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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief look at other OLPC efforts

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

Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

Nepal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicaragua / Nigeria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing thoughts

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

ICT4E in developing countries is here to stay

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

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

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

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

The hard part of ICT4E is the “for education“

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

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

You can only learn so much from a pilot

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

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

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

Context matters

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

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

Details, details, details

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

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

Don’t reinvent the flat tire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Infrastructure

Charger and non-connected network plug

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of 45,000 solar panels

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

2. Maintenance

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

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

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

Una laptop por niño repair center

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

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

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

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

3. Content and Materials

Using the XO to learn about geometry

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

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

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

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

Guide for teacher training

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

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

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

4. Community involvement

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

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

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

XO bag designed by Peruvian volunteers

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

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

5. Teacher training

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

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

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

Voluntary refresher training course

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

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

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

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

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

6. Evaluation

Early IADB evaluation report

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

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

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

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

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

Summary and Outlook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Infrastructure

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

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

WiMAX antenna at a school

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

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

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

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

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

2. Maintenance

Repair team’s DIY charger for multiple XOs

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

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

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

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

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

Poster on “How I take care of my XO”

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

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

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

3. Contents and materials

Teacher blogging about her pupils’ work

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

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

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

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

Pointing teachers to OLPC Peru materials

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

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

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

4. Community inclusion

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

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

A meeting with principals and formadores

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

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

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

5. Teacher training

Teachers during a training session

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

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

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

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

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

Scratch demo on formadora’s laptop

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

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

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

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

6. Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary and Outlook

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

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

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

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

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If there’s one country that has taken the notion of “one laptop per child” very seriously then it’s Uruguay.

As mentioned in the OLPC in South America introduction to date the country has distributed approximately 400,000 of OLPC’s XO-1 laptops, thereby equipping every single pupil and 18,000 teachers of its public primary education system with a laptop. Not stopping there, the country is now in the process of rolling out 100,000 laptops – 90,000 of them being OLPC XO-1.5 HS machines, with the remaining 10,000 being Intel Classmates – in its secondary education system.

Switzerland of South America

It’s not hard to argue that in many ways Uruguay presented the perfect environment for a country-wide 1-to-1 computing in education project. Pretty much regardless of which metric one looks at, Uruguay is always in the upper segments, particularly within the South American context:

• Literacy Rate: 98%
• Human Development Index (HDI): 0.865
• GDP per capita: $10,079 (2009)
• Internet users: 40 per 100 (2008)

Especially when it comes to primary education, Uruguay provided a stable foundation to build on given that practically every pupil finishes the six years of primary school and as a result literacy levels are very high. At the same time the physical infrastructure in terms of reliable access to electricity and the Internet also existed in many parts of the country.

It’s within this context that then-president Tabaré Vázquez first announced “Plan Ceibal” – Ceibal being both the acronym for Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea – Basic educational connectivity for online learning as well as being an emblematic Uruguayan plant. The corresponding presidential decree was signed in mid-April 2007 and in then-president Vázquez’s own words:

“[Plan Ceibal's] longer-term objective is to promote social justice by promoting equal access to information and communication tools for all our people.”

Distributing the aforementioned 400,000 XO-1 laptops was thereby the first step of a larger process, and that ambitious first goal was completed at the end of 2009. Hence Uruguay is the first country to achieve full device saturation in its public primary school system. This makes the county and excellent example of having transitioned from the “should we do it” and “which technology do we use” stage to the more important, and more complicated, question of “how do we do it”?

Status quo

Now as indicated in the introduction the main indicators of Plan Ceibal I was looking at during the two weeks I spent in Uruguay in July are what I call the six criteria for successful implementations of ICT for Education projects in developing countries.

1. Infrastructure

Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay

On a logistical side it is impressive to see how approximately 400,000 OLPC XO-1 laptops were distributed within 24 months. An interesting side-effect of that distribution was that the country discovered several thousand children which previously hadn’t been officially registered. Registering the children included them and their families in social services and support.

Almost all of the schools are connected to the country’s electricity network. The few remaining schools are planned to receive solar panels over the coming months with 10 schools currently being part of a pilot project to get the details right.

