Calls are frequently heard for improving schooling by closing the gap between children’s life out-of-school and traditional learning styles, and by broadening the space and span for life-long learning opportunities. The Math4Mobile development endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas. It provides a collection of tools that could be included in a variety of activities to support students’ mathematical skills, conceptual understanding, and creative mathematical thinking.

Computerized tools have been shown to provide important support for achieving these goals. Three decades of using technology in mathematics education provide clear evidence that the tools designed to support a well-defined educational agenda were the most successful ones. In general, technology achieves its most important gains in settings in which it is available for long periods of time, and when it is designed to be incorporated regularly into the learning process. I suspect that an important reason for the slow pace of change in this area is that ubiquitous, long-term access to technology is yet to be achieved in most learning environments.

Given the high rate of increase in the number of mobile phone owners worldwide, the computational capability of most phones, and the widely available communication infrastructure, we have been looking for ways to turn the available and relatively cheap personal mobile technology into a relevant learning tool in and out of school.

Meeting the challenges of computation, communication, and usability

Understanding the computing potential: The Math4Mobile project has been developed based on VisualMath, which was found to be a successful technology-based curriculum for changing the ways students learn geometry, function-based school algebra, and calculus. The Math4Mobile project started as yet another cycle of development of already existing WEB tools, but working under the constraints of the new hardware and enablers has led us to ideas and challenges beyond hardware-related problems. To support cognitive empowerment for the learning of mathematical content, our first challenge was to plan a variety of well-recognized useful applications. Design decisions were to focus on:

1. Applications that have already been recognized as successful in using technology for learning: Graph2Go, a graphing calculator that serves a wide range of users at different levels and in various fields of learning; Quad2Go, a dynamic geometry environment that allows constructing and analyzing while dynamically changing the various available quadrilaterals, mostly supporting primary school geometry.
2. Applications that could be useful in motivating learning out of the classroom: Sketch2Go and Fit2Go, which support recording and mathematically analyzing temporal processes that students might face in a task out of class.
3. Design applications supporting scientific inquiry; all applications designed to include embedded feedback in a variety of representations, to encourage observation of multiple examples, and at the same time to support the development of mathematical skills through intensive practice (for example, Solve2Go).
4. Applications that first and foremost can be easily operated “on the go,” with a numeric keypad being the only necessary requirement, although navigation keys can also be used. Because typing mathematical signs and expressions can be extremely tedious, our design strategy is to provide ready to work but easy to alter mathematical objects such as expression or equation clusters, iconic graphs, geometric shapes, etc.
5. Applications that are appropriate to use by children and that comply with hardware, resources, and infrastructure constrains. Our intention is to develop for everyone, closing rather than widening the social gaps in the process. Thus, we plan for minimal air time and the lowest possible end, and for widely used hardware that does not require compromising on essential learning goals. We chose J2ME as the development language because it supports the visual mathematical representations assumed to be essential for conceptual learning and design that works for users of small screens.

Understanding the communication potential: According to social-cultural theories of learning, collaborative thinking is an essential component of scientific inquiry. Whereas the social studies and humanities are better known for providing opportunities for sharing, mathematics is assumed to be practiced and developed individually. The choice of mobile phones provides an opportunity to create incentives for collaboration that are authentic learning processes for a community of math learners at all levels. We examine designs of three types of communication:

1. Each Math4Mobile application includes Phone 2 Phone collaboration via SMS center. Students can use it to share their work, post it to receive critical comments from their peers, analyze and propose improvements of others’ work, and submit their work to the teacher.
2. We identified two challenges for our future development work: multi-user communication, where users can share their work interactively, and communication between phones and computers. Advancing in this direction, we developed the Click2Go Classroom Interaction System, currently piloted in schools. Click2Go allows students to use the local communication infrastructure to respond to teachers’ prompts and present the collated students’ responses to promote whole-group discussion.
3. Another channel of communication, the Augmented Textbook, works with the Math4Mobile application to augment paper textbooks with mobile applications that include interactive diagrams, a counterpart to printed diagrams.

Understanding the Usability Potential: Pilot experiments involving teachers in schools and pre-service teachers were part of our development work. In each experiment we designed activities relevant to the curricular agenda. The learning was recorded and analyzed, and usually the results showed the direction of required improvements of the application. After analyzing the learning and teaching opportunities, we design scenarios that can be relevant to the following pedagogical and technological variables:

• Space: activity suited for use in class, in and around school, or anywhere
• Size: to be used by an individual student, in collaboration in a small group, in the course of a whole-class discussion
• Learning mode: exploring, practicing skills, or solving problems
• Teacher’s role: teachers could use the tools and the activity to deliver instruction, moderate group collaboration, assess individual performance, or observe student activities out of the classroom
• Means of use: online, offline, asynchronous, synchronous
• Infrastructure media components available (ubiquity): the ideal setting for the activity also includes, in addition to the personal mobile phone, a “smart board,” a website, a desktop application, and an augmented textbook
• Phone resources: camera, calculator, stop watch, dedicated applications

Educational impact: Patterns, scalability, and sustainability

Since 2008/2009, downloads range from hundreds to thousands monthly, the more frequently downloaded being Graph2Go and Solve2Go. Most applications can be downloaded from the site free of charge. There are many options to download the applications from a variety of sites that adopted them as favorite educational resources. The applications also spread virally. We therefore assume that the above figures are only partial.

