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

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

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

Observation

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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Yet the fruits of this Information Age are still unevenly distributed. This gap threatens to continue to cut off some populations from new opportunities. Access to new forms of education, good jobs, medical and health information, communication, and the chance to participate in the affairs of the broader society may be denied to them. For some individuals, technology brings the promise of inclusion, education, opportunity, wealth, and better health; for others, greater isolation and continuing poverty. Many look to universities and K-12 schools to bridge this gap.

Meanwhile, today’s Internet—the commodity or commercial Internet—has recognized a number of limitations. At the same time numerous opportunities and new possibilities have emerged. Some challenges, like the inability to provide workable “quality of service” or end-to-end performance guarantees needed for demanding applications such as telepresence (the current state-of-the-art videoconferencing technology) were outside the scope of the Internet’s original design goals. Challenges, such as dealing with today’s gargantuan amounts of traffic, exploding number of users and sites, privacy and security needs of users and institutions, and requirements for Internet addresses, are the consequences of unanticipated success.

Many new but challenging opportunities, like the delivery on demand of real-time, movie-quality, high definition television (HDTV) or even films over the Internet, as well as many new and experimental approaches to health care, are the product of extraordinary progress in a wide array of technology industries that are now convergent with the Internet’s evolutionary path. Other new applications and capacities are outside the focus of the commercial Internet. These innovative activities are supported best by research test-beds, the international fabric of national research and education networks (NRENs), which focus on the development and deployment of the next generation of Internet technologies.

The regular or “commodity” Internet was not designed to handle the huge amount of data transfer, the explosive numbers of users, or the interactive, media-rich applications commonly used today. For applications where reliability is critical and delay is unacceptable – applications such as real-time streaming events, access to remote scientific instruments, high definition video-conferencing, online gaming, and interactive immersive worlds and simulations – the commodity Internet is inadequate. Research and education networks were purpose-built by the research and education community to offer the flexibility, performance, speed, and advanced services that allow these applications to evolve and thrive.

NRENs serve many functions. They create leading-edge network capability for the international research community; they enable revolutionary Internet applications; they ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community; they provide a platform for sharing scientific (and other) applications and resources; they aggregate demand for bandwidth and thereby create “buying clubs,” drive down the cost of bandwidth; and they create social value by including communities outside their primary research university constituencies, like primary and secondary schools, libraries, museums, scientific and cultural institutions. In order to flourish, NRENs must focus on the technical dimensions of data networks and they must also attend to the human dimension, the creation of shareable expertise for support and collaboration across many fields of research and education.

The African Context for NRENs

NRENs began in Africa about ten years ago, with Eastern and Southern Africa at the forefront. The availability of fiber and the high cost of bandwidth were, initially, limiting factors. Now, with several trans-oceanic submarine cable systems completed or near completion, and with a concurrent expansion of terrestrial fiber across Africa, access to fiber is within reach on most of the continent. Prices have dropped significantly, although bandwidth is still pricey when compared with rates in many other parts of the world. NRENs can help to address pricing inequities across countries by (a) aggregating demand among universities and, more broadly, within the school sector (more on this below); (b) architecting networks with points of presence across broad and complex geographies; and (c) and by working across national boundaries to create regional optical networks and, ultimately, a pan-African optical network.

Furthermore, African NRENs can leapfrog their counterpart NRENs elsewhere in the world and build networks without some of the inherent historical limitations of comparable networks, emphasizing collaboration and mass access to education and research applications across educational sectors. In addition, African NRENs can design their networks to combine the best of wireless and mobile technologies with optical networks. Inspiring leaders, ambitious goals, and imaginative and carefully crafted plans – these things (and more) will guarantee that African NRENs will flourish.

The continent has a firm foundation in place. There are NREN success stories such as KENET in Kenya, RENU in Uganda, TENET in South Africa, Xnet in Namibia, to name a few. And there are regional efforts, the most prominent of which is the UbuntuNet Alliance, which began as a regional bandwidth aggregator and now has created a very strong human network and an operational point-of-presence which can, over time, be the initial hub of a regional network. The UbuntuNet Alliance is, in fact, a model for subsequent developments in West Africa (WACREN) and North Africa and the Arab States (ASREN) – both of which are nascent regional networks, now human networks and, eventually optical networks.

The cornerstone of the R&E networking is the Local Area Network (LAN), which is the network serving a university, school, museum, or research institution, and the network closest to the end-user. In some instances, these LANs might connect to a municipal network or another Wide Area Network (WAN) and then to an NREN. In other instances, the LAN may connect directly to the NREN. Similarly, NRENs may connect to a multi-national regional network or directly to other international NRENs or, perhaps, to a pan-African R&E Network. Much will depend upon local conditions, regulatory structures, and geography. (In its ideal state, networking is a function of the best technological practices and geography, not politics.) Figure #1 below illustrates the various strata of networking.

NRENs: A Necessary Foundation for African e-Science

Advanced information, communication, computation and collaboration technologies – known as cyberinfrastructure – have become essential elements for education and for research in the 21st century. Of particular interest to many researchers and educators is the use of these tools for “e-science,” as computational discovery has emerged to complement the traditional practices of theory and experimentation. Examples abound across all scientific disciplines, as well as in the arts and humanities.

Explosive growth in the resolution of sensors and scientific instruments has led to unprecedented volumes of environmental and experimental data, which can be combined, compared, and correlated across time, place, and types of data. Computational science aids in modeling, simulation, and scenario assessment using data from diverse sources. Complex multidisciplinary problems – from health care and public policy to national security, scientific discovery, and economic competitiveness –complement the historical focus on single disciplines. And important multidisciplinary discoveries are now made by teams of experts spread around the world.

Advanced cyberinfrastructure, enabled by very high-speed research and education networks, is essential for participating in all these efforts. Those without access and the ability to participate will not have full participation in 21st century innovation.

Therefore, a major challenge confronting African nations today is how to ensure that all colleges and universities, including those that have not traditionally benefited from expensive research infrastructure, can participate seamlessly in national and multinational e-science efforts that are cyberinfrastructure-enabled. The challenge begins with the need for ubiquitous deployment of advanced research and education networks.

NREN Practices to Consider

Peering
As the Internet evolved from a US government funded network in the 1980s to a world-wide, market driven network in the 1990s and beyond, one organizing principle continues to endure – the settlement-free exchange of Internet traffic among independent networks. Often referred to as “peering” by the community of engineers and operators of networks, this seemingly contradictory notion of the free exchange of traffic among competitors as an economic benefit has become an important foundation in the growth of the network. Large centers of settlement-free peering have also resulted in greater network resiliency in light of geographic or systemic outages, and the promotion of fair and equitable access to the constantly evolving Internet marketplace.

There are a few key structural principles one may wish to consider when implementing settlement-free peering facilities in an emerging NREN or regional network:

• Geographic diversity. Internet routing decisions often follow the “first exit rule”. Thus, a network needing to pass data to another “peer” network will usually pass that traffic to its peer at the first opportunity. This often results in networks only agreeing to peer with one another if the peering facilities are distributed widely in a given geographic area.
• Resiliency. One should build a high degree of redundancy in all of the necessary components comprising a peering facility; electricity (i.e., multiple feeds with generator backup), diverse fiber paths in to and out of the facility, and “carrier class” environmentals such as HVAC, security, and fire-suppression.
• Open access. A peering facility should have equitable, open and easily understood criteria for all participants who wish to connect to the peering fabric (i.e., switches, routers, fiber-distribution panels). The more participation from networks in a peering facility, the higher the degree of usefulness to all concerned.
• Sustainability. The success of a peering facility itself becomes a potential service liability if the facility is underfunded or inadequately maintained. Early peering facilities in the US in the 1980s were sponsored and subsidized by the federal government, with commercially managed peering facilities quickly following once economies of scale were reached. Depending upon the financial realities of a nascent deployment of continental peering facilities, one may want to consider government subsidy and oversight of early peering facilities until an economy of scale is achieved to allow a more independent yet still reliable support model.

IPv6
Conventional computers have been joined on the Internet by a myriad of new devices, including iPads and smart phones, smart TV set-top boxes and videogames with integrated Web browsers, and embedded network components in equipment ranging from office copy machines to kitchen appliances to automobiles.

Internet Protocol version 6 is needed because the Web is running out of addresses. The current technology, known as Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), supports just 4 billion addresses, not nearly enough to cope with the new devices that connect to the Internet and need addresses and certainly not enough addresses to cope with the explosion of new devices across the African continent.

With the future in mind, IPv6 has been outfitted with an enormous address space that should provide globally unique addresses for every conceivable variety of network devices for the foreseeable future (i.e., decades).

But IPv6 is a complex structure and addressing is only the most visible component. IPv6 also attempts to deal with critical business requirements for more scalable network architectures, improved security and data integrity, auto configuration, mobile computing, data multicasting, and more efficient network route aggregation at the global backbone level.

Middleware: Access and Identity Management
The term “middleware” is used to cover a broad array of tools, information, and what programmers call “hooks” that help applications use advanced network resources and services. Middleware can be thought of as glue layers that provide reliable, standardized support services like authenticating users and authorizing them (or not) to use specific applications or have access to certain on-line resources. Indeed one common application of middleware is to provide the common services and information necessary to allow applications to restrict or enable access (“log on”) to certain resources.