In terms of Internet connectivity, 98% of the primary schools involved with the program now have Internet access and 150,000 children can walk less than 300m to the next public WiFi hotspot. Additionally various community and youth centers, cooperatives, and other organizations have started providing public WiFi hotspots in many cities and towns across the country. An important note to make, is that Plan Ceibal closely collaborated with ANTEL, Uruguay’s largest telecommunications company which is government-owned, to provide this high degree of connectivity at a subsidized price.

Canal Ceibal TV studio

Going a step further, Plan Ceibal also developed Canal Ceibal which is a special television program that is focused on presenting various ways and methods of how the XOs can be used for learning. The program is broadcast over the cable network and more recently the various segments have also been uploaded to YouTube.

As of early October more than 200 videos had been made available and Uruguayan volunteers recently compiled a detailed overview of approximately 50 videos that show which subject, grade, and software is being demonstrated.

All of these activities are coordinated by approximately 180 people who work at a newly created organizational unit called CITS (Centro para la Inclusión Tecnológica y Social – Center for Technological and Social Inclusion) within LATU (Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay – Technology Laboratory of Uruguay). LATU is the organization that then-president Vázquez had tasked with executing the technical and operational implemention of Plan Ceibal. This is an interesting decision given that in most cases it’s the Ministry of Education itself which runs ICT4E projects.

So in terms of the infrastructure it has built up Plan Ceibal is undoubtedly very impressive and will greatly benefit from this solid foundation in the future.

2. Maintenance

One of the biggest issues that Plan Ceibal has encountered so far is extensive breakage of the XO-1 laptops it has distributed. An official survey earlier this year found that 14,2% of the laptops were broken in one way or another and that an another 13,2% were in an “unusable state” due to currently undergoing a repair process, being locked down by the country’s XO security system or a variety of other issues.

Assuming that the results of the survey are representative for the whole country this means that in total 27,4% of the laptops – more than 100,000 in total – weren’t usable as of April 2010. Similarly an independent report by volunteers of the RAP Ceibal San Jose group that was released in August 2010 indicated that only 68,3% of the XOs in the surveyed homes were working without any issues.

Plan Ceibal has since been working hard to adapt and improve its maintenance system in order to deal with this issue. Originally all of the broken laptops were repaired in a central facility in Montevideo. This required parents to contact a call-center, receive a shipping number, and then go to a post-office from where the XO was sent in free of charge. The repair center then evaluated whether the breakage was covered by the warranty provided by the government or whether the parents had to pay a fee for the repair.

This approach proved to have some limitations as people didn’t know the phone number of the call center, were reluctant to call it due to fear of an expensive phone call, weren’t willing to send their children’s XOs away via the post office, and had a variety of other concerns. This lead to the situation where only a third (official survey) or fourth (RAP Ceibal survey) of the broken machines had actually been sent in for repair.

A common sight: a broken XO keyboard

In the recent months Plan Ceibal has expanded its repair process via several significant steps. The first one was to establish about a dozen mobile repair teams which go out and visit schools, particularly in rural areas. As many laptops as possible are fixed on-site with the remaining ones being entered into the repair system.

Secondly the project has started partnerships with already existing computer-repair shops and businesses across the country. They are taught how to repair XO laptops and then serve as local repair facilities in their respective cities and regions.

Additionally Plan Ceibal has built up significant capabilities when it comes to being able to deal with complex breakages. Previously these would have meant that an XO or its motherboard would have to be discarded. Thanks to investing in special equipment and training staff they can now do a lot complex repairs – such as ones of broken motherboard chips – in-country. Similarly Plan Ceibal has closely collaborated with OLPC’s engineering team to work on improvements of the XO laptops to address certain weaknesses. One example is the thickness of the XO-1’s keyboard membrane which was increased after reports of keys frequently ripping off after a few months of use.

All of these measures however only cover scenarios where the laptops are already broken. An equally important area to focus on is the mitigation of these breakages. To that end some volunteers in Montevideo as well as other cities have started organizing parent information events before the laptops are handed out in the first grades. While no evaluation has been done to record the effects of these meetings, many volunteers agreed that they’ve seen significant drops in the number of broken machines in schools where parents were told that the XO is an important learning tool for their children and not, as it is often perceived, a toy.