The geographic breadth spans the globe and includes India with thousands of downloads yearly, and African countries (Cote D’Ivoire, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique), South American countries (Argentina, Mexico), and Asian countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines) with hundreds of downloads a year. Clearly, the development is attractive, sought after, and useful in rural locations and in less developed communities.

Users: We suspect that the applications are being used by students in a wide range of ages and settings. We learn from teachers around the globe who occasionally write to us about their use of the applications in their schools, from teachers’ centers using the applications for professional development at teachers’ workshops, from secondary and higher education students reporting and asking for further improvements, and from resources being created for Math4Mobile independently by users.

Development challenges

The lack of standards has been a major difficulty. Several years ago Symbian and J2ME were supported by the majority of mobile phones. This is not the case anymore, and since 2010 the market share of Android and iPhone systems keeps growing. This continuing fragmentation is a major obstacle for the scalability and sustainability of the development. It requires constant investment in parallel development (different languages and mathematical packages) for a variety of systems and hardware, that have different capabilities even when operating under similar system. It also requires software verifications and quality assurance that are not easy to do in educational environments.

Developing high-quality applications is relatively expensive. Math4Mobile, an innovative experiment, has been developed in an academic R&D center by faculty and students. To scale it up, it requires economical models that would support free personal use and also provide sustained support for further development and implementation.

Designing human-computer interfaces that take into account the yet unknown health effects of extensive use of mobiles by children. For example, current design is aimed at maximizing offline use.

Investing in a variety of application types such as games and location-based applications that have been shown to be important for learning.

Pedagogical challenges

At present, educational systems own the hardware and software required for learning. Mobile personal phones are a different ball park, in which the centralized models do not seem to work well.

Taking into account the new meaning of students working with their own personal tool is a challenge. A major threat to teachers is the misuse of the communication tools during school time. Another threat is use of applications that students upload to their mobiles (or of resources such as video clips) that interrupt class work. Yet another popular use that can be interpreted as misuse of a cell phone in a classroom setting is recording with the camera and mailing paper resources. It requires imagination and creativity to turn these affordances into constructive learning situations. Projects that involve children in the design could be important in establishing new learning norms.

Tools should support teachers in managing the load of students’ personal work. Following the first design experiment, a full archive system was developed for each application. It was required because the traffic of work sent by SMS between students and the teacher was enormous. The development of Click2Go, which collects and organizes personal data on a server that can be accessed by the teacher, is another model for organizing assessment. Further enhancement of ubiquity that would easily make the same applications work with a variety of media is essential.

Math4Mobile provides and updates activities and teaching ideas at its site. We hope to create professional development models using new means that assume the active involvement of such media as blogging, mobile communication, and sharing mLearning scenarios used around the world throughout social networks. We continue developing instructional materials to be used with existing curricular standards and platforms that allow phone users to communicate with colleagues and mentors worldwide, even when they have no access to computers (as we recently prototyped in India with www.mobilegurukul.org).

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From the time of Plato, educators have struggled with the acquisition of knowledge, seeking it to be understood by the learner versus just assimilated as dogma. And since Plato’s time, educational technology – from the written word to the printed book to the chalkboard – has been hailed as the solution to this challenge. Each successive technology had impact, though often not the type or scale that the introducer hoped.

Now we come to the digital age, where electronic information and communication technologies (ICT) are the newest promise to empower learners to understand and interact with society. Radio, TV, and now computers and the Internet are profoundly changing civilization, as we know it. Can they have the same impact on education?

Will investments in ICT create a revolution in education, as The Children’s Machine predicts, where the learner is central and knowledge is created and understood with guidance from fellow learners and adult facilitators? Or is ICT in education really a fools’ errand, yet another fad that will waste resources, create Flickering Minds, and leave educational systems no better than before?

This month’s Educational Technology Debate on ICT investment in schools and education will feature the following five discussants giving their regarded opinion on this issue:

• Kentaro Toyama a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and previously assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India. He was recently featured in the “Can Technology End Poverty?” debate, the impetus for this month’s ETD.
• Claudia Urrea, a visiting research scientist at the MIT – Media Lab. Her PhD thesis focuses on the creation of new learning environments for the digital era and she collaborates with OLPC in the worldwide deployment of revolutionary learning tools to children in the developing world.
• Lowell Monke is assistant professor of Education at Wittenberg University. He researches and writes on the social and psychological impact of high technology on children’s development, including, Breaking Down the Digital Walls.
• Cristobal Cobo is a research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, and a coordinator of a collective project on informal, non-formal and invisible learning as noted in the TEDx talk: Invisible learning: How to learn beyond the school?
• Larry Cuban, a former high school social studies teacher, district superintendent, and university professor. He is also a prodigious author on education and the role of technology, including Oversold and Underused, a critical look at the actual use of computers by teachers and students in education.
• Rob van Son, a linguistics expert with a focus on speech technology and elearning for the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the University of Amsterdam. He was a member of the team that developed the SpeakGoodChinese CALL application, and is a regular contributor to the Educational Technology Debate.

Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation exploring the impact of ICT on educational systems around the world. Your input can start right now in the comments below, and opening remarks will follow shortly.

