. This means it was secret-sauce + technology that caused the benefit, not technology by itself. Second, what was the total cost of the technology (including training, maintenance, curriculum, etc.)? Inevitably, it will be a factor of 5-10 more than the cost of hardware. Both issues suggest that for ailing schools, technology is not the answer.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 8: Computer games, simulations, and other state-of-the-art technologies are really changing things.

Reality: This article was written with current and near-term technologies in mind. It’s possible that future technologies will not fit the theses. Certainly, a humanoid robot indistinguishable from a good teacher could work wonders! More realistically, it’s likely that sophisticated software could become richer in the range of things they can teach and the degree to which they sustain motivation. But, any such advances should pass lab trials, pilot runs, controlled experiments, and cost-effectiveness analyses before anyone starts advocating them for widespread use. So far, no technology has met this bar – computers running existing software certainly haven’t.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 9: Technology is transformative, revolutionary, and otherwise stupendous! Therefore, it must be good for education.

Reality: This myth is pervasive because it is so easy to believe and because we want to believe it so badly. After all, with computers, we can publish our own newsletters, buy gifts in our pajamas, and find the best Italian restaurant in town. And, it would be nice if all we had to do was to sit every child in front of a computer for 6 hours a day to turn them into educated, upright citizens.

But, why do we believe this? It makes no sense. We don’t expect that playing football video games makes a child a great athlete. We don’t believe that watching YouTube will turn our kids into Steven Spielbergs. We don’t think that socializing on Facebook will turn people into electable government officials. And, if none of those things work, then why do we expect it of writing, history, science, or mathematics?

A good education is second only to parenting in the importance it has in raising capable, upright members of society. We would never think to replace parenting with technology (and when we do at times, we do it with shame, and only because we’re too damn tired to parent, not because gadgets are superior to us). Why do we keep trying to replace teachers?

Honesty in Technology Failure

As if to underscore these points, last month, the Azim Premji Foundation, a well-funded non-profit in India and arguably the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to working with computers in education, made a startling – and courageous – confession. They had worked for over half a decade with tens of thousands of schools, providing computers, training teachers, designing whole software libraries in 18 languages, and integrating material with state curricula. Aspects of their programs and their software could be criticized, but their methods were as thoughtful and as heartfelt as any technology-for-education effort I have witnessed, with frequent research and evaluations to confirm outcomes. Their conclusion?

“[W]hen we took stock at a fundamental level, we realized that [our whole effort in computer-aided learning] was at best a qualified failure… there was practically no impact in a sustained, systemic manner on learning.”

Anurag Behar, co-CEO of the foundation cited a number of issues (the full article is worth reading), but chief among the problems were that any deficiencies in administration and teaching were not overcome by technology. He notes: “At its best, the fascination with ICT as a solution distracts from the real issues. At its worst, ICT is suggested as substitute to solving the real problems, for example, ‘why bother about teachers, when ICT can be the teacher’. This perspective is lethal.” He concludes with a paraphrasing of what he learned from education leaders in Finland and Canada (two countries who consistently do well on PISA): “not a dollar will we invest in ICT, every dollar that we have will go to teacher and school leader capacity building.”

In short, there are no technology shortcuts to good education.

For further reading along these lines, see 10 Worst Practices in ICT for Education, by Michael Trucano, as well as education-focused posts by the ICT4D Jester.

References

Barrera-Osorio, Felipe and Linden, Leigh L. (2009) The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1344721, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Behar, Anurag. (2010) Limits of ICT in Education. LiveMint.com. Dec. 16, 2010. http://www.livemint.com/2010/12/15201000/Limits-of-ICT-in-education.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Camfield, Jon. (2006) What is the real cost of OLPC? http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/price/the_real_cost_of_the.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Camfield, Jon. (2010) Total cost of XO ownership for OLE Nepal. http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/price/total_cost_of_xo_ownership_for.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Cuban, Larry. (1986) Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. Teachers College Press.

Lemov, Doug. (2010) Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. Jossey-Bass.