Middleware such as authentication (are people or programs who they say they are?), authorization (what is he/she/it allowed to do?), and the directory services needed to keep track of users, resources, and any rules that may apply to them, comprise essential elements of any shared network computing infrastructure. Other middleware services, such as cooperative scheduling of networked resources, enabling secure multicast or interactive video or object brokering (matching requests with providers for relatively high level services, such as databases, format, or protocol conversion) are preconditions for many applications and services sought by the research and education communities. These include a number of innovative applications.

Broad adoption across education of certain standardized middleware fabric is a key requirement for addressing the needs of the education community for capabilities like user-friendly, but broadly shared and highly cost-effective access to libraries and other educational resource repositories, remote scientific tools, music repositories, and other intellectual property; for use of widely and safely shared interactive services; and for workable and properly protected wide-scale student records access and transmission. As such, middleware must be, as a practical matter, interoperable between applications, among campuses and other educational institutions, and the wider Internet. This effort will not be successful if individual groups or institutions build their own internal versions of middleware and then try to patch the pieces together. African NRENs are at a distinct advantage here as the compromises required to develop a common framework, standards, and protocols for attribute naming, storage, and exchange are easier to obtain when there are no existing use cases.

However, developing and managing the trust relationships necessary for the success of identity management can be tricky. The more diverse the groups, the more complex this becomes, particularly when the focus is inclusion of many educational sectors beyond universities. One should expect significant challenges as divergent interests and priorities will be even greater in this environment. The bottom line is that the technical issues are the least difficult to address. New policies specific to access identity management, and the operational issues caused by them, tend to be bigger hurdles. As with introduction of any new processes, effective change management will play a significant role in successful outcomes.

Some engagement of organizations like UbuntuNet and key leaders among existing African NRENs in international access and identity management federations like REFEDS would, ultimately, be extremely beneficial to successful implementation of middleware across diverse educational sectors among these NRENs.

Wireless Access
Given the prevalence of mobile and wireless technologies for mass access to education in African countries, careful attention to the integration of the various forms of wireless technologies – Microwave, Wi-Fi, WiMax, and cellular (3G, 3.5G and 4G) – is critical. These are all excellent ways to extend the reach of wired R&E networks. The best practices are dependent upon the environment, potential commercial partners, available spectrum, and other local conditions.

Wi-Fi is still the leader in terms of network speed. It is best suited for building or campus environments. The equipment is inexpensive and readily available. WiMax and cellular networks are usually deployed in connection with a wireless service provider, although there are several examples of communities and institutions deploying their own. The real differences between 3G/4G are data-rates and the amount of spectrum that is in use. For instance, 3G networks can exceed the speed of a T-1 line (a fiber optic line with a 1.5Mb/s speed). Second generation data networks (2G cellular) still have a place as they are widely deployed and their slower speeds often mean less cost.

Extending the Reach of African NRENs: Supporting Schools and SchoolNets

NRENs can provide significant social benefit by extending their reach to schools and other educational institutions (e.g., libraries, museums, scientific and cultural organizations). Such efforts can contribute to the development of prospective university students who can begin to develop fluency with information technologies while in primary and secondary schools. In addition, there are many compelling models of university students being trained to be both technology and content experts who intern at school sites and in doing so, enrich their own experiences as well as the students and teachers whom they support. It is a wonderful way to train students, particularly those in non-technical fields who may aspire to occupations where information technology is either at the center of their work or essential to it.

In the U.S., the K20 Initiative now engages schools in 43 of the 50 states, and over 70,000 schools and millions of students. It was not conceived at the outset of the creation of Internet2 but has become one of the hallmarks of the U.S.’s advanced R&E network initiatives. If African NRENs are essentially greenfield efforts, extending their reach to schools would have many benefits. By increasing the numbers of institutions participating, such an effort could have a positive impact financially by aggregating bandwidth costs across significantly more institutions.

Broadly stated, a schools initiative can have many goals, which may include the following: (1) to bring innovators in K-12, colleges, universities, libraries, and museums into appropriate regional, national, and international advanced networking efforts, creating new “workgroups” where warranted; (2) to develop mechanisms for enabling quick, pervasive technology diffusion and transfer; (3) to create mechanisms for timely communication across educational sectors and regions; (4) to leverage and propagate a culture of parallel independent efforts along with education, private sector, and government partnerships; (5) to get interested and capable schoolnets connected and properly engaged in existing workgroups and projects; and (6) where there is interest and realistic opportunity, to include appropriate experiments in learning and education and help enable experiments involving innovative deployments of advanced technologies in education at school sites.

Among the many activities of such an initiative, relevant local, provincial, and national special interest groups might be formed in some of the areas described below to pursue collaborative ventures:

• Digital learning resources, content repositories and open educational resources
• Learning management systems and education management systems
• Videoconferencing: H.323 and other interactive video and multimedia technologies, digital video, low- to high-end video multicast, and the convergence of on demand video and broadcast
• Access to scientific apparatus and other broad application areas which could be shared across educational communities
• Middleware, enhanced portal, and “relationship-ware” deployment and partnerships
• Advanced server technologies, caching, and co-location strategies
• IPv6 deployment
• “Buying clubs” to purchase access devices (computers, mobile devices, etc.)
• Cloud resources

Despite the many challenges and complexities ahead, African NRENs have innumerable opportunities to expand educational opportunities across the widest range of education sectors, to create a platform for African faculty and students to engage in research collaborations across the continent and the globe, and to support a rising generation of researchers, educators, professionals, and leaders who will contribute to a peaceful and prosperous Africa.

This discussion is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

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Internet2 (USA) shares a key characteristic with other National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) and that is provision of connectivity to multiple universities. However, Internet2 is organized as not-for-profit whereas some NRENS are government/ministry based. Internet2 takes pride in being community led and member focused.

Internet2’s core mission is “to ensure that scholars and researchers have access to the advanced networks, tools and support required for the next generation of collaborative discovery and innovation and for effectively preparing the next generation of innovators, our students”.

Started in 1996 with 34 universities, Internet2 now has 372 members and 131 sponsored education group participants. Members include U.S. universities, corporations, government research agencies, and not-for-profit networking organizations representing over 50 countries. Internet2 membership is by institution and has been restructured into four levels based on the Carnegie Classification assignment for Higher Education members, operating budgets for Affiliate members and revenues for Industry members. These levels determine membership dues and fees.

EMERGING TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICE EXAMPLES

Expanding to a broader education community
To bring more innovators to the table, the Internet2 developed a K20 Initiative to connect university members to the broader education community through a process called Sponsored Education Group Participants. The result is connection to the Internet2 backbone network of 66,000 Community Anchor Institutions (CAI) in 38 U.S. states. CAIs are community-based organizations that include K-12 schools, libraries, community colleges, health centers, hospitals and public safety organizations.

The plan is to extend the network to 200,000 CAI through a Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) grant. The $62.5 million grant will upgrade the Internet2 Network to an 8.8 Terabit per second national network. The infrastructure will serve not only the Internet2 members but also 200,000 CAIs. Since CAIS are not Internet2′s traditional research university members, a different network, U.S. Community Anchor Network (CAN) was established to bring together the diverse voices of CAIs, with start-up costs provided by Internet2 and other partners. Thus, the physical infrastructure will be shared by Internet2 and U.S. CAN; however, Internet2 will focus on network R&D needs of its members while U.S. CAN will tailor its programs to the various community anchor sectors.

Opening Internet2 membership to industry partners has reciprocal benefits.
Benefits from industry include significant contributions in support of the development and deployment of advanced, Internet applications and services, including donations of equipment, cash, software, personnel, consulting, and services. By serving on Internet2’s Board of Trustees and its advisory councils, industry members make available valuable input and strategic guidance on advanced networking in research and education. Benefits to industry partners include ability to interact with current and prospective customers, showcase products and services, acquire market and user intelligence, tap and recruit university talent, and discover new market opportunities, among other things.

The governance structure is member-led and member-focused.
The Board of Trustees is inclusive, consisting of representatives, from members, including university presidents and CIOs, and leaders from industry and research agencies. The Board offers leadership, strategic direction, and oversight.

The size and diversity of its membership require advisory councils, again coming from its membership, for its many services–Applications and Middleware, Architecture and Operations, External Relations, and Research. These Advisory Councils guide strategic planning and implementation, help set organizational priorities, and ensure that Internet2 continues to serve the needs of the research and education community members.

Members are engaged and opportunities for membership engagement abound through a variety of Working Group activities, such as:

• Development efforts in network infrastructure, network performance, middleware, applications, and security, and;
• Discovery, research, and collaboration in discipline areas, such as the arts and humanities, health sciences, and sciences and engineering.