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EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

Evoke emerged from discussions with universities in Africa who increasingly wanted to find avenues to encourage their students to works with local communities and develop innovative solutions to local development challenges. The universities were searching for ways to engage students in real world problems and to develop capacities for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial action that many believe will be the engine for job creation now and in the future.

Working with leading designers, Evoke was created to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start solving urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, disease, conflict, climate change, sustainable energy, health care, education, and human rights; to collaborate with others globally; and to develop real world ideas to address these challenges.

Players were challenged to complete a series of ten missions and ten quests — one per week, over the course of the ten-week game. The “text book” for this course was an online graphic novel written by Emmy-award nominated producer Kiyash Monsef with the art done by Jacob Glaser.

Set in the year 2020, the story follows the efforts of a mysterious network of Africa’s best problem-solvers. Each week, as players unravel the mystery of the Evoke network, they will form their own innovation networks: brainstorming creative solutions to real-world development challenges, learning more about what it takes to be a successful social innovator, and finding ways to make a difference in the world.

Findings

By the time the EVOKE adventure ended, 19,324 people from over 150 countries registered to play, far exceeding expectations. Players submitted over 23,500 blog posts (about 335 each day), 4,700 photos and over 1,500 videos. The site received over 178,000 unique visitors and 2,345,000 page views with time per visit averaging over eight minutes. For the month of March, EVOKE generated just under 10% of what the World Bank’s entire external website generated with regard to page views (1.1 million versus 12.1 million). In fact, visitors to EVOKE demonstrated substantially higher levels of engagement than those visiting WorldBank.org, Kiva.org, or Unesco.org. Phenomenal numbers.

Over the course of the 10 weeks, players posted ideas, found friends, commented on projects, shared information, rated the quality of the information shared, discussed, argued, created and acted.

Librarians donated time to do research. Someone developed a wiki for the game. Teachers created their own online community within the game. Some players developed an online conference for sharing the best ideas. One player wrote a song about EVOKE. Others planted gardens.

“I got to see things I would not have unless I went out actively searching for them. A lot of knowledge has been imprinted in my mind from some of the activities. Now I can delve deeper into certain topics, talk about them and do something about them, which I couldn’t have before.” — EVOKE player

Based on the evaluation of the program, 60% of sub-Saharan Africans report that the game had a strong effect on “thinking big thoughts about the future” and 60% reported that the game influenced them to “start something new”.

At the end of the game, 74 project ideas (known as ‘evokations’) were submitted and the top 25 projects qualified for a month long on-line challenge with Global Giving resulting in US$30,000 in additional funds raised.

As an innovation and skills development tool, EVOKE has demonstrated enormous potential to create ideas; provide the social capital to move those ideas form concepts to reality; provide skills to execute those ideas; and link innovators to essential partnerships needed to grow those ideas.

As a first foray into serious gaming, we were thrilled with the response, and we look forward to new ways to engage learners to improve their communities around the world.

At first sight the Peruvian OLPC project “Una laptop por niño” is quite similar to Uruguay’ Plan Ceibal. In both cases the projects are national initiatives which are strongly pushed by the respective governments.

In terms of their current size the projects are also comparable: Uruguay has so far distributed approximately 400,000 XOs and is currently adding 100,000 more laptops to its secondary school system. Peru on the other hand has distributed slightly less than 300,000 XOs to date and recently announced its intent to add another 300,000 over the coming year.

This however is where the similarities end. Uruguay’s 400,000 XOs result in full saturation of the country’s public primary school system whereas Peru’s 300,000 only cover a small double-digit percentage of its primary school pupils. This example already demonstrates what I consider to be a key difference between the two countries: the size of the challenge to make “one laptop per child” a reality.

Of course it’s not just the size of the population (Uruguay: 3.5 million, Peru: 29 million) which makes a big difference here. In many ways Peru’s population is also more varied than Uruguay’s as exemplified by the fact that Peru has two official languages: Spanish and the indigenous Quechua.

When it comes to the current state of the education system Peru is also in a different situation than Uruguay. Whereas Uruguay’s literacy rate is 98%, Peru’s is estimated to be between 90% and 92% with rural areas being closer to 80% where children often also don’t have the opportunity to proceed beyond the first few years of primary school.

Last but not least Peru’s geography – being roughly seven times larger than Uruguay and consisting of the desert coast, high Andes mountain ranges, and inaccessible jungle – and the associated difficulties of building and maintaining infrastructure such as roads, an electricity grid or Internet connectivity also present additional challenges to a project such as Una laptop por niño.

It’s within this context that Peru first announced that it was interested in OLPC in 2007. Similarly to Uruguay and Paraguay the first step was a small pilot project with 60 XOs which started in the village of Arahuay in May 2007. What is important to note at this point is that Una laptop por niño was originally specifically targeted at rural multi-grade schools with a single teacher. While this focus has shifted in the recent past I feel it is worth pointing out that within an already difficult environment Peru certainly picked the most challenging target schools one can possibly imagine.

1. Infrastructure

Charger and non-connected network plug

As already indicated in the introduction the setup and subsequent maintenance of any sort of technical or logistical infrastructure faces tough challenges given Peru’s geography.

