(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.

1. The history of electronic technologies in schools is fraught with failures.
2. 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.
3. Technology has a huge opportunity cost in the form of more effective non-technology interventions.
4. 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:

1. that technology doesn’t cure all educational ills or
2. 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.

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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In many ways the OLPC project in Paraguay is radically different to Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal which I described in-depth last week and Peru’s Una laptop por niño which I’ll dive into next week.

As already indicated in the introduction of this article series in terms of scale it’s significantly smaller than the efforts in Uruguay and Peru. Whereas these countries have so far distributed 400,000 and 300,000 XOs respectively – and are already in the process of ordering more laptops – Paraguay currently has approximately 4,000 children with XOs. With an additional 5,000 pupils receiving XOs over the coming months the total reach of the project will increase to 9,000 which means that every child enrolled in primary school in the city of Caacupé, the project’s main site, will have received a laptop.

Another major distinction between Paraguay and the other two countries is that an NGO rather than the government is the main driver of the OLPC project. These two different approaches can be found both in the particular context of OLPC as well as ICT for Education projects in general. There’s no doubt that these different starting points often have significant impacts on projects’ approaches, goals, an developments. Some of these differences will be discussed when we explore the six criteria this series is loosely based around later in this article.

In any case, Paraguay’s OLPC project was initiated by ParaguayEduca, an NGO that was started in 2007 out of a group of people’s desire to bring One Laptop per Child to their country. The organization’s main objective is:

“To promote a system of teaching that utilizes ICT as a tool oriented towards collaborative learning which is centered on pupils and integrates the different educational stakeholders found both inside as well as outside the classroom.”

The first step to achieve these goals was the start of a pilot project with 200 XOs in 2008. As mentioned above the program has since been expanded to 4,000 pupils and is scheduled to achieve full saturation in the city it works in over the coming months.

On a personal note it’s worth mentioning that already well before I went to Paraguay I heard a lot about the efforts there and was very intrigued by what seemed to be a very well run project. The reason I heard so much about the project was that during the three months I volunteered with OLE Nepal in Kathmandu in 2009 I shared an apartment with long-term OLPC contributor and volunteer Daniel Drake. Daniel was and is one of the most experienced people when it comes to OLPC implementations given that he has supported in-country teams in many different places around the world: Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Nepal, Nigeria, Peru, Argentina, and of course also Paraguay.

Combined with the information I got from other people who worked in Paraguay and who I met at conferences in Austria and on the U.S. Virgin Islands my expectations were certainly high when I arrived in Paraguay’s capital Asunción in late July 2010.

Just like with my earlier article about Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal I’ll again be using the previously introduced six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries as a guidance for this report.

1. Infrastructure

Similarly to Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal, ParaguayEduca spent a lot of time and resources in the past two years on getting the underlying technical and logistical infrastructure for its project right.

All of the schools which have received XO laptops to date are connected to the country’s electricity grid so there was no need to use alternative power solutions. However the classrooms themselves generally only provide a handful of power outlets so multiple power strips have to be used to enable all the XOs to be charged simultaneously.

WiMAX antenna at a school

When it comes to connectivity ParaguayEduca is cooperating with Personal, one of the largest telecommunications providers in Paraguay, to connect all of the schools where it distributes XOs to the Internet. Since the schools are in or close to the city of Caacupé a wireless WiMAX backbone was installed which connects them to a central 14MBit Internet connection that is shared between all the schools.

On top of that Personal is supporting ParaguayEduca’s efforts by providing this connectivity for free for the first two years after which it’s likely that the schools themselves will have to pay for the connection. Additionally ParaguayEduca has installed a server at every school which so far is mainly used as a storage medium for automated backups of the XOs and as a content repository but could take on additional tasks in the future.

To tie these efforts together and enable monitoring of the network components’ operation, keep track of XOs undergoing repairs and its stock of spare parts as well as other operations related to logistics ParaguayEduca developed its own backend software solution called Inventario which it has released as open-source software. Apart from simplifying as well as facilitating many processes the data the system collects also provides a basis for analysis of factors such as common hardware and software issues or the reliability of different WiFi equipment.