Members have access to a comprehensive menu of services, tools, capacity building, and R&D. Examples include access to:

• A systems approach to high performance networking provides a wide range of integrated services, from dark fiber to production IP and optical networking, to middleware and advanced applications. The network is designed to deliver next-generation production services and serves as a development platform for new networking ideas and protocols. The Internet2 Network is scalable to meet bandwidth-intensive requirements of collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis and social networking. The network will be upgraded with the BTOP grant mentioned above.
• The Internet2 Commons is a suite of tools that integrate presence, instant messaging, chat, voice, video, data and application sharing. It now offers cloud-based interoperable video services from tele-presence to videoconferencing to desktop and mobile tools.
• The pS-Performance Toolkit includes a pre-configured suite of network performance tools for collection, storage and analysis of network performance data.
• InCommon is a framework for inter-institutional authentication and authorization to enable secure access of protected online network services and resources.
• The U.S. Higher Education Root (USHER) acts as a public key infrastructure (PKI) solution for the higher education community for applications and services that require encryption or true digital signature technologies.
• Internet2 workshops provide participants with the opportunity to learn about and experiment with advanced networking technologies. Workshop topics include: Hot Topics in Identity Management and Federated Identity Management, Network Performance, IPv6, Campus Architecture and Middleware Planning, Digital Video Transport System, Performing Arts and Master Class production to advance the frontiers of high-performance networking in service of research and education.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES, SUCCESS FACTORS AND BARRIERS TO WIDER DISSEMINATION AND TAKE UP

The July 2008 strategic plan indicates commitment to “continuous innovation and sustained leadership”. The plan is under review to enable Internet2 to respond to the following 2010 opportunities:

• Involvement in “Community Commons” tools for “computing and services above the campus,” including collaboration tools, cloud computing services, and other initiatives so that campuses are able to better leverage each other’s resources.
• Participation in major U.S. federal programs and policy initiatives that define the future of advanced networking for the research and education community, other community anchor institutions, as well as the general public in the U.S. and worldwide.
• Leadership in shaping and investing in U.S. federal policy development and advocacy and reinforcing the role that the research and education (R&E) community has played, and continuing to provide intellectual leadership in advanced networking and in research and education in network policy in the U.S.
• Recognition that research is a global enterprise requiring (i) support for Internet2 member universities with international programs and with campuses abroad, and, (ii) support for U.S.-based researchers to have the same levels of high-bandwidth access that they have for domestic as well as for international research resources. This recognition will entail working with other nations and regions of the world with regard to the development of a global broadband.
• The best practices highlighted in Section I contribute to success in the achievement of Internet2’s core mission. Success factors include remaining focused on core mission; membership that is inclusive of university, industry, and government agencies that are involved in network R&D; tapping members for leadership roles, governance, and active engagement through working groups; and outreach to the broader education community, including to the global education community. One success factor is showcasing advanced networking efforts among its members. Internet2 recognizes and awards applications of advanced networking that show progress in research, scholarship, collaboration, teaching and learning not only by researchers and faculty but also by students.
• As with any NREN, barriers arise from the fact that the membership is by institution, yet institutions are made of people who may not be inclined to participate due to lack of interest, lack of time, lack of perception of individual benefit, lack of trust, and lack of knowledge to use the advanced applications. In January 2005, faculty and researchers at a member university indicated they still “experience significant barriers in creating and using advanced applications. “ Among the barriers identified were lack of ubiquitous help identifying and solving performance problems; lack of well-integrated and easy-to-use tools for human collaboration; and lack of secure, authenticated access to data and resources. It appears that technology solutions now address these barriers but getting faculty and researchers to embrace these solutions probably remains an obstacle to full utilization of the high performance network.

REFLECTIONS

Clearly, the immediate benefit of Internet2 is connection to a high performance network by its members. This infrastructure allows for collaboration with Internet2 university, industry, government research agencies and not for profit networking organizations on network R&D and discipline specific applications. Member benefits include access to services and tools, such as middleware and other Internet2 commons; updated knowledge on advanced Internet technologies and innovations for technology transfer; market opportunities; and, development of new projects with other Internet2 members. However, full utilization of the high performance network and all its applications is probably not equal among the faculty and researchers and students that make up the member institutions.

It is also worth stating the obvious: that Internet2 serves members primarily from the U.S. and that a regional or Africa-wide REN will necessarily have to deal with many countries with competing interests. While Internet2 has Special Interest Group on Emerging NRENs, NRENS can perhaps look to Internet2 for knowledge exchange, collaborative network research and development, and test the suitability and relevance of the Internet2 network applications, middleware, software and other tools. At the same time, NRENs should be able to offer up their own success stories, particularly in the use of mobile phones for applications and content delivery. NRENs should be able to facilitate discussion on a global commons for research and education not only in networking but also in discipline specific areas.

While working in Afghanistan a Chief of Party for the Afghan eQuality Alliances, I had a chance to participate, along with our project partners from Kabul University, Ministry of Higher Education, and the Ministry of Communications, in a video conference call with the South Asia Interest Group in 2007. The purpose of the Group was to keep each other up-to-date about activities/needs/projects in the region; raise issues important to the region and help guide additional activities to enhance R&E network connectivity within and to the region. The Afghan participants were able to share what their thinking was with regards to an NREN and what initial steps were being done. The Afghans appreciated hearing about the NRENs in other countries. I sense a disconnect between expectations on what Internet2 can deliver versus the constraints faced by Internet2 in collaborating with under-resourced potential partners.

RECOMMENDATIONS: ON THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN THE PROVISION OF PRIORITY ICT APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES IN ORDER TO MAXIMIZE PRIVATE SECTOR DEVELOPMENT

• Develop a broad set of policies, including funding, to protect and encourage competition in the private sector markets that make up the broadband ecosystem (including wireless broadband): network services, devices, applications and content.
• Establish technical broadband (including wireless broadband) performance measurement standards and methodology, with the help of NRENs.
• Support and promote online learning by: funding development of innovative broadband-enabled (including wireless broadband) online learning solutions; encouraging copyright holders to grant educational digital rights of use or offer some of their content to the creative commons; and, establishing standards for locating, sharing and licensing digital educational content across institutions and national boundaries.
• Modify the e-rate program to support modernizing educational broadband infrastructure.
• Encourage the formation of an NREN and a regional or Africa-wide REN that would:
  1. Fill the R&D investment gap by funding network research that would yield net benefits to society
  2. Operate a national and a regional or Africa-wide REN
  3. Provide advocacy on the set of policies, including financing, of the broadband ecosystem at the national, regional and Africa-wide level
  4. Ensure access to standard-based tools and services
  5. Act as the R&E commons for evaluating and adapting software, middleware, and other network tools and services for deployment to and adaption by member institutions.
  6. Promote innovation and technology with industry members
  7. Provide enhanced information technology (IT) applications training, such as applications for e-learning, e-government and e-commerce.

This discussion is part of the eTranform Africa initiative.

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Mobile digital devices rocketed to popularity around 10 years ago with the release of the iPod. Mobile computing went mainstream with the release of the iPhone in 2007. With the release of the iPad just one year ago, we are now seeing a significant shift in the dynamics of computer purchase and practice – moving away from desktops and laptops to iPads and other mobile devices. Their cost relative to laptops along with the promise of mobile computing has raised tremendous interest in iPad use in education.

I don’t believe Apple anticipated the demand for iPads as educational devices. When they were first released, more than one Apple sales representative suggested that iPads were designed for personal media consumption and laptops would be a more appropriate investment for schools. In response to overwhelming interest among educators, I started our online community – iPads in Education – within weeks of the iPad’s release.

The site is an online network that provides guidance on educational usage, allowing users to ask questions and gain from others’ experiences. In the past several months we’ve learned a significant amount about how mobile tablet computing may impact education now and into the future.

The Promise

• Form factor: Anyone that has used an iPad can attest to its compelling form factor. It just feels right. Light, portable and easy to hold or lay in your lap. As opposed to a laptop where the upright screen acts as a barrier between people in classroom settings, the iPad tends to be used more organically; it’s small, lays flat and is easily shared and passed around.
• Long battery life and instant-on: Continuous, transparent access to information is a key educational goal and these are two core requirements. The long battery life of iPads allows you to charge them overnight and use them throughout the school day without any need to pull out messy power cords or search for sparsely located electrical outlets. Additionally, they power up almost immediately. Teachers have little class time to meet increasing demands and don’t need to be wasting five or more minutes every lesson waiting for students to open laptops, power up and log in or shut down. The iPad simply flips open and it’s on. Importantly, as with other mobile devices, this also enables natural, almost transparent educational use. You’re more likely to just spontaneously turn to it for information in the course of a discussion. Students can carry it around easily and instantly access and integrate information and tools into discussions and educational activities.
• Price: The cost of computer implementations has been a stumbling block for many communities and countries. The advent of cheaper alternatives – netbooks, smartphones and iPads – are closing the digital divide and making computing increasingly accessible to more people.
• Touch interface: When combined with the simplicity of the screen layout, the touch interface is a key element of the iPad’s popularity. Most notably, you will observe how young children instinctively take to it without instruction – the web is replete with examples. From my own experience, I find that younger children adapt to the interface even more naturally than teens.
• Improved digital reading: The crisp quality of the display, especially when combined with the light weight and portability, enables a far superior reading experience than currently exists on desktops and laptops. Along with the iPad’s light weight and portability, this finally opens the door to the possibility of utilizing eBooks in education in place of their far heavier and more expensive paper counterparts.
• Integrating multimedia: We live in a society that increasingly expresses itself in images and video. There is an abundance of apps delivering high quality multimedia content to iPads, allowing for integration of fantastic media experiences into educational activities. This is especially applicable to news events where fresh, sharp video footage and images are easily accessible and can spark valuable class discussion.
• Special education: Increasingly we are hearing how the iPad has been a huge success within special education. The simplicity of the touch interface is making it an extremely popular device for students with special needs.
• Connecting: The educational value of social networking lies in its ability to facilitate the growth of impromptu virtual learning communities – connecting people around the globe to share opinions and experiences. Social networking applications are an integral part of iPad usage – whether connecting users to news events, industry experts or video-conferencing with students and classes in other countries.

Consumption or Production?