On the technical side these challenges certainly haven’t been adequately addressed as a recent evaluation by the Inter-American Development Bank found that almost 5% of the schools which have already received XOs don’t even have electricity yet. In terms of Internet access only 1.4% of the schools are connected at the moment. It’s clear that such a situation makes the implementation of a 1-to-1 computing in education project very hard indeed.

The fact that laptops were distributed to schools without electricity points to several underlying issues. The first one is that the Ministry of Education’s data on the infrastructure available at schools doesn’t seem to be up to date and accurate enough. One example is that a school with a single outlet in the principal’s office is officially listed as having electricity yet obviously this isn’t going to be enough to power several dozen laptops.

Secondly it seems like not enough time was spent on planning the implementation of Una laptop por niño. An example in this area is the way Peru handles the activation and anti-theft system on the XO laptops. Uruguay keeps a database of which child owns which specific laptop (identified by its serial number) which allows for laptops to be remotely disabled when they’re reported stolen. Peru’s database however only includes information as to which batches of laptops were sent to which schools. This lack of granular information means that an anti-theft system such as the one used in Uruguay simply can’t be implemented.

Some of these problems might also be explained by how the implementation of Una laptop por niño is organized. Whereas Uruguay, Paraguay, and most other countries have separate entities focusing on their OLPC efforts in Peru it’s only one of several initiatives that the Ministry of Education’s DIGETE (Dirección General de Tecnologías Educativas – Directorate General of Educational Technologies) is tasked with. In combination with a relatively small number of staff this results in seemingly not enough time and resources being available for Una laptop por niño.

Overall it’s quite obvious that the infrastructure within which Peru’s OLPC project is taking place leaves much to be desired. Whether it’s very obvious problems such as the lack of electricity at schools which received XOs or less obvious ones such as the lack of a central database matching pupils to laptops it’s clear that they will negatively impact the project and make things significantly harder.

One of 45,000 solar panels

Many of these issues seem to be the result of planning oversights and while these can undoubtedly be corrected it will require a significant overhaul of the whole strategy as well as the availability of additional resources. A first step into that direction was the purchase of 45,000 solar panels which are currently being distributed to schools without electricity access. While this will certainly improve the situation in many cases it’s still not a perfect solution given that many of the schools are located in regions with extended rainy seasons which will render solar panels useless for extended periods of time.

2. Maintenance

When it comes to maintenance Una laptop por niño is very much relying on existing infrastructure and responsibilities within the education system to deal with XOs that aren’t working.

On the lowest level teachers receive some basic training to deal with issues such as failures of the activation system or other software problems which can be fixed relatively easily. If a problem that can’t be solved at the school itself is encountered, the next level of support is provided by the local UGEL (Unidades de Gestión Educativa Local – Local Education Management Unit). On this level, generally one person who is responsible for all technology-related education projects has received additional training to deal with more complex software issues as well as simple hardware repairs.

The next step up the ladder is the DRE (Direccion Regional de Educacion – Regional Directorate of Education) which provides a stock of spare XOs which can be used as replacement units or as a source for spare parts. Only if none of these entities is able to fix the laptop, is it then sent to a central repair facility in Lima.

Una laptop por niño repair center

While this system might look good on paper it runs into a variety of issues in practice. The first problem is that many teachers don’t have a USB flash drive which allows them to store the data needed to fix simple software issues. Secondly these repairs also seem to overwhelm teachers, many of whom had never used a computer before they received their XO. The fact that the commands required to fix common issues are in English, in combination with the lack of handouts or digital guides, provides another barrier.

As a result many laptops remain unusable once they’re broken as teachers aren’t able to repair them themselves and when their schools are located in remote regions, it might take several weeks or months until they can be handed over to the respective UGEL. Similarly the UGELs and DREs often don’t have the spare parts or extra machines to deal with breakages either, and getting new stock from Lima often takes more than three months.

The overall result of this situation is that broken machines don’t get reported and don’t get replaced, which means that there are pupils who often have to share their XO with someone else rather than having their own laptop. While I’m not aware of any larger evaluation of this situation, my own experiences as well as those of people I talked to indicate that this is indeed a country-wide problem.

In the end Una laptop por niño demonstrates that even a theoretically well planned maintenance system can run into serious issues in practice. The lack of USB flash drives for teachers for example may seem like a neglectable detail at first but it has a significant impact on the whole system.

3. Content and Materials

Using the XO to learn about geometry

When it comes to content and materials Una laptop por niño’s approach is similar to Paraguay as the focus is very much set on how to use the existing Activities on the XOs to teach certain subject material, rather than developing new interactive learning content. Una laptop por niño’s Web site provides about a dozen or so guides which cover how to use the laptops to teach topics such as geometry, writing poems, and dental hygiene.

Additionally DIGETE has also produced several manuals and guides which focus on how to use the XO laptop, what functionalities the various Activities provide, and similar topics.

Other materials which could be very useful for teachers include the “La laptop XO en la aula” (“The XO laptop in the classroom”) manual which was independently written by Sdenka Z. Salas, a teacher in the South of Peru, and contains a lot advice and suggestions on how to use the various Sugar Activities for teaching.

The problem is that neither the teachers – nor the teacher trainer – who I spoke to were aware of the availability of these materials. Since almost none of them have Internet access at school and only very few of them have USB flash drives there is no way for them to access the content and materials that DIGETE and others – such as for example the OLPC projects in Uruguay and Paraguay – create.