Linden, Leigh L. (2008) Complement or Substitute? The Effect of Technology on Student Achievement in India. Jameel Poverty Action Lab Working Paper. http://www.columbia.edu/~ll2240/Gyan_Shala_CAL_2008-05-22.pdf, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

OECD (2010), PISA 2009 Results: What Makes a School Successful? — Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV). http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264091559-en, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Oppenheimer, Todd. (2003) The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. Random House.

Santiago, A., Severin, E., Cristia, J., Ibarrarán, P., Thompson, J., & Cueto, S. (2010). Evaluacíon experimental del programa “Una Laptop por Niño” en Perú. Washington, DC: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. http://www.iadb.org/document.cfm?id=35370099

Suppes, Patrick. (1966) The Uses of Computers in Education. Scientific American, 215(3):207-220.

Toyama, Kentaro. (2010) Can Technology End Poverty? Boston Review, 35(6):12-18,28-29. http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/ndf_technology.php, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

Vital Wave Consulting. (2008) Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials. http://www.vitalwaveconsulting.com/insights/articles/affordable-computing.htm, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Warschauer, Mark, Michele Knobel, and LeeAnn Stone. (2004) Technology and equity in schooling: Deconstructing the digital divide. Educational Policy, 18(4):562-588. http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/warschauer_m/docs/tes.pdf, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

Warschauer, Mark. (2006) Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom. Teachers College Press.

Ashish Garg on Why Most Investments in Technology for Schools are Not Wasted

wayan — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:22:05 +0000

The Educational Technology Debate is one year old this month and to celebrate, we had a Live Debate: Are Most Investments in Technology for Schools Wasted? at the World Bank offices in New Delhi, India. With six great speakers, we focused on the issues around technology implementation in educational systems of the developing world.

This is the opening remarks and initial response of Ashish Garg, Asian Regional Coordinator for Global E-Schools and Community Initiative to the question: Are most investments in technology for schools wasted?

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Ashish Garg: (download the podcast)

Thank you Dr. Kelly and thank you Atanu for trying to make this debate interesting. Even though, I don’t see any reason for us to be here debating about the affrication of using ICTs in schools and education. Nevertheless let me start by quoting not Shakespeare but Ban Ki-moon from recent times.

“Information and communication technology have a central role to play in the quest for development, dignity, and peace. The international consensus on this point is clear. We saw it at the Millennium Summit in 2000 and at the 2005 World Summit and we saw it at the two phases of the World Summit of Information Society.”

Already a substantial number of examples have demonstrated that ICT based systems and servers have the power to improve the quality of life not just for people in the cities but also more importantly for the marginalized and the poor. In the years that have followed, we have seen global spent on ICTs increase consistently the number of internet subscribers have multiplied across the globe depicting the hunger for knowledge, communication, and collaboration. To be debating the efficacies of using ICTs in schools in 2010 in this phase of tremendous progress across the world to me is nothing short of incongruity.

I am afraid I have to fall back on clichéd argument that has now been used a zillion times to support my motion of the day which is investment in ICTs in school is not a waste. I think first and foremost what is required is we need to set expectations right. It is far too easy to take the myopic view of the role and impact of ICTs in the society. ICTs do not exist in isolation and therefore they cannot be measured in isolation to all other elements that impact education. They exist within an educational framework that is part of a larger societal ecosystem.

Jyrki Pulkinnen, CEO of GeSCI, writes:

“I think it is very important to recognize that basically ICT applications are standardized work processes and therefore always social by nature”

and as Shahid Akhtar writes:

“the main challenge across the region is less the matter of access and distribution of technology per say. It is more a matter of creating the enabling environment and capacity building approach.”

I agree that computers may continue to sit in their boxes but the point is that there needs to be a development of an ecosystem and for that it is very important to understand what is the way to assess the investment that is made in ICTs. Wayan ran on this topic on Education Technology Debate, Asessing ICT Evaluations, and there were varied responses to that starting from priorities in developing countries versus investment in ICTs, lack of appropriate tools to measure the impact of ICT versus are ICTs for e-assessments actually effective or not and so on.