Last but not least ParaguayEduca has also built up significant capabilities when it comes to improving the Sugar software that’s running on OLPC’s XO laptops. Unlike some other OLPC projects the Paraguayan software team has gone beyond just fixing bugs and adapting the software to local requirements. Based on work done by other Sugar developers and partially in collaboration with Uruguayan developers from Plan Ceibal, ParaguayEduca’s team has enhanced Sugar by adding several new features related to accessibility, data backup, 3G connectivity, and system monitoring, releasing them as Sugar 0.88 Dextrose.

There’s no doubt that ParaguayEduca’s team has done an excellent job of establishing the required infrastructure for implementing a successful and potentially large-scale ICT4E project. At the same time it’s great to see them sharing their software and knowledge and collaborating with Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal which enables the wider OLPC community to benefit from their efforts.

2. Maintenance

Repair team’s DIY charger for multiple XOs

To address the challenges related to maintenance ParaguayEduca has built up CATS (Centro de Asistencia Técnica y Soporte – Center for Technical Assistance and Support), a small repair team based in Caacupé. As of July 2010 the team consisted of one full-time employee, a half-time employee and several interns.

Currently the repair team visits each of the 10 schools which have received laptops so far on a weekly basis. Laptops with minor issues are repaired on the spot while the remaining ones are taken back to the repair team’s office. Before any repairs are undertaken a laptop’s issues are entered into the Inventario system mentioned earlier which enables both ParaguayEduca’s team in Asunción as well as the CATS team itself to accurately track which kind of issues are regularly encountered in the field.

Not surprisingly the issues encountered in Paraguay are relatively similar to the ones being observed in Uruguay. Software and problems with the activation system are the most common issues that the repair team has to deal with. In terms of the hardware broken chargers, displays, and keyboards are at the top of Inventario’s “failure by cause” chart.

When it comes to the hardware failures efforts are currently underway at OLPC to redesign the chargers that XOs are shipped with in order to address the issues encountered with them. Similarly the next batch of 5,000 XOs should have significantly less keyboard issues due to the fact that upon receiving reports from Uruguay of them regularly being broken OLPC increased the thickness of the keyboard’s membrane to make it more robust

One important difference is that unlike in Uruguay where a warranty covers some types of breakages in Paraguay spare parts needed for repairs currently have to be paid for by the pupils’ parents who often can’t afford the cost. In combination with difficulties PraguayEduca encountered when purchasing spare parts this has led to a number of cases where broken XOs simply haven’t been repaired. Obviously this is less of an issue with chargers which can be borrowed from other people but leads to an unusable laptop when the display is concerned. As a result an estimated 20% of the pupils are currently without a working XO which results in laptop-based classroom activities being more difficult for teachers.

Poster on “How I take care of my XO”

Overall maintenance is proving to be an area which creates significant challenges for the OLPC deployment in Paraguay. The current approach with having the repair team based in the same city where the pilot project is taking place definitely has a lot of advantages. The regular visits by the repair team combined with the intensive in-classroom support provided by ParaguayEduca (more on that under “teacher training”) significantly lowers the barrier to entry to the maintenance and repair process. This results in basically all breakages being reported and subsequently addressed within a week which is a stark contrast to Uruguay where up to two thirds of XO breakages seem to be going unreported.

Now the question is just how scalable the current process will turn out to be once the next 5,000 XOs are delivered. Given that some of the schools involved in that upcoming stage are further away from Caacupé it will be interesting to see whether the repair team’s weekly-visit schedule can be kept going or if the frequency of these visits will decrease. Similarly ParaguayEduca needs to find ways to ensure the availability of a steady stock of spare parts to enable the repair team to repair hardware breakages. Last but not least the organization needs to come up with ways to allow children of families who can’t afford expensive spare parts to still be able to use fully functioning XO laptops in class. Whether this can be best achieved via subsidized repairs, external sponsoring for spare parts, making short-term loans of XOs available or a different measure remains to be seen.