Guide for teacher training

In my opinion this issue really exemplifies why ICT4E projects that don’t provide its participants and stakeholders with Internet access are very hard to implement. Of course there are other offline distribution methods such as USB flash drives and printed materials. However in most cases these alternatives require an additional logistics infrastructure and associated resources compared to being able to point people to a Web site and ask them to check it regularly as part of training efforts.

In light of these circumstances Una laptop por niño recently purchased large quantities of USB flash drives – several hundred thousand from what I gather – to distribute to teachers and pupils. These USB flash drives will come preloaded with a selection of educational content, most likely the documents which are currently available on Una laptop por niño’s Web site. This would provide teachers but also pupils and parents with a baseline of materials to build on. At the same time it would enable teachers and administrators to independently exchange materials which they could access in Internet cafés or while they’re visiting local or regional offices.

It’s clear however that until these USB flash drives are distributed, the grand majority of Peruvian teachers simply will not have access to any content and materials that help them integrate the laptops in the teaching process. As a result the overall impact and usefulness of the few resources that are available today is very small.

4. Community involvement

Unlike its counterpart in Uruguay, Una laptop por niño so far hasn’t created a broader community of people and organizations involved with the country’s OLPC efforts. This isn’t necessarily due to a lack of interest by the broader society but rather seems to be the result of a lack of support for people and groups who are independent of the Ministry of Education.

One group that does exist is Sugar Labs Peru which is based in and around the southern city of Puno and consists of several teachers as well as software developers. Sugar Labs Peru is involved in a variety of activities such as creating manuals for teachers on how to use the XO in a classroom and organizing workshops focused around Sugar Activities.

Another effort that is somewhat community related is OLPC’s Intern program in Peru. The program regularly enables mostly North American students to support teachers in schools with XOs over the course of several weeks.

XO bag designed by Peruvian volunteers

Other individuals and groups who had been interested in contributing to Una laptop por niño in various ways were often discouraged by a lack of support from DIGETE. One such example are students from one of Lima’s private universities who were interested in working on thesis and research projects but ended up going into another direction after their repeated requests for information and official support remained without a reply.

Hence it comes as no surprise that overall the number of people outside the traditional education system contributing to Una laptop por niño is relatively small. Given the limited resources available to DIGETE and the need for a broad variety of support measures – and the impact they have in countries such as Uruguay – this is a shame and an example of a missed opportunity. Again, this is an area were improvements are still possible, however it seems that a lot of the initial good will and desire to support the initiative might have been lost already.

5. Teacher training

As mentioned in the introduction as well as the subsequent articles about OLPC in Uruguay and Paraguay I consider teacher training to be a key component of a successful ICT4E initiative. Similarly to Paraguay I was again lucky enough to be able to attend a teacher training session during my stay in Peru.

In general teacher training in Peru consists of two components: One training session which ideally takes place before the laptops are handed out and then a yearly refresher course. The training that I observed was a voluntary 2-day refresher for teachers who had received the XOs roughly one year earlier.

The initial training consists of 40 hours during a week-long course. Given that many teachers have never used a laptop before the training starts with the very basics such as how to turn on the XO, how to keep it charged, how to navigate using the touchpad, how to type on the keyboard, etc. Since a significant amount of time is spent on these topics there is little left to discuss the educational use of the laptops in the school setting.

Voluntary refresher training course

In the refresher course which I attended again a lot of time was dedicated to dealing with fundamental questions about how to resolve minor software issues and learning how to use some of the Activities. While some ideas on how to use the laptops to teach certain subject matter were discussed overall again too little attention seemed to be given on how to integrate the laptop with the curriculum that teachers need to get through.

The lack of quality teacher training, combined with the aforementioned lack of support materials and manuals or the ability of teachers to exchange ideas or access content online, results in teachers being inadequately prepared to use XO laptops in the classroom.

The effect of this situation is that if teachers use the laptops they mostly ask pupils to transcribe a text from the blackboard or school book in their word processor. Similarly in many cases the use of the XOs seems to drop off significantly two or three months after they are first handed out. This can be interpreted as a sign that the novelty factor is wearing off without teachers seeing a purpose in really using the laptops in schools.

Teacher training could be a way to compensate for many of the infrastructure and content related deficits and difficulties that exist for Una laptop por niño. However in its current state it doesn’t seem to be able to convince the majority of teachers that the laptops are a valuable tool for learning let alone address these additional complexities.

It is worth pointing out that progress in an environment where many teachers have never used a computer before will undoubtedly be slow. However a more intensive initial training combined with regular follow-ups as well as support in the form of manuals could go a long way in enabling teachers to effectively start using the laptops inside the classroom.

6. Evaluation

Early IADB evaluation report

In terms of evaluation of Una laptop por niño the most significant effort is being undertaking by a consortium consisting of the Peruvian Ministry of Education, the Inter-American Development Bank, and GRADE, a Peruvian NGO. The first preliminary report (in Spanish) from that evaluation was recently released and the results are quite sobering.