To mention Tim Kelly who first started talking about ICTs for E-assessments will help avoid wasteful tragedies and so on. I would really urge you to read that blog for some really insightful articulations on the use of ICTs in schools. As Dr. Kelly even said right the cost of a computer is equivalent to providing a class with a couple of books each but providing the computer is linked to the internet the students and their teachers will then have access to the boundless library of the worldwide web which is constantly updated and which contains a hugely diverse range of views and experiences.

By contrast, the textbook inevitably provides a pre-digested view of the world and one that is out of date the day it is printed. It also brings us to another very important element which is the lack or the presence of political wind and remember long time ago we all lamented the fact that there is no political way to push this wonderful technology across in schools but today we are actually moving from our focus just simply hardware.

Thanks to research and awareness building in not just countries like India but also in Bangladesh and Nepal, countries are more open on spending on teacher training plans, reforming school curriculum, and providing new assessment tool for technology in every class. Clearly I think the risk does not lie in failing to adopt the technology-enabled strategies which are inevitable. You could see the lucrative use of mobile even though I do not really stand for the use of mobile for basic literacy and things like that but these are inevitable and they are lucrative as you can see them across.

The risk is rather tonight doing a poor job of adopting these strategies and then the final point that I want to make is to Atanu’s point where he says that the number schools and the number of people that we have to educate in India and how do we provide technology for all of them? I think brick and mortar possibilities are really going to be difficult.

The recent RTE now says 290 million more students will start attending schools. I think if we are planning on putting up more schools then we might have to stop losing roles because probably we have to put schools everywhere but contrast that with the statistics or the data that IGNOU printed out sometime back, 24% of India’s school going population, higher education population, uses ODL, open distance learning methods, for education. So therefore I think, and Dr. Kelly is showing me the time already, there is really a lot of scopes for ICTs provided we understand a few basic mechanisms of how to make this work.

The last point that I want to make is there really is a phased evolution process on how we use the technology in our countries. Jyrki Pulkinnen talks about the society where the society actually stops the question of relevance of ICT in education. Thank you.

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Dr Kelly: How do you think we should be doing evaluation of ICT in education, to make the investment worthwhile?

Actually, the government is going to be beaten any which ways. If they did not spend the money on the ICT then there would be a brigade that would rise up saying the government is not doing anything to put technology in the schools and today the government is doing then the response is that because the government is doing it there is no responsibility and there is no accountability.

I agree that yes ICTs help a lot in various things and there is no debate on that and Sam brought forward a very important point about a tail that wags the dog and yes definitely it is the ecosystem but my point is that for 62 years of India’s independence nobody really decided to question the response of the ecosystem, the development of the educational ecosystem, or the readiness of the educational ecosystem. So what has lead especially in India and this part of the world? What has lead to this question?

It is the coming of the ICT that brings up these questions that what is it about that needs to be done? The reformative or the transformative reforms that need to come in so that new technologies can be adopted. The last point that I want to make is that it is not about just raising a point about what has been the worth of that particular investment. It is not like your log book which says credit and debit and in the end of the day both the sides have to be equalized. It is education.

It is a social change. It is social reform so there is a gestation period. So sufficient gestation period has to be given in order for ICT to prove their point but beyond that let me just talk about the PISA results, the program for international student assessment. Likewise there are several such impact studies monitoring and evaluation studies which have particularly shown how ICTs have helped move scores forward and in one of the blogs Dr. Kelly writes that available evidence of benefits of ICTs in schools is sometimes mixed and hard to interpret.

In the same way we say in the latest survey of 2006 shows the fastest gain in reading standards in any country observant with in the Republic of Korea where students have increased their reading standards by 31 points and not coincidentally he continues to write Korea also scored top in the ITUs digital opportunity index, DOI index, in 2006 which is the most respected measure of an economy’s ICT performance.

So if you kind of correlate the two I think there is a lot to be drawn from there and I think finally that it is these evaluations that are necessary to demonstrate to the local officers and to the national policy makers that ICTs are worth the investment. They need to know what local problems ICT can address or opportunities that are possible.

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Dr. Kelly: Do you want to challenge the other side or shake the arguments?