Similarly to my thoughts about maintenance in Uruguay I believe that the issues described above can and will be adequately addressed by ParaguayEduca over the coming months. However it again shows that even with seemingly robust devices such as the XO laptop maintenance must be a key consideration for any ICT4E project.

3. Contents and materials

Teacher blogging about her pupils’ work

Given its strong focus on constructionist learning ParaguayEduca education team is working hard on developing ways in which teachers can effectively leverage the various Activities and capabilities of the XO and the Sugar software platform. Therefore the educational content they provide teachers with is guidance on how to use the laptops within the school context rather than developing new digital learning objects such as games or other interactive media.

A lot of the education efforts revolve around the use of Scratch, a powerful and versatile programming environment specifically developed for use in education. Examples of the use of Scratch in Caacupé range from simple animations over interactive story-books to extensive games with multiple levels and the integration of environmental sensors. Extensive support for this approach has been given to ParguayEduca by Claudia Urrea who works for OLPC’s education team.

Additionally teachers are also encouraged to use the photo capabilities of the XO as well as other standard Activities such as the Web browser or text processor. This has resulted in a broad range of interesting projects developed by individual teachers. One that I particularly liked was based around homework where pupils were asked to take a photo of a tree at home or on their way to school. The resulting photos were then compared and the trees individual parts subsequently labeled by the pupils.

In the future I also expect to see more use of Sugar Turtle Blocks Activity (which is similar to Logo) given that Walter Bender of Sugar Labs and OLPC led a workshops about its use in Paraguay in June which sparked the education team’s interest. Similarly the education team also expressed an interest in learning more about eToys, another powerful media authoring and programming tool.

Pointing teachers to OLPC Peru materials

Similar to Plan Ceibal and other OLPC projects ParaguayEduca has also established an online library where it shares content and materials ranging from handbooks on how to use certain Activities over works of literature to a broad selection of audio, images, and videos. Given that all the project schools have Internet access this portal is a valuable resource to both teachers and pupils.

Additionally teachers in Caacupé are also encouraged to look at and use materials created by the OLPC projects in Peru and Uruguay therefore enabling them to benefit and be inspired from work done by fellow teachers in these countries.

Overall ParaguayEduca’s educational approach is closely aligned with constructionism that OLPC and Sugar Labs are also very strongly associated with. The education team in Asunción has followed this approach all the way through and built up some great capabilities and knowledge about the use of tools like Scratch in education. Combined with what is apparently a relatively constructionist national curriculum this approach and its strong teacher support component (see the “teacher training” section for further information) has a good chance of having a solid impact on how pupils in Caacupé are being taught with the XOs.

4. Community inclusion

Given its history of being started by a small group of engaged individuals it shouldn’t come as a surprise that ParaguayEduca has been working closely with a variety of different groups and communities in Caacupé to ensure broad support for its project. In many ways, particularly when it comes to local administrators, this process has been facilitated by the fact that Caacupé has been the site of a variety of innovative educational programs in the past which results in people being more open and accustomed to new things being tried out in schools.

Thanks to its formadores (see the “teacher training” section for more information), the repair team, and frequent visits by staff from Asunción ParaguayEduca has managed to establish a strong and continued presence in the local community and the education system. Recruiting people from Caacupé who are part of the community rather than relying on outsiders has been a key component in creating a high level of trust between the various stakeholders and the organization.

A meeting with principals and formadores

One example of the resulting collaboration between ParaguayEduca and other local organizations was a joint event that took place during Día Del Niño (Children’s Day). At the event ParaguayEduca wanted to demonstrate its project as well as highlight some of things that pupils and teachers had created on their XOs. So in preparation for Día Del Niño it organized meetings with other organizations to coordinate several activities such as a booth on Caacupé’s main square. It’s thanks to this kind of approach that ParaguayEduca generally seems to be considered a part of the local community rather than an outsider trying to force its own agenda on the schools.

Apart from this type of work in Caacupé, ParaguayEduca has also been working with the computer science faculty at Paraguay’s largest university, Universidad Nacional de Asunción, to teach students how to get involved in contributing to its project. Its efforts in that area range from offering internships – which are also open to students from other countries – to courses for teaching the basics of programming for the XO.