Much has been written about the opinion that iPads are great consumption devices but are less stellar at allowing students to express themselves creatively. I don’t entirely agree. Firstly, it isn’t simply a consumption device – it’s an extraordinary consumption device – and the role of information acquisition in education shouldn’t be under-valued.

Also, as the application market matures we’re starting to see an evolving depth in the creative opportunities. Music applications, digital storytelling, animation, mathematics … now with the addition of a camera to the second generation iPad and the hallmark release of core Apple applications such as iMovie and GarageBand, the creative possibilities are expanding rapidly.

Some Considerations

• Sharing: iPads are intensely personal devices that record your digital footprint – logins, preferences and more. There’s no login process. This makes them difficult to share. A 1:1 iPad implementation requires very different planning than an implementation that shares iPads among students. My hope is that educational app developers will see the obvious need for sharing in schools and add login layers to their apps.
• They aren’t laptops: You can’t manage iPads in the same way as laptops. Imaging and synchronization processes, content management, application purchasing – they all raise specific issues that require thorough discussion and planning.
• Keyboard: The touch screen keyboard is not popular with all users. I find that it’s more than sufficient for smaller typing tasks such as emails, notes, blog posts and more …. but I believe we’re approaching the end of qwerty typing in computing. The popularity of tablet computing may end up stimulating development of alternative, more efficient input methods that also utilize voice and video.
• eTextbooks: At this point, the promise of eTextbooks still exceeds the reality. There aren’t enough quality books available in digital format and frankly, most still stem from a model that is built upon their physical, paper counterpart. It’s not enough to simply translate textbooks to digital files – we need new models that utilize the media and interactivity capabilities available on iPads. A digital textbook should be cognizant of what the learner has mastered and where he/she needs assistance. It should customize the content to the reader’s strengths and weaknesses and report the student’s progress to the teacher. Effective use of multimedia – interactive multimedia – will become core elements of new eTextbooks and eCourses. There have been some excellent first attempts and eTextbooks and eCourses will improve as the market matures.

The Immediate Future

• The app market will mature and we’ll move from single task, short session apps to more sophisticated offerings. The release of GarageBand and iMovie are the first steps in that direction.
• The barrier to entry for creating and distributing eBook content will become lower. Increasingly, teachers and communities will create their own eBook content.
• Social reading is an imminent phenomenon that combines the reading of eBooks with social networking. When reading eBooks users can connect to friends and other readers, asking questions and sharing notes or opinions. Apps such as Inkling are a bold first step in that direction.
• While the iOS browser is adequate it still lags behind desktop offerings. As mobile continues to expand we can expect a consolidation of desktop and mobile systems and browsers resulting in better mobile web editing, more collaboration tools and support for a wider range of web technologies.

Finally, it’s still a free-for-all in the mobile tablet market. The huge popularity of the iPad is spawning a wealth of new applications and cultivating the development of a host of competitive products that will only serve to strengthen the overall educational value of mobile tablet computing.

The most popular answer to the question of how to improve the quality of schools and education in developing countries is: Invest in more teachers and more schools.

Let there be more teachers

I think there are few people who would contest that having one full time, fully qualified teacher in front of every class of 25 children would bring education of the highest standards to any country.
But could this really be the solution to the educational problems in poor countries? I sincerely doubt whether this solution is feasible. I even fear it is completely impossible to solve the plight of education in the developing world by this route alone.

Here is a statistic that paints a bleak picture, indeed:

India has one of the lowest ratio of teachers. In the US, it’s 3,200 teachers per million people, in the Caribbean it’s 1,500, in the Arab countries it’s 800 and in India it’s 456 teachers per million people. The Times of India (2009)

The US might not be the best example, but even to get at the level of the Caribbean, the Arab countries must double their number of teachers, and India must more than triple its number. And that would be just the number of teachers needed to get at the level of the Caribbean. If the teacher pupil ratio should get close to that of the US, double the number of new teachers would be needed.

Obviously, if the aim would be to decrease the number of pupils per teacher in all developing countries to the level of the developed countries, enormous numbers of teacher would have to be recruited and trained. For many countries in the developing world the number of teachers would have to double, like in the Arab world, in others it would have to triple, like in India and many African countries.

A lot of numbers

How many teachers would have to be recruited, trained, and send to schools? Below, a lot of statistics will be presented. If you are already convinced, you can skip the arithmetic and go to the next section.

Let us look at the numbers, some of which are collected in the table. For OECD countries there are around 16 students per teacher in primary education (CESifo DICE Report). Looking at the numbers, we can take a national average of 15 pupils/teacher as the norm for primary education in developed countries and 13 for secondary education. But note that these are just very global statistics on education. And keep in mind that worldwide, approximately 100 million children that should be in school are not.

Furthermore, as these statistics are global, they do not tell us how the available teachers are distributed. The developed countries are able to organize education in such a way that all children have comparable access to education. The difficult situations in the developing world make that the already low number of teachers are also distributed unequally. The pupil/teacher ratio can be much higher in rural areas than in urban areas. So for many children, the situation is even worse than these averages indicate.

Teaching staff in millions, pupil/teacher ration (P/T), and enrolment ratios in percent (net- NER and gross- GER) in primary and secondary education. Data for 2008 unless indicated otherwise. Source: Unesco

Just to get the average number of teachers in the developing world to the level of that of the developed world would mean that the number of teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South- and West-Asia must more than double. In other regions increases of over 50% would be required.

To get these numbers in a global perspective, there are currently some 58 million teachers in the world, 28 million in primary education and 30 million in secondary education (see table). If the worldwide average ratio of pupils to teachers should be reduced from 25 to 15 for primary and from 18 to 13 for secondary education, an extra 30 million new teachers would be needed (19 million in primary, 11 million in secondary education).

Even a more modest aim to get the pupil to teacher ratio to 20 in primary education and 15 in secondary would require some 13 million new teachers, world wide. And that is without increasing the enrolment ratios in primary and secondary education to 100%. That alone could require another 20 million teachers.

In conclusion, any attempt to improve education in the world by increasing the number of teachers must prepare to recruit, train, and deploy well over 10 million new teachers, and maybe even up to 50 million new teachers. Trainers are needed to train these new teachers. If we are in a hurry, we would have to train them in, say, 6 years for a 3 year teacher training program, that would make 4-13 million new teachers a year entering training. This training program would require anywhere from 130,000 – 400,000 trainers for these teachers.

Round numbers:
13-35 million new teachers: Recruit, Train, Deploy
40 million teachers: Retrain
150,000 – 250,000 trainers for these teachers

Can we really rely on training more teachers alone?

Obviously, the numbers given above are rough ballpark estimates. But it is clear that “invest in teachers and schools” often means “double or triple the number of your teachers”. A truly gargantuan task.

There is an important question that has to be answered before such an effort is undertaken.

Why is it that there are not enough teachers in the first place?

It is not that training teachers is an unknown art. Teachers have been trained for a century now. Why is the world short of tens of millions of teachers?

It is not for a lack of trying. Ever since development aid became into existence somewhere after WWII, it has been known that more teachers are needed. But somehow, the developing countries have been unable to supply them. There are many reasons for this shortage, underfunding, bad working conditions, labor migration away from rural areas, competition from other employers, low social status, bad organization etc. These are social problems. And we know that social problems are the hard problems. And there are as yet no convincing ideas on how to solve these very hard problems.

So, that is why I think any plan to “invest in teachers, not technology” is bound to fail. There is simply no known policy that can solve the problems that plague teacher recruitment and training in less than a generation, if they can be solved at all. Trying to recruit and train millions of new teachers is simply going to fail. Any attempt to just throw money at the problem will fail just as badly as all the other cases where a solution was dropped on the developing countries.

I like the idea of supplying every child with a well trained teacher in a class with only 30 pupils. My sole objection is, it cannot be done. And even if it could be done, what should be done for the children that enter and leave school in the meantime?

Technology to the rescue

Compare the problems of supplying children with teachers to supplying them with technology. If we would supply the roughly 900 million children in dire need of education with OLPC laptops over a period of 5 years continuously, this would cost around $40B a year, worldwide. (200 million laptops a year at $200). I can write a small encyclopedia with all the objections to spending $40B/year on OLPC laptops. But we all know that it is actually possible to produce and distribute 200 million laptops per year. It costs money, but it can be done. This is technology, and technology is easy.

As education will have to rely on the existing workforce for the foreseeable future, their work, and that of their pupils, should be made as easy and productive as possible. In a service industry like education this means using technology, i.e., ICT. But we should not forget that a lot can be done using less glamorous technology. For instance, in many regions in the world, a bicycle may improve mobility of children and teachers alike and enable children to continue further education (Indian Times, 2009).

Without light and heating, education would have to be curtailed severely during the winter in my own country. But such measures, e.g., electrification or increased mobility, have obvious positive impacts on economic development. Such measures do not have to be argued. Here I would like to concentrate on ICT4E, the advantages of which are much more contentious.

ICT4E has the same problems as ICT4D(evelopment). It is inconceivable that a solution to every local problem could be devised by a person sitting behind a keyboard in Western-Europe. People on the ground, locals, know what is needed and what is available. Bicycles can help some children get to school in the Netherlands or regions of India, but it would be a complete waste to send bicycles into other areas, e.g., the Andes or Himalaya. However, there are many “simple” problems that crop up everywhere in the world, and might be solved by a single tool or technology. Just like the blackboard solved a problem experienced in every classroom in the world, there might be technologies that are valuable everywhere.