I would really like to go back to what I put forward some time back why we are asking ourselves these questions today? How come we are questioning the ecosystem and its ability to deliver which we didn’t do? I actually want to go back to the time when I was probably in class 10 and then multiple choice questions were starting to get introduced and before that everybody thought it was great to write 5 answers of 20 marks each for a paper of 100 marks and you had to memorize as much as you could.

The reason why these multiple choice tests started coming up was because first computers had these multiple choice standardized tests fed into them and then the government thought that it would be great. So I am just trying to bring the fact forward that technology has been influencing change. Technology has been influencing innovation and it is just not possible for a country like India to wait until the mindset of the government has been changed and we are in a state of readiness to accept not just the hardware but be transformed ecosystem processes or the human ware.

So I don’t think that is going to work and it is a process of evolution but we see a whole lot of new indigenous dynamism that is coming up and it is only a matter of recording them and I am sure a lot of organizations that work at the grass roots level already just-so stories but they are there and you cannot take it away from the process of evolution.

Phones Are a Real Alternative to Computers

wayan — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:08:48 +0000

“Could it be that mobile phones offer developing country governments a better learning tool and more educational benefits that computers?”

Wayan’s question here is provocatively phrased. Of course this is not a binary issue: The question is not either/or, as both technologies will be increasingly integral to the delivery of educational services going forward. That said, the almost single-minded focus of most educational policymakers on the ‘computer’ as the preeminent ICT device to be used in schools going forward is short-sighted, so I’ll take the bait for the sake of debate.

The momentum behind the proliferation of mobile devices appears inexorable for the near future. Throughout much of the developing world, when we speak of an low-cost ICT device used by the masses, we are speaking about phones, not computers. In India, there were 15.4 million new phone subscribers in the month of January alone! There is perhaps no more mass-scale undertaking in the world than organized education (with the possible exception of organized religion), and it is difficult to see how the mass adoption of mobile technologies will not intersect with educational practices in key ways.

That said, there are currently five great limitations to the use of mobile phones in education when compared with computers. Quickly, they are:

small screen;
limited battery life;
difficulties with input;
the ‘distraction issue’; and
a failure of imagination (or phrased differently: we haven’t use them in the past, so we don’t yet have workable models to guide us).

Computers do certain things quite well. If we evaluate the potential use of the mobile phone in education only in the comparison to what a computer can do, we are greatly limiting our vision. How about we switch this around, and ask what the phone can do that the computer can’t?

The Phone is Personal

There is nothing ‘personal’ about a personal computer in schools in most developing countries. These are shared use devices. The phone is, for most people, an intensely personal device — in some places, it is the first thing a person reaches for when she wakes up, the last thing she touches before she nods off to sleep, and it is with her throughout her waking hours.

The Phone is Always On

As a tool for just-in-time, connected learning, the phone would appear to have important advantages over the computer, merely given the fact that it is always there, and always on. The success of the iTunes app store is demonstrating that there are great opportunities to exploit the fact that people are walking around with an increasingly sophisticated computer in their pocket that we are choosing to call a ‘phone’ for historical reasons to offer other types of software and learning applications that are not feasible to offer on a PC.

It is perhaps interesting to note that, while there are mass programs by governments around the world to promote computer use among citizens, there are no similar programs to promote mobile phone use, with the exception of Venezuela — these simply do not appear to be necessary.

The Phone is Proliferating

While mobile devices will no doubt play an integral role in education practices in some places in the near future, we remain a few steps removed from mass adoption, even in affluent, education-obsessed, technology-saturated societies like Korea and Japan. That said, while experimentation has been going on exploring the potential utility of the use of phones in the education sector for quite awhile, it is only a matter of time before we reach a tipping point that could lead to quick, wide-scale utilization in many places.

The Phone is Not the Only Solution

Let’s be clear: Whatever our educational objective, what we are interested in is the right tool for the right purpose. Whether it’s a laptop, a mobile device of some sort, radio, or even (gasp) a printed book, whatever technology we chose to use should be commensurate to the goal at hand. The increasing availability of mobile ICT devices like phones in the hands of teachers and learners will not make the PC go away, but it does present educators with a great opportunity.

By focusing almost exclusively on only the personal computer or laptop when evaluating technology options to aid a wide variety of educational activities, ignoring the potential utility of the mobile phone (“the PC in our pocket”), policymakers in many places are in a sense driving forward while looking in the rear view mirror.