To sum up it’s safe to say that ParaguayEduca has done a great job in reaching out to various stakeholders within the context of its pilot project in Caacupé and that this will prove to be a solid foundation for continued collaboration in the future.

5. Teacher training

Teachers during a training session

One area where ParaguayEduca’s efforts are a class of their own is teacher training which in other projects unfortunately often doesn’t seem to receive the attention it deserves.

An interesting aspect here is that ParaguayEduca’s education team doesn’t train the teachers directly anymore like it did early on. Rather at the end of 2009 the organization decided to hire people who had previously worked as teachers or trainers themselves and in turn trained them to become “formadores” (teacher trainers). These formadores – currently ParaguayEduca employs 15 of them – are subsequently in charge of the training sessions for teachers before XOs are distributed in their respective schools.

While I was in Paraguay a large number of teachers received training sessions in anticipation for the arrival of the next 5,000 XO laptops and so I had a chance to observe some sessions myself. The teacher training always takes place during vacations when Paraguayan teachers generally seem to be expected to attend courses for their continued education. It’s also the only suitable timeframe to accommodate the 150 hours of training sessions that the teachers participate in.

Just to give you a reference: the most extensive teacher training at any OLPC project that I had been aware of before is provided by Open Learning Exchange Nepal and consists of roughly 80 hours of training over 10 days. In other countries teacher training generally seems to hover around the 40 hours mark.

Of course the effectiveness of teacher training doesn’t just depend on its quantity but also its quality. While it’s impossible to thoroughly assess quality from a few short observations the impression I got was definitely a very favorable one. The training sessions I attended generally focused on how to use the laptop for learning related activities, rather than learning how to use a particular program. Too often the opposite is the case which tends to result in teachers not knowing how to integrate new devices into the classroom routine.

Scratch demo on formadora’s laptop

To complement this training the formadores also spend a significant amount of time supporting the teachers in-class once the XOs have been distributed in the schools. The focus there is to help with the integration of the XOs in the teaching process. Additionally it’s no secret that having a helping hand in the classroom makes a lot of difference and facilitates the teaching process.

One simple example is when a pupil runs into an issue – be it a program not starting or the mouse not behaving as expected – a single teacher can normally either interrupt the class to attend to that one pupil or continue the class which results in that pupil falling behind and not being able to participate. In such a scenario a formador being present in the classroom can simply help individual pupils having issues while the teacher continues the normal class.

So overall it’s easy to see that I was thoroughly impressed by the teacher training and support that ParaguayEduca has established. These teacher-centric efforts have really been at the heart of the organization’s work rather than an after-thought as it’s often the case.

Going forward it will be interesting to see how ParaguayEduca can scale the approach to teacher training to potentially include the whole country. In that area the project can definitely benefit from some of the Uruguayan experiences in this context.

6. Evaluation

This is an area which turned out to be significantly harder to investigate than I had anticipated. Before arriving in Asunción I had heard about an evaluation by the Inter-American Development Bank which had also contributed some funding to the first phase of the project in Caacupé. I now found out that this evaluation is still ongoing hence no reports or results are available just yet.

Similarly the Paraguayan alda foundation was involved in early monitoring and evaluation work in 2008 yet again I wasn’t able to obtain a copy of any resulting reports.

A third and still ongoing effort in this area is a PhD thesis by Morgan Ames from Stanford’s Department of Communication. Her work is focused on exploring the educational and social impacts of the OLPC projects in Paraguay and Uruguay on pupils, parents, and teachers. To that end she has conducted more than 130 interviews to date and once completed her thesis is almost bound to become a must-read for people working within the OLPC and larger ICT4E context.

Last but not least and more on a monitoring rather than evaluation level there are also efforts under way to gather data about the usage of the Activities that are available for the XO laptops. This is meant to be a first step to address questions such as which Activities are popular, which ones are used inside and outside school, whether there are differences between how boys and girls use the laptops, etc.

To sum up: There are a variety of evaluations which have taken or are taking place within the context of ParaguayEduca’s project. However the fact that the results of these evaluations don’t seem to be readily accessible – unless I totally missed something – is quite a major let-down in my opinion.