Similarly to what I outlined above the evaluation for example found that there’s a strong demand for better and more extensive training and technical as well as educational support for teachers. As a likely result of the lack of these supportive measures the use of the laptops drops off significantly after two to three months. The study also indicates that the learning outcomes by pupils who had received a laptop aren’t significantly different to their peers. Additionally it also revealed that only slightly more than half of the pupils are allowed to take the laptops home thereby significantly reducing the potential amount of time that the pupils can use them. Overall the two main vectors that one might consider positive at this point are that pupils’ abilities to use computers has increased and that parents and teachers have a more positive attitude towards schools.

Apart from that ongoing effort some Peruvian researchers previously also published results from independent evaluations that they worked on. While these are obviously based on a much smaller sample of schools, about a dozen or so in some cases, their findings are in many ways quite similar to the IADB evaluation. One such example is a report by Carlos David Laura of Peru’s Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES) which found that teacher training is lacking and that pupils’ learning achievement hadn’t improved.

One lesson to be learned from Una laptop por niño is that small independent evaluations can often provide first indications and vectors about how an ICT4E project is going before larger and longer-term studies are available. In this sense they can provide a much needed external monitoring tool which provides information and insight which can be the basis for modifying implementation details and strategies.

Overall the efforts in Peru are a good example of the value that both small, short-term and large, long-term evaluations can provide to ICT4E initiatives. Of course considering its size one would expect to see more independent efforts looking into both the educational as well as social impacts of Una laptop por niño. However as described in the community involvement section this also requires institutional support which at least in some cases wasn’t provided in Peru.

Summary and Outlook

Undoubtedly Peru’s Una laptop por niño offers many valuable lessons for ICT4E projects however in the grand majority of cases these will be how NOT to do something. There is no doubt that of the three South American countries I visited, Peru is the most physically challenging environment for a nation-wide 1-to-1 computing in education project. Even with a perfect implementation this would be a difficult undertaking, and with the plethora of issues and problems that the project’s execution has exposed, the results and impacts – or lack thereof – are bound to be underwhelming.

This is not to say that everything about Una laptop por niño is bad. It has undoubtedly opened enormous possibilities for thousands of teachers and pupils which will come up with interesting and creative ways to use the XOs and learn a lot in the process. Yet there’s no doubt that the majority of teachers and pupils as well as other stakeholder such as administrators and parents will hardly see any benefit from the initiative.

While not necessarily directly related to the early lackluster evaluation results, it is interesting to see that in mid-2010 DIGETE significantly changed the strategy of Una laptop por niño. While the main target until then had been rural multi-grade schools with a single teacher, the upcoming 300,000 XOs will be distributed to larger and often urban schools. At the same time this phase of the project will no longer be traditional 1-to-1 computing. The new XO laptops will be used to set up CRTs (Centro de Recursos Tecnológicos – Center for Technology Resources) – basically mobile computer labs – at every remaining primary school in the country. This is indeed a very intriguing development, and I’m sure many people will closely watch how this new strategy works out compared to the old one.

OLPC in Peru 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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The study found that giving students home PCs led to small but significant declines in academic performance as measured by math and reading test scores. In addition, the researchers reported, the “introduction of high-speed internet service is similarly associated with significantly lower math and reading test scores in the middle grades.” Worse yet, “the introduction of broadband internet is associated with widening racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.” Vigdor and Ladd’s sobering conclusion: “For school administrators interested in maximizing achievement test scores, or reducing racial and socioeconomic disparities in test scores, all evidence suggests that a program of broadening home computer access would be counterproductive.”

Given the excitement that surrounds efforts to close the “digital divide” by subsidizing computer purchases for disadvantaged students and schools, these findings may seem surprising. But they shouldn’t be. An earlier study that examined the effects of giving Romanian students access to computers resulted in similar findings. It discovered that while home computers may improve students’ computer skills, the devices appear to result in an erosion of math and reading skills.

Educators often take an idealized view of new information technologies. They focus on the potential of the technologies to improve academic performance, weaving enticingly optimistic scenarios of how the tools will be used. But the reality of the way the technologies come to be used rarely matches the idealized view. Kids do not, for example, see computers, mobile phones, and the Internet as essentially educational tools. They see them as tools for entertainment and communication. As Vigdor and Ladd suggest, the computer becomes an instrument of distraction, interrupting study rather than deepening it.

Earlier research into the educational consequences of hypertext and multimedia pointed to similar conclusions. Thirty years ago, when personal computers were first coming into schools, it was often assumed that taking in information on screens, with lots of textual links between documents and supporting audio and video presentations, would lead to deeper comprehension and stronger learning than was provided by traditional textbooks. In reality, hyperlinks and multimedia were found to divide students’ attention, leading to reduced comprehension and learning. To put it into psychological terms, computer use often leads to “cognitive overload,” impeding the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory and hence short-circuiting the development of rich conceptual knowledge and critical thinking skills.

It is interesting and revealing to compare the impact of giving students access to computers and the Internet with the impact of giving them access to printed books. One recent study, published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, revealed a strong connection between the number of books in a student’s home and the number of years of education the student completes. “What’s surprising,” wrote the Chronicle of Higher Education in reporting on the research, “is just how strong the correlation is between a child’s academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It’s even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs. Books matter. A lot.”