Summary: ICT’s Can be a Good Educational Investment

wayan — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:33:29 +0000

At the beginning of this month, we initiated a discussion around ICTs in education with the open question:

Are ICTs the best investment for scarce educational funding, or should investments be made first in the familiar tools and methodologies that are already being used?

In the lively debate that followed, we’ve had a number of key points put forward, as much by Tim Kelly and Wayan Vota, the designated discussants, as the varied commenters replying to each post and each other. From this conversation, I’ve distilled four key points that I feel can be at least a partial answer to the original question.

ICT is One Good Educational Investment

While too many people sound like they believe that ICT is a magical solution – a silver bullet that will solve all the major problems in education – I found Clayton R Wright’s comment to best express the feeling of all the participants in this discussion:

ICT is one of several key investments. It should not be ignored, nor should it receive the bulk of educational funding. It is unlikely that there will be enough funding to hire and train all the teachers that are needed, to provide every child with healthy meals on a daily basis, to provide clean drinking water, to construct latrines, to build schools, and to provide adequate telecommunication and electrical infrastructure. Yet, some funding should be set aside for technology for a variety of reasons.

Fund ICT Tools for Teachers First

There was general agreement that if and when schools invest in ICT, invest in teachers first – teachers are the leaders in the educational experience, along with parents, and should have a command of any tool the child uses to learn with. In addition, Anthony Makumbi noted that teachers are also protectors of children:

I think its only right for the teacher to know about the technology and what it can do before the student . The reasons for this go beyond just using the technology but to also understanding the risks associated with the technology.

Children Must be a Focus

Yet Kozuch pointed out that the heartwarming vision of a child with a computer has a greater ability to draw support and generate excitement:

I think you mostly hit a nail on its head with the “teachers first” approach. However, the very opposite approach, especially when it gets overhyped (e.g. XO-1) appears to be able to generate a lot of positive press, which might be a foundation for some serious “teachers first” action or campaign. If there was no OLPC, would this site exist?

In fact, Kozuch is partially right. ETD does owe an aspect of its existence to the hype and excitement created by One Laptop Per Child. But Tim Kelly’s technology retrospective, demonstrates that technology doesn’t need to be one a one-to-one basis with students.

ICT is More Than Just Computers

Technology doesn’t need to be constrained to computers or the Internet either. Tim Kelly remembered TV, and John Daly quickly and often pointed out that ICT encompasses many types of information and communication technology:

I bet that the first ICT investment that most school principals would make would be a telephone, and that that telephone would go in the school office for common use. If the school system provided good educational broadcasting, I would think a radio would be a great investment, to be used by students during classroom hours and teachers before and after school.

Our Measurement Tools Are Lacking

Regardless of these points, I feel we still have a major barrier to fully answering our original question: Are ICTs the best educational investment?

When Tim Kelly suggested that Korea is an example of where ICT in education has a proven track record of success, Ed Gable challenged him on that conclusion:

Without slightly rigorous test showing causality, we’re really not sure whether the improvement of students in Korea is the result of increased use of ICT, enhanced teacher development or some other factor.

This gets back to a basic issue: how can we measure the value of educational investment in ICTs? There are so many variables, so much qualitative, vs. quantitative results, and educational systems themselves are still wrestling with measurements and evaluations of their work – even when ICTs are not present.

Memories of ICTs long ago …

Tim_Kelly — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:36:52 +0000

Thanks for the great comments, both on my post and on the general topic of priorities in educational investment.

John Daly’s post about the value of “traditional” ICTs (e.g., TV, radio etc) in capturing the attention of kids reminded me of my own experiences as a child. I don’t remember very much about elementary school, but I certainly do recall the two occasions when the whole school was assembled in front of a black and while television. The first occasion — for the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales — was a bit of a bore, but relatively few of us had TVs at home at that stage, so the TV itself was more important than what was happening on screen. But the second occasion — Apollo 11 landing on the moon — is what I still recall, almost 40 years later. It left a big impact, and I’m certainly in agreement that traditional as well as newfangled ICTs have a continuing educational role to play.