Having said that I feel it is worth mentioning that given its limited resources it’s partially understandable that ParaguayEduca has focused the majority of its energy on building up what I believe to be a solid foundation and infrastructure for its project. Yet it seems necessary for in-depth evaluations to receive significantly more attention in the future, particularly since ParaguayEduca hopes to expand the OLPC project beyond Caacupé which will likely require solid evidence about its impact.

Summary and Outlook

The OLPC project led by ParaguayEduca is without a doubt a very impressive and effective operation. The organization’s focus on getting the infrastructure right in combination with their extensive teacher training and support as well as their knowledge about the effective use of the XOs in the broader learning context makes for a very strong project. In all of these areas other organizations and projects – regardless of whether they’re using OLPC XOs or other devices – can definitely learn a lot from ParaguayEduca’s experiences. Hence it’s great to see them already collaborating and sharing with Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal and the larger OLPC and Sugar communities.

The core question over the next year or two will now be whether the current approaches, processes, and structures can be made to scale efficiently. The upcoming increase from the current 4,000 to a total of 9,000 XOs will likely require some changes in how ParaguayEduca works in areas such as maintenance, ensuring consistent quality of teacher training, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of aspects such as the Internet access. So the organizational challenge will be how to turn what is a relatively small effective project into one that is also efficient on a larger, potentially nation-wide, scale.

Given ParaguayEduca’s track record and status quo I’m convinced that it is in a very good position to run and expand its successful OLPC project over the coming years. Other OLPC and ICT4E initiatives should definitely watch this one closely over the coming months and years!

OLPC in Paraguay is part of an overview of OLPC in South America, a first-hand report of XO laptop deployments in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru by Christoph Derndorfer.

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With more than 800,000 XO laptops having been distributed on the continent so far, South America represent the largest concentration of active OLPC projects in the world.

• Uruguay is the first major country to achieve full 1-to-1 saturation after having finished the distribution of approximately 400,000 XO laptops to every primary school pupil and teacher in late 2009.
• Paraguay currently has 4,000 XOs on the ground and will receive another 5,000 over the coming months
• Peru is close to finishing the process of distributing 300,000 XO laptops and recently purchased another 300,000.

Looking at these figures it quickly becomes obvious that South America is the place to be when it comes to understanding what the true status quo of OLPC on the ground is today. In July and August I was able to spend more than six weeks traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru to get a hands-on impression of how things were going in these three countries. Over the next month, I’ll present my findings as the October Educational Technology Debate.

Background on OLPC in South America Review

Two weeks per country isn’t a whole lot of time but thankfully I could rely on an extensive network of people who helped me in many ways to get a broader and deeper understanding of the situations in their respective countries.

I built this network through the experiences of being involved in the global OLPC community in the past four years:

• I am the editor of OLPC News, the premier independent community of OLPC supporters
• I’ve given numerous talks about OLPC at community gatherings, open-source conferences, universities, and recently presented the OLPC in South America review at The World Bank
• I’ve been coordinating the efforts of the Austrian OLPC pilot project since 2008
• I volunteered for three months with OLE Nepal in Kathmandu in 2009

Being fluent in Spanish and having spent a year living and going to school in Trujillo, Peru also helps when talking to pupils, teachers, principals, regional administrators, national coordinators, students, university professors, independent researchers, community members, and other people involved in the projects.

As the sentence above already indicates a lot of my impressions are based on interviews and talks with a broad variety of people. Additionally I visited schools as well as teacher training sessions in all three countries. One of my core realizations was that although all three countries use OLPC’s XO laptops the respective projects vary significantly when it comes to their goals, the implementing organization, and their current size. As I wrote back in August:

“What has become clear over the past two or three years is that while “one laptop per child” might be the ultimate goal for the majority of the initiatives associated with OLPC, the paths choose and reasons why they’re chosen are often quite different. Hence it’s no longer sufficient to talk about OLPC as opposed to other projects in the information and communication technology for education (ICT4E) space. Yes, the XO might be a common denominator but in almost every other aspect you’ll find different approaches and I for one am excited to see how the various projects pan out over the coming months and years.”