Of course computers and the Internet have an important role to play in education, not least because computer skills are increasingly important to economic opportunity and achievement. But it is a mistake to assume that modern technology is an educational panacea, particularly when it comes to helping poor kids close gaps in learning and achievement. Investing precious dollars in teachers, books, and classrooms—in the traditional foundations of education—may well produce greater returns than investing them in computer hardware and software.

Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

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Mr. Carr presents considerable evidence that the networked, interactive nature of digital technologies scatters our attention and limits our ability to think deeply. Even more, he points to emerging evidence that access to computers leads to poor educational attainment. Concerned about the decline of books, he writes,

“We need to be concerned about the digital divide, to be sure. But perhaps we should also be thinking about the Gutenberg divide.”

Nearly all of the debate around Mr. Carr’s provocative and thoughtful book is focused on areas that are traditionally well-saturated with media, both physical and, increasingly, digital. What, though, of the developing world where printed material is traditionally not as widely disseminated and where basic literacy is sometimes lower?  As low-cost digital devices proliferate throughout poor regions, is it a reason to worry or a cause for celebration? Simply put, is a mobile phone in the hands of an impoverished student better or worse than no book at all?

For this month’s Educational Technology Debate, we have four experts on media and education providing their views on this question:

• Nicholas Carr, the author responsible for the newfound attention to the cognitive effects of the Internet and ICTs, will provide the opening piece, summarizing his position that networked technologies are detrimental to educational efforts by inducing distraction and limiting deep thinking.
• Marion Walton, a senior lecturer in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, will broaden the discussion by summarizing her research and views on how new technologies can be promote both formal and informal literacies in resource-constrained environments.
• Inés Dussel, is the Educational Director of Sangari Argentina, and is a researcher at the Latin American School for the Social Sciences (FLACSO/Argentina).
• Finally, Steve Vosloo, of the Shuttleworth Foundation, will provide an explanation of his ongoing project to promote literacy via a novel written for teenagers and available on their mobile phone.

Please join us over the coming month in what promises to be a lively and enlightening debate about one of the more important issues facing educators around the world.

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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.

This is the opening remarks and initial response of Atanu Dey, a noted speaker on ICT in education and an economist at Netcore Solutions in Mumbai, India to the question: Are most investments in technology for schools wasted?

Atanu Day at ETD Live Debate

Atanu Dey: (Listen to the podcast)

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, great to have you here. Let me start off by quoting Shakespeare, about my favorite quotes from Henry the IV in which Glendower is trying to impress the prince by making the statement “I can call the spirits from the vastly deeps” to which Hotspur says “ why so can I and so can any man but will they come when you do call them”.

So in that same spirit I would like to say that yes you can make a lot of investment in technology. The question would be, but will it be of any use? My argument today with my colleagues over here on the right side that most investments in technology for education are wasted and the reason is fairly straight forward.

So I will start off by arguing that what is technology and what is it supposed to do and what does investment in technology translates into and what are the problems that education has in specifically in a country like India. Let’s start off by saying how do we understand technology to be. So technology has always been present in education. Since the printing press, the printed book is a technology. It is a communication technology. When we say ICT I suppose we mean high technology, which is computers and Internet and all the new fangled worldwide web. So there is some space for technology.

The problem is how it is being used – that is the fundamental problem.

About technology there are two very salient facts that we need to remember. Technology is something that enters what we call the production function, economists call it a production function or whatever we are trying to do, multiplicatively. It doesn’t enter any function additively. So you had nothing to begin with if you impose technology on it. If your production was not very good to begin with technology just amplifies that not very good part. So technology amplifies things.

The other part of technology is especially high technology requires a deep back end. It requires an ecosystem to support the use of that technology. If you don’t have that ecosystem support then the investment in that technology is wasted. So I would argue that in the case of India specifically that ecosystem doesn’t exist and because of which the investment made into technology is wasted.

So you can tell just so many stories and anecdotes. So let me just take your time and give one anecdote that I am personally acquainted with. There was this school in rural India where the government had spent several million rupees in bringing computers or PCs to the school. Two months into the thing they had not even unwrapped. They were still in the boxes. A year later they were taken out of the boxes but nobody was there to be able to fix it up so that it could have been worked and finally it was fixed up so that it could now work and the power was not available most of the time. Therefore after two or three years, the PCs were just boxes that had never been used and all that investments was wasted.

The problem with investment in technology for schools or education in India is that this investment is probably made with public money and as Friedman would have reminded us there are three ways in which money could be spent. You can spend your own money on yourself and in that case you are very careful about wasting or you could spend somebody else’s money on yourself and in that case you are not that concerned about the expenditure part of it but you are very concerned about what benefits you are going to get of it but in the case of the government, the government takes from Peter to pay Paul so the government is not interested in seeing the expenditure side of it nor what the benefits are. It is just interested in entering a lot of money to very sticky fingers.

In this case I find that much of the investment that is made by government in the education sector in technology gets wasted because the people who are in charge of making the decisions how to use it and so on, they are not really concerned. It is not their money. It is somebody else’s money and there is very little accountability.

Then finally we have to ask ourselves what exactly is wrong with our education system? Is it something that requires a technical solution? In many cases, you do require technology but it is by no means a given that every problem that we have in education admits to have technological solution. In many case what happens is that it is a lazy person’s way of doing things. They just say let’s bring in computers because in those places they use computers so maybe if we use computers we will get the same results.