In our quest to look for eligible technology, I would like to stick to ICT solutions that avoid the “Top 7 Reasons Why Most ICT4D FAILS” (Rogers, 2010, a nice YouTube movie). The video explains it all so I will not repeat them here.

The central question is how to make ICT useful for schools. Received wisdom is that technology should be integrated in community life before it can be really useful. It is instructive to study cases where this received wisdom has been flouted. Prime examples are radio, television, and mobile phones. History has shown that these gadgets have been embraced by almost all communities, even those that lacked any understanding of the underlying technologies. In a completely different field, the simple formulation of Oral Rehydration Therapy helps local staff tackling one of the leading causes of child mortality in the developing world without lengthy training or expensive infrastructure.

The successful electronic consumer gadgets all have in common that they require zero maintenance and are robust in normal use. The only consumables of the gadgets are electrical power or batteries. A costly infrastructure is needed for all three, but this is both outside of the view of the consumers and the costs are shared by all.

These technologies fitted every human society because they were transparently enabling some of the most basic human needs: Exchanging stories, gossip, and news and playing music. This acceptance is not a matter of User Interface or ease of use. Text messaging on a mobile phone must count under the worst User Interfaces ever invented. But because the feed-back is immediate and transparent, even small children are able to put up with it (and often can do the task blindfolded).

So we need turn-key drop-in technologies that have zero-maintenance, are robust in the field, including fields of the green and grassy type, and latch into basic human behavior. Mobile phones might be the best examples, as they require little more than electricity and a (prepaid card) number. They are easy to carry and protect: Just keep them out of the rain or in a pouch. And they help people to do what they seem to like most, talk and write to each other.

A last feature of successful technology introductions is a long technological horizon. Anything that takes so much effort to introduce should last a long time. We can expect our children to still use something that functions as a phone or a TV. The actual device might look different, but we should be able to recognize the function. Especially in education, new technology should last a generation. The children of the pupils that are introduced to the new technology should be expected to use something alike. So if no continuous upgrade path is expected over the next decades, I think the introduction of a technology should be seriously reconsidered.

To summarize, the kind of technological solutions that I am looking for would fit all of the following (think radio, TV, and mobile phones):

• Solves a global problem or need
• Robust in normal daily use
• Turn-key drop-in
• Zero-maintenance
• Consumes only electricity, and very little of it
• Connects to content or communication channels (including surface mail)
• A long technological horizon

Note that the technological solutions discussed are intended to solve serious problems. Nowhere is it assumed that technology should improve education if there are no real problems. Technology does not replace a teacher, but it can help her teach and help the children learn.

My archetypal example of successful educational technology is the blackboard. The blackboard solved a huge educational problem in teaching for large groups: A simple, flexible, and cheap method to present text and diagrams to large groups of pupils. It allowed to effectively display and explain complex concepts so that children in the back of the classroom could see them too. It is a pity that you need chalk to write (a consumable), but that proved surmountable.

Two examples will explain these bullet points: The pocket calculator and desktop PCs running Microsoft Windows.

Pocket calculators, or better, graphical calculators, were introduced in secondary education in Europe at the end of the 1970s. The problem they solved was that some important mathematical concepts could not be taught because the calculations on anything but toy problems were too cumbersome. With these electronic calculators, realistic problems in statistics, matrix algebra, and function theory could be introduced into secondary education. As these calculators can be used in class and at home, their use can be easily integrated into the relevant courses. Moreover, pupils learned how to perform arithmetic on real calculators like they would need in working life later.

So using the calculators solved a small, but very real problem in the teaching of mathematics, economics, and science. Obviously, a pocket calculator fits all of the other bullet points. They run for months or years on a single battery, get their contend from the text books, and they have been in continuous use for over 30 years now. A clear success story.

On the other hand, desktop PCs in school running Microsoft Windows defy every bullet point. The only general problem that is solved by a PC in school is Internet access. But there is little use for direct Internet access in class. Desktop PCs can be used in courses directed towards computer use, but even that is hardly useful in school. At home, PCs do have general practical value, but that has little to do with the limited presence of PCs in school. Introduction of such desktop PCs in schools in the developing world generally ends in a deception.

An important problem is that Microsoft Windows has a tendency to break in daily use, especially when the computer has an Internet connection. The hardware of desktop PCs is not designed for a tropical climate. Moisture and dust can easily break the hardware. Installation and maintenance are difficult and require special skills and knowledge. Desktop PCs consume a lot of power and, therefore, cannot run on batteries. So their use is very limited in locations with unreliable power supplies. Connectivity is good, if a wired or wireless Internet connection is available. And they can be used with CD/DVD disks or USB memory sticks.

The technological horizon is more complex to judge. In future generations, we can expect to see screens, keyboards, and computers of some kind. However, I still remember a quote from a parent in the 1980s. When asked why she preferred the use of MS Dos PCs over Apple Macintosh computers in primary school she answered “Because when my child will go to work, it will have to use MS Dos, and not the fancy graphical interface of the Apple Macintosh” (paraphrased from memory). And it has been this way ever since.

If we look at the developments of computer use in the last years, we see perpetual shifts. Nowadays, the shift is towards a completely different model of computing with the integrated User Interfaces of mobile phones (iOS and Android) becoming the standard for tablets, netbooks, and upwards into other computers. So the technological horizon of standard desktop computers has always been very short.

An example of new technical gear: The OLPC XO

As an illustration of a recent project, compare the above with the OLPC XO laptop. The design goals of the XO laptop came very close to the ideal of a no-worry drop-in technology.

The software is distantly related to the Android mobile phone operating system with a zero-maintenance update and security model. The laptop was designed to be robust and the only consumable was electricity. The laptop was easy to carry and protect. It enabled access to the Internet for video and voice connections, email and Instant Messaging, and you could also use it to play music. Connected to the Internet, it could replace radio, TV, phone, and music player.

The laptops could double as book readers and store a complete library, allowing schools that could not even afford textbooks to get a library for each child. On top of it, it could also be used as a computer. The technological horizon looks promising as some kind of small, mobile computer with a simplified interface is likely to be around for the next decade or so.
What went wrong with the first version of the XO laptop?

Basically, the execution fell somewhat short of the design goals. Quite a number of laptops were rolled out before the software was finished and these laptops suffered from a lot of very annoying bugs. These bugs could not be solved by the normal update mechanism, but required replacing the operating system itself. The logistics of supplying a new operating system image to laptops in the field proved to be impractical.

On the hardware side, the keyboard was not robust enough and broke in too many laptops, as did the trackpads. And power consumption was still a bit too high for many locations. The mesh network to share Internet connections did not scale well inside schools and did not deliver the planned connectivity. Supplying Internet connectivity to schools proved to be the Achilles heel of the project. And without an Internet connection, the laptops became much less useful for their intended purpose.

In then end, the first generation of the OLPC XO laptops came very, very close to achieving the status of a no-worry drop-in technology. And where there was Internet, they seem to function as intended. But without a solution for the Internet connectivity, the laptops are much less useful. Had there been Internet connectivity at home, we can be pretty sure that the children would have found out how to use the keyboards and navigate the User Interface. If primary school children can find out how to send text messages on mobile phones without formal instruction, they can learn to use the OLPC’s Sugar interface.

But even if the XOs function as intended, there remains the logistic problem of giving out and replacing laptops and delivering electricity and Internet connectivity. In general, all technological solutions require logistics to distribute the gear (TV sets, mobile phones), the electricity (or batteries, or solar panels), and the connections (transmitters, cell towers). These will always be a problem for rural areas in the developing world. But these factors affect each and every attempt to solve problems in the developing world as they are at the heart of the economic under-development to start with.

As many technophiles, I really love the OLPC laptop. But I know that was not the question. What we really want to know is whether there is a technology that solves the problem at hand. However, this discussion is targeted at a global audience, and we know that the cost of technology depends on the production volume. The very first radio was extremely expensive, the billionth transistor radio is a free promotion item. So I will look here at global problems with high volume solutions.

Example of a global problem and solution: Textbooks fantasies

To illustrate the ideas presented above, I will fantasize about a real global problem in education and a technological solution.

Textbooks are a necessity in school, but they are expensive. My country spends around 300 euro ($400) a year per pupil on textbooks in secondary school. For this money, each pupil could get a laptop and a broadband Internet connection at home for the duration of her education. With some change to spare for electronic textbooks. Most of this cost is the result of monopoly rents by the publishers, as it is in many developed countries. But even at half the price, each student could get an ebook reader with a lot of money to spend on electronic books and prepaid mobile Internet.

The root of the textbook problem lies in the cost of production. Textbooks are a difficult market, with high investments in writing and printing and high distribution costs. And it is an all or nothing market. Either your book is selected for the curriculum, and you sell big, or it is rejected and you sell nothing. Moreover, to stay up-to-date, textbooks have to be revised very often. A lot of insider knowledge is needed to produce a textbook that fits in the standard curriculum. As a result, the market for textbooks for primary and secondary education is always limited to a single school system (country).

And in the end, the textbooks are not that great at all. Ansary (2004) gives an illuminating and entertaining, but also infuriating, account of the way text-books are produced in the USA. Quite often it is a pain to use these textbooks. Most teachers have to create extra “cheat-sheets” to supply missing material and explain incomprehensible portions of the text. Beyond all these problems with the content, there is the daily wear and tear of paper books that makes every textbook usable for only a few years, if well cared for.