So what I was mainly looking for in my observations is what I’ve come to call the “six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries”. They are based on a literature review as well as hands-on experiences and were compiled by Tanja Kohn, a PhD researcher at University of Innsbruck, and me in early 2010.
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What 40,000 XO laptops look like in a Peruvian wharehouse

6 criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries

1. Infrastructure: ICT4E projects require a significant infrastructure in order to run effectively. This infrastructure need doesn’t just include technical aspects such as the availability of electricity and Internet access but also logistical aspects such as how to efficiently and reliably distribute hundreds of thousands of laptops in some of the remotest regions of the world.

2. Maintenance: Regardless of how robust an ICT device or software solution is there will always be issues with a certain percentage of them. This is especially true in the context of OLPC where the XO laptops are used in environments which are dusty, hot, and humid and the main users are young children. However variations of these challenges will also be encountered by other ICT4E projects in developing nations. As a result processes and solutions need to be developed to address how to repair broken equipment.

3. Contents and materials: One of the core requirements for ICT4E projects are appropriate contents and materials that enable the technology to be used as a tool for learning. Simply scanning in existing books and making them available digitally doesn’t come close to utilizing the full potential of a digital and connected device such as a laptop or mobile phone. Hence interactive learning contents as well as materials such as digital multimedia libraries need to be developed according to the particular needs of a project.

4. Community inclusion: One component that often seems to be underestimated in ICT4E projects is the importance of community inclusion and the buy-in from key stakeholders such as teachers, parents, principals and administrators. This is key requirement for enabling long-term sustainability of projects and adequate support from all sides.

5. Teacher training: Using a new tool and approach is always hard, particularly when we’re talking about something as complex as learning and education. Hence it’s vital that teachers receive adequate training on how to efficiently and effectively use ICT tools such as laptops within the school context. Training people is both very resource-intensive and complex, yet without it ICT4E projects are very likely to fail.

6. Evaluation: Last but not least evaluation of the impacts an ICT4E project has on learning as well as the broader society is a key criterion. Unfortunately in many cases the main difficulty is a lack of appropriate baseline data that a project’s impact can be evaluated against. Additionally evaluation is often an afterthought that only receives attention once a project has been started which means it’s often too late to gather aforementioned baseline data. Ideally evaluation is part of very early project stages as well as a continually used toolset to refine and improve a project.

I’ll leave it at this for now and look forward to reading your comments, thoughts, and questions on this initial post and the forthcoming OLPC in South America articles. Over the coming weeks, I will provide in-depth looks at the projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru, and put them in context to other OLPC deployments worldwide.

We’re also focusing on OLPC in South America this month on OLPC News. Be sure to join in that conversation as well.

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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.

1. provides a global network of quality, free and open k-12 courseware,
2. enables teachers everywhere to use innovative approaches to learning and
3. employs suitable and effective information and communications technologies.

These three legs must be balanced and closely linked to achieve a quality and universal basic education.

The growing impact of free and open educational resources

Content is king. Yet today high quality k-12 courseware that is aligned with educational standards, as distinct from interesting bits and pieces of content, is rare. Over the next few years, spurred by the Internet and Creative Commons licensing, high quality, free and open courseware will become increasingly available to schools in the developing world. Such resources are readily adaptable to local conditions and are inexpensive to produce and distribute. The evaluative feedback that authors receive from users enables these resources to be improved continuously.

Intellectual property. We can expect educators increasingly to use the Creative Commons, “for attribution, non-commercial” license for the basic educational resources they develop. Most are not in it for the money. Thus it will be difficult for commercially produced educational materials employing digital rights management systems to compete with open source content. As a result for-profit publishers of basic educational resources will perforce modify their business models.

Global Library Network. To facilitate the availability of free high quality content, the Open Learning Exchange is developing a federated network of national libraries comprising free and open k-12 content, including online interactive, offline interactive and paper-based materials. Emphasis is being given to contextualized and printable courseware packages complete with lesson plan, textbook and work book that teachers can download and use “as is” in their classrooms.