They sometimes bring in a solution and then they start looking for a problem to solve it with. The old adage about somebody with a hammer finds every problem has a name holds very true in this case. People who have been brought up with technology they think that every problem could be solved through technology.

So with those remarks I think I am going to conclude my time. Thank you very much and I am feeling sorry for my opponents on the other side because they have a very hard road to follow. Thank you.

Tim Kelly:

Atanu, I think I will begin with you. You gave us a just story about computers that were in boxes. They weren’t unwrapped and a year later there was no power. It was a story of failed investment. Now actually that is about just stories and not a basis for your evaluation. How do you think we should be doing evaluation of ICT investment and how can we do it that we actually get to the other side of this debate that the investment is worthwhile?

Atanu Dey:

Yeah Tim that is a very good point that you raised and it was a just told story because I wanted to point that this is an example of what happens when ecosystem is not available for the use of a technology, which is not appropriate at a specific call.

I think to most of the other side where we say that yes the investment being made in technology in education is not being wasted is well your money that is on the table. It is not somebody else’s money. It is because the government is spending the money that is creating a problem. If you go to a private sector school or a school where the people ask questions about what were the returns on investment in this. That is how you are going to get on the other side.

I think what Ashish had started out by saying that ICT is great for this and ICT is great for that but no one questions that at all. It is completely given and as Sam said on our side, the proposition is in again in that again ICT can be useful but problem is it now being wasted.

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As Tim says, “device convergence” will make this a stale debate, but not yet. Comparing computers and phones is like comparing “apples and oranges”, we can (and will) eat both, as Allen suggests. But, for the sake of this debate, let’s stick with the artificial choice of either/or:

Phones can indeed be a distraction device. We are seeing them banned in many schools (including the USA, as Wayan rightly notes). We are at the same time seeing parents lobby in some countries against such bans, arguing that they need to be able to connect to the children in the case of emergency.

Cheating with phones, cheating with computers, cheating with calculators, cheating with crumbled up pieces of papers. While mobile phones do perhaps offer certain advantages in this regard, I don’t know that any device as a monopoly here.

Indeed, phones are out of reach of most students and teachers in most countries, and smartphones are even further out of reach. But what if we extend our time horizon a bit? Smartphones are coming faster than we think. Can anyone who has seen the explosive growth in mobile phone use over the past five years doubt that cheaper, more powerful, more widespread smartphones are coming, and soon? Government policies and plans often look 5-10 years in the future. A fixation on the ICT form factor of the past — the PC/laptop — seems to me to be terribly short-sighted.

Are there currently abundant, compelling uses of mobile information devices, something that I will label a ‘mobile phone’, for lack of a better term, in widespread use today in the education sector? Aside from uses of PDAs and calculators, all of whose functions will presumably be subsumed within the functionalities of the ‘phone’ at some point, the answer today is largely no. This answer, I would like to submit, will change.

Of all the commenters who have posted insightful remarks on this site, I must confess that I agree the most with Alex’s points.

Seeing phones as destinations for education content and applications ported from PCs is an unnecessarily limitation on our vision here. Simply digitizing textbooks and making them available for use on a computer has not proven to be terribly effective. Why should we expect content developed for 15″ computer monitors to work on 2″ screens?

The success of the iPhone is showing that there are many types of compelling content and applications that only make sense to develop for the phone — and that there are critical masses of software developers willing to do such development.

Only five years ago, the use of the mobile phone for access to banking services had been largely abandoned in ‘developed’ countries. ‘Why would we use the phone to access our banking information, people asked, when we had access to a much richer experience using PCs and the Internet?’ At about the same time, firms in the Philippines were finding many users were quite willing to use their phones in slightly different ways to transfer money to/from their banks — and each other — in ways slightly different from how such practices were envisaged in OECD markets. Learning from such experiences, Safaricom rolled out its version of m-banking in Kenya last year with explosive results.

Just as computers offer certain key andvatages over printed books (and vice versa), so too do mobile phones present us with certain opportunities that computers do not. These are some of the key attributes of mobile phones that make their increased use in education inevitable:

1. Personal.
2. Mobile.
3. Always-connected.
4. Cheap(er).
5. And increasingly ubiquitous.

While I agree with Bob and Alex (and so many others here) on many issues, I disagree a little bit on one final point. Yes, the eventual impact of any technology to transform teaching and learning in the classroom does depend on larger, fundamental educational reforms. But I think we need to think a little more broadly here. One recurrent lament in educational technology circles is that ‘ICTs are revolutionizing education everywhere but in the classroom’. Reform of educational systems takes time — often a long time.

But going forward, the rapid growth of mobile phone use, especially in developing countries, and the inevitable development of education content for use on such devices, highlights an important opportunity for individual learners outside of the classroom to engage in meaningful education activities whenever, wherever they want. This is of course no substitute for formal schooling, and certainly no substitute for the critical relationship between teacher and student and teacher at the center of most learning processes.

The importance of such outside-the-classroom use should not be discounted, and, to the extent such use is increasingly effective and widespread, it may turn out to also be an important trigger for larger educational reforms within the formal education system.

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

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

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

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

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

The Phone is Personal

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

The Phone is Always On

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

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

The Phone is Proliferating

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

The Phone is Not the Only Solution

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

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