In accounts of classroom practises in the developing world, we often hear of whole classes that spend their day copying the complete text of a textbook from the blackboard into their notebooks. This seems a waste of time. When copying large amounts of text, you are unable to think about the text or even remember it. However, supplying the books themselves to the children was obviously not possible. So copying a book wholesale might be the only way the children can ever get hold of the text. Still, we will all agree that it would be better if the pupils had the same textbooks as the teacher. The teacher could then spend her time explaining the material in the textbook and children could spend time learning and practising the skills covered by the textbook.

So here we have a truly global problem: Expensive, outdated, low quality, and cumbersome textbooks that are often not available for the children in the developing world. Can we fantasize about a better system? One that gets both teachers and children the books they so desperately want and need?

There is a very good idea that was actually embraced by (some) politicians in the developed world, the Open Textbook Initiative. Creative Commons electronic books produced by authors and teachers in Wikipedia style (Creative Commons, 2010; Beshears, 2005; Durbin 2009). In principle, this can be applied world wide. The ministry can give grants for writing specific electronic textbook, or volunteers and teachers can write their own. The textbook are licensed under some Creative Commons license that allows free distribution and adaptation. The books are archived and made available in a repository and distributed electronically as ebooks.

Teachers, scientists, and students can add and submit changes in Wikipedia style. It cannot be said that ebooks are better than paper books, but they will be preferred over no books at all.
And the costs? As I wrote above, for what the developed countries pay for textbooks now, they can supply top of the line ebook readers and Internet connections to the students, and have massive amounts of money to spare for grants to write the books. And if you ever tried to lift the school backpack of a high-school student over here, you know that ebooks would take a heavy burden from their shoulders.

In the developed world, the Open Textbook initiative solves kind of a luxury problem. The developed countries can actually pay for the costs of over-priced paper books. They just feel they do not get quality for their money. And often no quality at all. The question is, could such an Open Textbook initiative work in the developing world, where paper textbooks are problematic?

Here we have to look again at our technology bullet list. The Open Textbook initiative does serve a pressing need for good and affordable textbooks. We can be pretty sure that every teacher in the world would welcome better, up to date, textbooks. So, provided a collection of good textbooks can be produced by way of government grants or volunteer work, this part is covered.

Current ebook readers are constructed for indoor use in the developed world. They do have too many unprotected openings and fragile components for a developing world environment. However, covering up these holes and putting in more robust components is not very difficult, the OLPC has done most of that work already. For most ebook readers this would be a minor, and cheap design change, not a problem.

The use of ebook readers is quite simple. You drop in an ebook (or a shelf of ebooks) and you start turning pages. Apart of language and date and time there is not much to set. So, indeed turn-key drop-in technology. Theoretically, you can update the software of an ebook reader, but there is not often a need for doing that. An ebook reader can in most respects be considered to have zero-maintenance.

And last, but not least, ebook readers using electronic paper displays have extremely low power use. Their requirements are low enough to make charging with small solar panels feasible. Current retail costs for cheap ebook reader offerings are below $100 for consumers. Ebook readers cannot be repaired (easily) in the field, so any program to supply them should stock for replacement readers.

The next bullet point is connectivity: How to get new books on the ebook reader. Ebooks can be transferred to an ebooks reader by either connecting it to a computer which has them stored or downloaded, or over a wireless connection in the more expensive ebook readers. Most readers have a slot for external memory SDcards, which could be used to distribute ebooks. Even though SDcards might be rather fragile in daily use, they can be distributed over surface mail. So, the connectivity could be handled by sending USB sticks or memory cards with the mail or a messenger. There would have to be some outlet with a computer or laptop to transfer the new ebooks.

Sounds ideal, so why has it not been done yet?

Even at $50 a piece (gross price), a complete roll-out would be a rather big investment for a single purpose gadget. The cost would exceed the total educational budgets of many countries by a large margin. And the organization of a coordinated roll out of so many devices could overwhelm the capacities of most administrations. The cost and organization alone of an ebook reader roll out would exceed the resources of the countries that need them most.

Furthermore, the technology is all very new. If you roll-out ebook readers today, you might miss out on the powerful and cheap tablet computers of next year. A kind of, very realistic, economic deflation fear. So the technological horizon is short, very short indeed with all the new tablet computers coming out. Ebook reader apps are already part of every new smartphone. In a few years time, separate ebook readers will cease to exist and a general mobile platform will have taken over their function.

There is also the chicken-and-egg problem of needing electronic textbooks to use an ebook reader in class, while these textbooks will not be produced if the children have no ebook readers. On the other hand, if there is one thing that can be learned from the history of the World-Wide-Web and Wikipedia, then it is that if there are readers, the writers will come. The real challenge is to get a national Open Textbook initiative going. This will be addressed in the next section.

Teaching the teachers: A program fantasy

From the earlier discussions on Educational Technology Debate, it has become quite clear that the real challenge is not to get cutting edge ICT4E gear in the hands of the children. The real challenge is to ensure that the teachers are able to actually make use of the technology in their lessons. The solution is simple to formulate: Remedial courses for the teachers. But the initial problem was that it was not possible to adequately teach the children. How can we then train the teachers?

First of all, there are much less teachers than children, and they can occasionally travel. So it should be possible to arrange some classes in (semi-)urban areas where it is easier to provide education for adults. On the other hand, children have ample time for learning, adults have other responsibilities. So any courses for teachers must be short, targeted, and effective. The main point is that a one week course during the summer break will not be enough to prepare for a large change in the curriculum including hitherto unseen technology. And for teachers too, it holds that education must be interactive. Simply dumping a large amount of documentation on them will not lead to them actually mastering the subject.

Let us assume some technological solution has been selected for a nationwide roll out. For the sake of argument, our fantasy ebook reader program is introduced in schools which lacked books. The ebook reader program is accompanied by a national Open Textbook program. Now, what follows is my fantasy of a teacher instruction plan to use these ebook readers. It is assumed that the Ministry of Education can hire some local (or international) educational experts to construct a basic curriculum and lesson plan for use with the textbooks on the ebook readers. These plans are the basis for the textbooks.

The current practise is that teachers do group drill exercises, e.g., children copy the teacher’s text book from the blackboard and memorize some part of it. Such drills normally would take most of the in-class time. The task of the training program is to instruct the teacher how to operate and use the technology itself. They should learn how best to teach the children the use and care of the technology. But this introduction to the technology is just the basic part.

The real training must be to instruct the teachers how to use the electronic textbooks in class. As copying and memorizing the text books has become an irrelevant exercise, there is time during class to do other things. So teachers will have to get an idea what these textbooks can be used for. The curriculum will be adapted to reflect the presence of the ebook readers. As other commenters have already remarked, this is not something that can be achieved in a mere 1 or 2 week course.

The solution would be some kind of continuous distance learning program. Any one-time out-of-town courses should be followed by refreshers over correspondence. This could be anything from surface mail of course materials and assignments, special magazines, to special (off-hour) radio and TV programs, phone-in sessions, and if Internet is available, live Internet chat or video conferencing sessions. Given that the whole program will cost quite a lot, a special, one time a week radio or TV show will not be that expensive. Tapes can be send to those who cannot listen or watch life.

For our ebook reader program, the reading and audio materials can be mailed on a USB stick. We can nicely integrate the distance learning course with the Open Textbook initiative. Instead of dumping the textbooks on the schools, it would be nice if the teachers would get a say in what would become part of the textbooks. So, part of the assignments could be to suggest improvements to the textbooks. Maybe write or edit paragraphs. And send back the notes. Nothing fancy, pencil and paper would already be enough. These notes can be processed by the editors of the textbooks. Best to keep a list of contributors at the back of the final textbooks.

Obviously, there is not a lot that can be done in the one to two years in the run up of a large roll out. Especially as the teachers will have their normal responsibilities and duties, which would already take up their time. A course with associated book, magazines, and radio and TV programs would probably be the best option.

This is a format that is used world-wide for teaching languages. There is a lot of experience with such TV/radio courses. The exact formulation will obviously depend on local circumstances and customs. The real advantage of such a program is that it can be produced and staffed by locals. Teachers “on the ground” can be interviewed, and radio shows can contain phone in question and answer sessions as well as listener feed-back. This is all quite ordinary practise in most countries.

It would be unrealistic to expect that all teachers will have opportunity and time to fully participate in the interactive and collaborative aspects of such a program. But the more teachers have a chance to be active in the program, the better it will take root. And for teachers too it will hold that peer instruction is the second best thing after teacher instruction. So if the program can reach a large fraction of the teachers, we can hope that their knowledge will diffuse through the whole community. And there is no reason to stop the information program after the roll out is completed.

Discussion and Conclusions

It is obvious that developing countries will not be able to double or triple their number of teachers in the short term. So for the next decade or so some solution will have to be devised and implemented to improve education for the children entering school. Beyond more teachers, there are only few options left. Technology is one of them. To increase the chance that the chosen technology will actually be effective, some precautions should be taken. Basically, the probability of success will vastly increase if the technology can be used and maintained by children for the intended purpose. Which is basically the main aim of the small bullet list above. Anything more complex or demanding risks being relegated to gather dust in a corner.