Wayan Vota, in his post “If and when schools invest, teachers first“, makes the incontrovertible point that teachers should come first in any educational investment strategy. Rather disappointingly (as this website is supposed to encourage debate) I can’t really find anything to argue with on that point. I fully agree that teachers should be in the foreground of any discussion of priorities over the limited resources available for investment, though not at the cost of depriving students the chance to engage with computers directly. If we treat computers in schools the same way that my old elementary school treated the TV, something to be watched from afar in awe, then we won’t have progressed very far.

Ed Gaible asks me to justify my rather trite attempt to link the success of the Republic in Korea in being the “most improved” country in the OECD’s PISA ranking of educational attainment with its #1 score in ICT performance, as rated by the ITU/UNESCO Digital Opportunity Index. I fully agree that the link is rather tenuous, but I would argue that Korea’s ICT success, especially as a pioneer in broadband, is one of the factors that has made a difference in its educational scores. Korean families place a high emphasis on the value of education and, according to some estimates, spend on average around one-third of the family budget on educational expenses. Starting around 2000, Korean families started to get broadband at home, and online homework was one of the early “killer applications”. The quality of computers and networking in schools also improved immensely aroudn the same date. It would be hard to prove a direct link between the improved broadband access and higher educational attainment, but the timing of the two processes is surely more than a co-incidence.

Perhaps, as a future topic, we could tackle the question of how exactly the value of educational investment in ICTs can be evaluated? Any takers for this topic?

Not Quite the Best Investment, but Pretty Good

Tim_Kelly — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:25:53 +0000

It would be churlish to claim that ICTs are the best educational investment. After all, take away the teachers and the schools and there is not a lot left. On the other hand, taking away the ICTs would only take a school back a few decades, but it would keep functioning.

Nevertheless, ICTs represent a pretty good investment, and one that would rank pretty high in the pecking order once the basic requirements of a school or university are met. Consider the following:

One of the primary tasks of an educational system is to equip its students for later life, and to assist them in responding effectively to job opportunities. Many of today’s students will work in an office environment and many of them will be spending eight or so hours a day in front of a computer screen. They may not necessarily be using the same programmes or the same applications that they learned in school, but many of the ancillary skills they pick up — typing, using a filing system, email, creating visual presentations etc — will be the same. In the same way that one would not design a cookery school without stoves and ovens, so one would not design a school to prepare students for living in the information society without computers.
A further task of the educational system is to prepare students for lifelong learning and to help instill the skills of finding information, and then analysing, digesting and repurposing it. Those tasks are all possible without computers, but so much easier with them.
In order to instil these talents in students, the teachers must first capture their attention and their imagination. It is much easier to do that with technology than with textbooks or with chalk and talk. Many students these days will already have a computer at home and they will be easier to reach through the medium they associate with fun.
Finally, consider the alternative … The cost of a computer is equivalent to providing a class with a couple of books each. But, providing the computer is linked to the internet, the students and their teacher will then have access to the boundless library of the worldwide web, which is constantly updated and which contains a hugely diverse range of views and experiences. By contrast, their textbooks inevitably provide a pre-digested view of the world, and one that is out of date the day it is printed.

Available evidence on the benefits of ICTs in school is sometimes mixed and hard to interpret, because the benefits of a good education are only observed years later. But the “Programme for International Student Assessment“, housed by the OECD, is generally acknowledged as the most rigorous monitoring and evaluation programme. The latest survey (2006) shows that fastest gains in reading standards of any country observable in the Republic of Korea, where students improved their reading standards by 31 points — equivalent to a whole year’s worth of teaching — between 200 and 2006. Not coincidentally, Korea also scored top in the ITU’s Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) for 2006, the most respected measure of an economy’s ICT performance.

It is important to conclude with a note of balance: no one is suggesting to throw away the textbooks. Furthermore, ICTs alone are pretty useless without well-trained teachers to exploit them, technicians to maintain them, and schools to house them. But, as part of a balanced educational budget, ICTs have an important and growing role to play in preparing students for the challenges of tomorrow. ICTs are not quite the best educational investment, but they are pretty good.