The potential educational roles for eBooks and other ICT devices in the developing world.

Technology is powerful. And it can be seductive. Some have assumed that quality content and well-prepared teachers, to the extent they are needed, will somehow follow the introduction of laptops in classrooms. However learning is not automatically enhanced by the distribution of cool technologies. Although they can have important roles in improving education, it is naive to believe that by themselves technologies will change education.

eBooks have a limited role. eBooks can deliver information. However more interactive tools are far more effective in helping learners develop the skills they need to manage information, physical objects and interpersonal relationships. Tools that support the key learning principles of immediate positive and negative feedback, mental and physical manipulation, standards-based practice, curiosity and creativity provide learners with the crucial experiences of agency and competence. Interactive content can be highly effective not only for developing the basic skills of reading, writing, speaking languages and performing basic arithmetic calculations but also for stimulating a positive framework about learning that lasts a lifetime.

We’re not quite there yet. Today’s eBooks, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader are essentially one-way delivery systems. Low cost cell phones have many interactive features and they are rapidly becoming ubiquitous throughout the world. But so far they lack effective learning materials. PDA’s, while more expensive, are even better suited for learning basic educational skills. Laptops are dropping in price but are still too expensive. And in those places where laptops have been employed extensively, such as the state of Maine, their results have not lived up to initial hopes.

Content for cell phones and PDA’s. We should focus on developing high quality courseware for cell phones and low-cost PDA’s, especially for the earlier levels of learning. They are widely available and inexpensive compared with other devices. Other tools specifically designed learning skills are continually under development. The TeacherMate, developed by Innovations for Learning is one such example; designed like a handheld game console it meets the basic learning requirements for early elementary levels, including its moderately low cost.

The Total Cost. Even as hardware costs decline, however, the costs for technical support, and maintenance will continue to be significant. All things considered, scaling ICT devices for all students remains outside the current financial capacity of most developing countries. The situation is only compounded by a serious shortfall in both high quality content and well-prepared teachers. While it is tempting to use technology to create a few centers of educational excellence, that does not satisfy the vital need to reach every child.

Paper-based content. It follows that, for now, strategies for achieving universal Quality Basic Education must not focus primarily upon ICT’s in the classroom, as attractive as that approach may be. It will be years before ICTs in the hands of every teacher, let alone every child will be affordable. Technologies can, however, be used now to provide teachers and students high quality paper-based lesson plans, textbooks and workbooks at low cost. The Siyavula Project of the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa has created an impressive such system for the development, localization and distribution of its printable free and open k-12 courseware. Such an approach is scalable.

An Important Demonstration

Notwithstanding the obvious problems involved we have much to learn about how best to employ ICT’s in schools. The Open Learning Exchange of Nepal (OLE Nepal) provides an excellent model for exploring the introduction of ICT’s in a developing country. The OLE Nepal team is now in its second stage of a carefully designed program involving student-owned laptops. Four thousand students in six widely dispersed rural districts of Nepal are using student-owned XO laptops with interactive content developed in Nepal.

OLE Nepal is documenting their process of creating interactive content, done in collaboration with the Nepal’s national Curriculum Development Center, and their extensive preparation of teachers and villagers. Both formative and summative assessments are providing evidence of the strengths and weaknesses of their approach. Initial indications are that students, teachers and villagers, including those in neighboring villages, are enthusiastic about the laptops and are asking for more content. We have yet to see how this approach can be scaled to the millions of students in Nepal.

Summary

I envision a world where virtually everyone has access to a quality basic education that is aligned with their capabilities and interests. That was a distant dream a decade ago. Today high quality, free and open digital and paper-based learning resources are spreading rapidly throughout the world. A plethora of ICT innovations for learning is becoming available and affordable. Teachers, principals and education leaders are improving their skills.

Our biggest challenge is to align and balance the three key components of change – content, technology and people. When that is done, the UN’s Second Millennium Development Goal and Quality Basic Education for all will become much more than a dream. While achieving that goal will still be an enormous and complex challenge, we will then be on a path that will make it possible.