But after we have the wonderful gadgets and gear, it should improve education. As teachers will have to change their teaching habits, it is very advantageous to instruct them in using the technology to improve their lessons. Given the other obligations that occupy teachers, any face-to-face training courses have to be short. To make the changes permanent, an interactive follow up is needed over the months that follow the face-to-face courses. A large number of options exist for semi-interactive distance courses and follow ups: magazines and tapes in the mail, radio and TV with phone-in, or question sessions by mail or phone. All these are distance learning practises with a long history. Only think of all the language courses broadcast around the world.

Under-development and over-stretched schools have shown to be very hard problems to solve. Although some kind of technological progress will be involved in the eventual solution, it is still unclear whether introducing any single technology can actually help. But as technologies like radio, TV, mobile phones, and even Oral Hydration Therapy have shown, the dire effects of important global problems can be alleviated by introducing certain types of technology. With only limited instruction, I think it will be possible to find solutions to help alleviate some of the educational problems that result from a chronic shortage of qualified teachers in the developing world.

References

Ansary (2004). A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education: A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing, Tamim Ansary

Beshears (2005). The Case for Creative Commons textbook, by Fred M. Beshears, U.C. Berkeley, April 07, 2005

CESifo. Class size and student-teacher ratio, CESifo DICE Report 4/2009

Creative Commons (2010). Open Textbook,

Durbin (2009). Durbin Introduces Legislation to Make College textbook more Affordable (press release)

Huebler (2008). International Education Statistics, Analysis by Friedrich Huebler, Pupil/teacher ratio in primary school, Pupil/teacher ratio in primary school

Indian Times (2009). CM gives Rs 15,000 and a bicycle each to girls, Feb 4, 2009

The Times of India (2009). India has one of the lowest teacher-student ratios: Expert,, Nov 7, 2009

Rogers (2010). Top 7 Reasons Why Most ICT4D FAILS – Dr Clint Rogers

UNESCO. Table 11: Indicators on teaching staff at ISCED levels 0 to 3, (accessed 02022011)

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Our model: Producing Educational Games for a $10 Computer

Playpower is an open-source community that supports the design of affordable, effective and fun educational media for underprivileged children around the world. We are currently developing a suite of educational games for a $10 educational computer.

The computer is so affordable because it is based on a 30 year-old 8-bit microprocessor technology that is now in the public domain; the computer is now produced by dozens of competing manufacturers, driving costs down. The 8-bit computer comes with a keyboard, mouse, game controllers, dozens of games, and uses a home television as a screen.

This computer is widely available for sale in dozens of developing countries, including India, Pakistan, Nicaragua and Brazil. The existing economy of scale creates an opportunity for a new model of ICT4D distribution, which we call a “Manufacturing Intervention.” In this distribution model, the completed Playpower games are given away to the manufacturers, who can “preload” the games with the computers they sell to distributors. In this manner, Playpower games can piggyback on the existing distribution network, which is already reaching millions of BOP (bottom of the pyramid) consumers.

This $10 8-bit computer is just the beginning. We believe that a wide range of technologies, including netbooks and smartphones, will soon be widely affordable to BOP consumers. As these devices already come preloaded with games like Solitaire and Snake, preloading educational games and media on these devices could effectively reach millions of children for a very low cost.

Where is the Educational Content?

While market forces will make ICT that is affordable to BOP consumers, it seems clear that low-cost computer manufacturers will not have the profit margins to invest in the creation of effective educational content. So, the question is, who will create the content? Perhaps more importantly, who will pay for the creation of the content? It won’t be the consumers, nor the device manufactures. We believe that government and private support is needed to create a shared, remixable global library of educational media.

Intellectual Property and Content Appropriation

The $10 computer uses the same microprocessor technology as the 8-bit Apple II computer. The Apple II (along with other low-cost 8-bit computers) introduced computing to millions of children in America, with 8-bit educational games like Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. While these games have little commercial value, they would be valuable on our platform—unfortunately, their copyrights will not expire for another 50 years.

We strongly advocate the modification of international intellectual property laws to promote the availability of educational digital media content in developing contexts. Ironically, at a consumer and business level, intellectual property is often completely unprotected in developing contexts—but this is not improving the availability of educational media. We believe that Intellectual property laws and licenses should be enhanced to support the legal flow of information to places that need it most—those who are most unable to pay for it.

The Case for Public Support of Digital Educational Media

Even conservative political philosophies believe that governments should provide free and effective primary school education. This is one reason why a quality, free public school education is recognized by the United Nations as a Universal Human Right. Despite this fact, millions of children around the world are receiving an ineffective primary education in government schools. In addition to the life of ignorance and low-wages facing these children, a lack of education stalls economic and political development. Low-quality education may even effect global security: the low quality of public schools has driven the dramatic expansion of religious schools in places like Pakistan.

In contrast to teacher training, quality digital educational media can scale rapidly and at a very low cost. It can often be quickly modified for regional languages and curricula, particularly if the source code is available. Furthermore, digital educational content can be improved over time, through an iterative development process. This suggests that digital educational media could dramatically impact education in developing contexts.

Unfortunately, creating quality educational media is difficult, time consuming, and often requires expensive efficacy studies and iteration. As a result, commercial media companies do not have the incentive to participate in the production of quality educational media—particularly media that is focused on developing contexts. This suggests a clear need for the public support of educational media development, at a regional, national and even international level. In addition to governmental procurements, governments could also incentivize content development through tax credits for media that serves the public good. To make the case for public support, however, it is important that ICT4D researchers can generate solid evidence for the utility of digital educational media.

Playpower Research

While we strongly support digital educational media in schools, Playpower.org is focused on providing games that can serve the needs of families—specifically, families that might buy a $10 educational computer. Therefore, we have undertaken an extensive field research program in India to identify these needs and to understand the use of the 8-bit computer in low-income households. Surprisingly, this research has identified a range of low-cost computing technologies that are currently prevalent in low-income households ($100-$300 per month, per household).

Since cable TV is widespread, even in low-income households, we found many families that had televisions or set-top boxes that had built-in games, including educational games, which are played with a remote control. Other households had handheld video game systems with small screens, while others had “Toy Laptops” that contained a range of educational games. Of course, mobile phones are ubiquitous in low-income households, and are almost certainly the most common gaming platform. Playpower.org has an academic collaboration with Millee, an organization that is focused on developing English learning games for mobiles phones.

Value of Playing Video Games

Given that our 8-bit computer platform is primarily used for playing video games, we hope to investigate whether video games contribute or detract from our educational objectives. Our fieldwork indicates that many low-income children in urban India have played video games, either on a mobile phone, on the television, in an arcade, or even on a PC. Does this experience have any positive or negative effects?

There is the possibility that playing videogames can improve economic opportunities for low-income children. While further study is required, the logic of this claim is as follows: videogame play seems to generally increase a child’s interest in computers; this interest results in more exposure to computers and enhanced motivation to learn computer skills, which subsequently results in videogame-playing children developing more computer skills, relative to children who do not play videogames. These greater computer skills can directly lead to meaningful economic opportunities.

Join Us in Person

Sound plausible? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And if you’re in New York City this weekend, join us for a Playpower 8-Bit Game Design Workshop at NYU.

The workshop will be led by Playpower founder Derek Lomas, Playpower programmer Kishan Patel, 8-bit artist Don Miller, and NYU professor Chris Hoadley (host). We’re focusing on:

• Furthering the develop Playpower’s current suite of games (e.g., Hanuman Typing Warrior, Hanuman Quiz Adventure, Malaria Prevention prototype)
• Learning the basics of 8-bit game design
• Expanding Playpower’s growing volunteer network!

We’ll have a mix of artists, graphic designers, programmers, learning specialists and ICT4D experts. If you’re interested in attending, please fill out this form ASAP.

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I thought I’d jump on the new near “top trends” bandwagon and provide some observations of my own for information technology for development (ICT4D).

Netbook fever and 1:1 computing in education begin to fade into the background

Ever since Nicholas Negroponte launched the One Laptop per Child project and Intel followed with the Classmate PC, the buzz has been about netbooks for classrooms, or 1:1 computing (one computer for each student).

The reality is that the majority of netbooks sold are not sold to schools, but to middle class consumers who are looking for a smaller notebook form-factor. In my 2009 travels, ministries of education in Latin America seemed to be the most notebook centric. Peru had purchased 150,000 XO laptops. Chile wouldn’t even consider anything that wasn’t mobile. As governments’ emerge from budget lockdown, I predict that they will look for more affordable and realistic options, such as PC labs and desktop computing.

Alternative computing models “cross the chasm.”

A desktop PC or notebook computer has typically been the primary way people in the developing world get exposed to computers and the Internet. That is changing rapidly with the introduction of solutions that significantly lower acquisition and maintenance costs and provide increased energy efficiency over a standard PC or notebook. For example, the company I currently work for, NComputing, sells a product that allows up to 30 users to share one, inexpensive desktop PC by hooking up additional monitors, keyboards, and mice to small access devices and costs about 75% less than a PC and uses 90% less energy. In 2009, NComputing reached 15% of the US market desktop computers in K-12 education.

Microsoft has also embraced “shared computing” for education, announcing a new product called Windows Multipoint Server that will be available later this year. Many developing countries, such as India, Brazil, Pakistan and others, now allow these type of solutions to be bid in addition to standard PCs and notebooks. Just as shared access will prevail over 1:1 computing, virtual desktops will become an increasingly popular option given the tremendous cost savings over traditional desktops.

Mobile phones and Computers

The final trend to watch is whether one form factor – the mobile phone or the computer – will win out over the other in ICT4D. With smart phones providing most of the capabilities of a computer, some argue this will be the ICT device that prevails. But is it really a zero-sum game? My opinion is that the computer and the mobile phone will coexist for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes you just need a full-size keyboard and monitor for an application. And sometimes you just have to be truly mobile (and by mobile I mean being able to transact on the move vs. sitting somewhere with a laptop). At Intel we often talked about “three screens” … the small screen (handheld), the bigger screen (computer), and the biggest screen (TV).

But all of these trends should lead to increased development through access to innovative ICT solutions and services that could be created and driven by social enterprises. I’d love to see a special report from BusinessWeek and The Economist on the convergence of these trends and its impact, but if not, we can always blog about it.

Reading the resulting commentary, I’d like to declare success. I feel we have found a new model, that is an child of these two parents, mixing genes of both to create a new, better ICT4E model where multiple platforms plus a single learning environment equals more educational beneficiaries.

Multiple Platforms

From the beginning, this discussion recognized that different communities allocate their limited resources differently. Some will have the resources for high saturation of computing tools, while others will not. In fact a single community may have multiple computing models within its own educational system, based on age, maturity, and progress of its students. Mark Beckford gave us a great example:

In Macedonia, NComputing deployed over 100,000 virtual desktops which made Macedonia the country with the greatest density of computers to students. But Macedonia also issued a tender to deploy a smaller quantity of netbooks. They cannot afford mobility for all students, and yet even at 1:1 desktop computing they see the advantages of mobility.

So educators need not feel that its a either-or decision. Communities can have both personal and shared computing environments in the same school. And as Alex Van de Sande points out, its not the technology that matters, but the way educators use it:

The most important is that in either case, the experience must be saturated, shared and free. The shared PC lab experience, where there are many peers around you who can quickly teach you is invaluable. But all that is nullified by models with restrict hours and usage rules. The 1:1 laptops are great on the fact that the freedom from “this is how you are supposed to use this” rules make you experiment more. But doing it alone may lead to the laptops being used for more private entertainment – like gaming.

In that context, a mixed environment may be the best choice. One where students use computer labs in the school setting, where usage can be monitored and directed, and on a more personal basis when outside the school.

Single Learning Environment

With all these platforms, there quickly becomes the need to maintain a homogeneous learning environment. One familiar look and feel that follows the child as they access different platforms during the day and their education. Walter Bender is working on such an environment with Sugar on a Stick.

This USB memory stick-based educational software platform is based on the principles of cognitive and social constructivism, and contains its own operating system (Fedora 11) so it can be run from just the memory device itself – no hard drive or specific operating system needed.

Caroline gives us her thoughts on the advantages of such an approach:

Sugar on a Stick should make mobility cheaper. If kids take their sticks with them they can use them on clusters of computers in day care centers, community centers and at home if the parent has a computer. Thus by using computers in different places in their environment they can get quite a bit more hours of computing time per week and their desktop and all their work is mobile. I wonder if we can run numbers on that type of solution, and maybe instead of running them per machine, run the numbers to compare $ per hour the child uses a computer.

And Walter Bender confirms that the Sugar on a Stick approach can be complimentary to current and new platform investments:

It is great that there are many different such platforms being developed: a diversity of hardware configurations is necessary to meet the demands of schools, budgets, and cultures. But one can remain agnostic about hardware platforms and configurations, while providing a great learning experience, better utilizing the installed base of computers while tapping the potential to engage every child in critical thinking, arming them with the complementary tools of science and the arts.

More Beneficiaries

So with a single learning environment on multiple platforms, let’s start talking about the real numbers of beneficiaries. Either in school or at home, let’s move away from the assumption that only the child assigned to the computer is using it. At any given point in time, children are usually in groups, learning from each other. In fact, it seems children learn best when learning with others. Alexa Joyce notes that:

Sugata Mitra’s research suggests that groups of 3-4 children per computer can be more fruitful than 1:1. In groups of such a size, children readily exchange ideas and knowledge about the topic they are investigating, as well as the computer itself.

Let’s not stop at children. When they are home, they are not necessarily alone. Siblings, parents, and others are nearby and they too hear the call of a glowing screen as Walter Bender tells us:

A study done by Claudia Urrea in Costa Rica found that the majority of parents use the computer at home for their own learning – a further leveraging of the investment. Other programs, where it is infeasible to let the children travel between school and home with a computer, have instituted “technology goes home” programs – a subsidy to parents to purchase new or used equipment to have in the home. The goals of such programs have been to bridge learning from school into the home and to engage parents and siblings in the school community and in their own learning.

This new usage model, where a single learning environment over multiple technology platforms, is used by more than just students, may change the way in which we think about costs, which is one of the largest barriers to adoption, just after plain inertia & fear of change.

Costs are often calculated on a per-student basis. Yet, with siblings and parents as co-learners with their children, education leaders may change their mindset around platform costs. Instead, divide platform costs by student + 1 parent & 1 sibling. Yet also reduce costs, as there is only one software system to maintain.

And so I say we have a whole new ICT4E model with multiple platforms, a single learning environment, that empowers more beneficiaries to learn at a lower cost. A success, eh?
.

“OLPC’s key development in our view is the software – who cares about the hardware as long as it gets the job done inexpensively?”

Nonetheless, it is still worthwhile discussing the advantages (and disadvantages) of various hardware approaches to deploying learning software such as the Sugar Learning Platform. I am ignorant of the current total-cost-of-ownership of the various options available; I leave this complex calculation to Mark Beckford and assume that he will take into consideration not just the lifetime cost of the hardware, but also training, administration, maintenance and repair, energy and disposal costs.

Other important factors, not often considered, include where the cost is born and to whom the investment brings benefit. For example, can support be delegated to enterprising high-school students (or some other local community resource) or must it be outsourced (out of district or even out of the country)? All other factors being equal, it matters where you make the investment.

What I will discuss here is “reach” in terms of who is learning, what is learned, and how it is learned. If we set our sights higher than using the computer to access information and learn “21st century computer skills”, the choice of model needs to be taken into consideration.

1:1 Computing in the USA

Of course, the principle advantage of a saturated model of computing is that the computer is available to every child at all times. In a middle school in Massachusetts, the children use their laptops to write in every class, including music, dance, and gym.

The children learn computer skills, but they also learn to use computation to enhance other curricula goals, through demonstrations, projects, and critiques. Learners develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand. Computation is used as a critical-thinking tool in the context of open-ended exploration and discovery, going beyond the use of the computer as a tool of instruction.

It is often the stated goal of one-to-one computer programs that laptops go home with the children. This is desired in that not only does child ownership result in less breakage – statistics from the Maine laptop program bear this out – but also, the computer, which otherwise was only available at school is now available to the entire family.

A study done by Claudia Urrea in Costa Rica found that the majority of parents use the computer at home for their own learning – a further leveraging of the investment. Other programs, where it is infeasible to let the children travel between school and home with a computer, have instituted “technology goes home” programs – a subsidy to parents to purchase new or used equipment to have in the home. The goals of such programs have been to bridge learning from school into the home and to engage parents and siblings in the school community and in their own learning.

Mobility and form factor also play a role. In a trip to rural Thailand, I got to see first hand how netbooks were being used to change what is learned and how it is learned. Two examples really resonated with me. In one example, the children organized a orchestra in which they combined computer music with the traditional instruments of their village. They sat on the floor with their parents, performing together.

Here, the form factor of a netbook computer was an enabling element to their physically being able to interweave the new and the old into a community and musical synthesis. In a second example, the children took their netbooks into the forest to capture the sights and sounds of their habitat. In some schools, students attach sensors to their netbooks so as to capture data such as temperature “in vivo”. Back in the classroom, they process these raw data as part of their science curriculum.

Mobility has also played a role in extra curricular activities. For example, an elementary-school student established an after-school photography business in a community for Afghani refugees in Pakistan, using a netbook.

But the most dramatic example is one that Benjamin M. Schwartz recently brought to my attention. Ben is the author of the Distance Activity, which measures the distance between two OLPC XO-1 computers through a measurement of sound-wave prorogation. It is incredibly engaging and has been used in a wide variety of situations, including gym class, where it has be used to introduce measurement and calculation to activities usually not considered academic.

Acoustic Tape Measure

Ben recently blogged about Stephanie Selvick’s experience with the use of Distance in a school in Senegal. A previously skeptical teacher enthusiastically began to brainstorm about connections to traditional curricula goals, such as “assignments for his kids to measure the distance around their homes or rooms” and to “figure out area from those numbers.”

As was reported from Senegal, “The goal of making teachers the experts for each other felt underway.” Opening the door to teachers to engage in learning “constructively” is of tremendous value.

Opening their eyes to the fact that they have ideas to contribute and that the software and hardware are able to be shaped to meet their needs is hard to put a price on, but also should be a factor in estimating the cost of deployment. While such “awakenings” could take place in a school computer lab, they are much more likely to occur when computation is always at hand, as part of everyday life.

I have largely avoided discussing the saturation vs. shared-use dichotomy. The same software, e.g. Sugar, can be used in both configurations. I echo Dukker in being supportive of whatever means we can deploy to get great software into the hands of children, inexpensively. However, we should not lose sight of the benefits afforded by the form factor and mobility of the netbook computer.

“21st century computer skills” seem to be about the acquisition of some specific knowledge – necessary but not sufficient. Learning is about the acquisition of a new “outlook” – what we are capable of doing with that knowledge .