Overall I believe that Plan Ceibal will soon be able to address the high breakage rates they’re currently seeing. This process could likely be both accelerated as well as improved by dedicating more resources to mitigation-strategies as well as extensive outreach to schools and communities in critical urban and rural contexts.

If you’re interested in more information about this topic then I’d recommend reading the article XO Breakage Rates and Mitigation Strategies in Uruguay which I published on OLPC News back in July.

3. Contents and materials

A basic manual for eToys

One of the key components of any ICT4E initiative is the educational content and materials that pupils as well as teachers use for learning and teaching. Now an interesting aspect here is that people define “educational content” in many different ways.

Some argue that a country’s curriculum is that educational content since it contains a list of all the things pupils should know and be able to do at a certain age. Hence the argument goes that the only question that needs to be worked on is how this content will be taught with the help of new tools such as the XO laptops.

On the other hand there are people who strongly believe that the use of technology enables new forms of content, and this content needs to be specifically developed. Current content is seen as only making use of the benefits provided by current tools such as chalkboards, books, pens and paper.

Plan Ceibal in many ways tries to embrace both approaches. Ceibal’s teacher training (see the corresponding section below for more details) has generally been focused on how to use the existing Activities that the XO laptops are shipped with for different subject areas and grades. At the same time Plan Ceibal has supported the development of new educational software and content in a variety of ways and helps distribute it via Plan Ceibal’s Educational Portal.

One example of new content creation are idea competitions where teachers can submit their own visions of educational content or software. The best submissions are selected by a jury and subsequently funding is made available to turn the initial idea into a digital learning object.

A second approach are open competitions for companies or organizations. CITS basically puts out a call for these entities to submit their software or content for review with the goal to obtain limited rights to distribute the best submissions on the XOs in its school system.

National game competition poster

A third model is when CITS asks companies for bids to write a specific type of software such as for example a system which helps teachers keep track of pupils’ attendance.

Last but not least there are also external competitions which are run by other organizations or companies. The resulting software and content are vetted by CITS before they’re distributed via inclusion in the standard software release or Plan Ceibal’s Educational Portal. One example of this model was used for a game which resulted from a competition originally organized by the Ministry of Tourism.

The result of all these efforts is a collection of content and materials which is mainly made available via the aforementioned Plan Ceibal Educational Portal. This collection of approximately 500 different objects includes a broad variety of media such as online resources, games, videos, tutorials, guides, as well as links to other Web sites. In terms of subject areas it covers arts, language, mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and foreign languages. There are also a number of materials with a health-related focus such as Dengue fever and the dangers of smoking.

The impression I got after speaking to a variety of people in Uruguay is that although these materials exist and are available to pupils and teachers – thanks to the near ubiquity of Internet access in schools – there’s a lack of knowledge of how to actually use and integrate them in the classroom context. Additionally some teachers mentioned being overwhelmed by the broad variety of choices with a subject area rather than being able to rely on a single text book as it’s generally been the case up to now.

This impression might be related to teacher training, yet it shows that simply making content available isn’t enough to ensure that it’s being (effectively) used for learning. One way to approach this issue could be to include guides and support materials for teachers – and possibly also parents – which help them understand how to use each content object with the pupils.

At the end of the day it seems to be clear that digital learning content and materials will need additional support as they’re being phased into the education system in order to convince teachers to use them rather than tried and trusted tools such as text books.

4. Community inclusion

Volunteers of RAP Ceibal in Montevideo

Due to both its vision and its size Plan Ceibal has attracted a variety of entities outside of the official implementation organization CITS who are contributing to the project with a variety of efforts. These initiatives and groups of people play a key role in reaching out to a variety of stakeholders, such as parents, teachers, and school administrators and generally addressing what they perceive to be gaps in the official initiative.

Three initiatives are particularly noteworthy in this context:

Flor de Ceibo is a community outreach project that was started at Universidad de la República – Uruguay’s largest university – in 2008. The program’s three main goals are:

• To create an enabling space for participation in the ongoing and interdisciplinary national effort that is Plan Ceibal.
• To contribute to the closing of the digital divide by involving university students in Plan Ceibal.
• To enable new forms of collaboration between the university and the broader society.

In order to achieve these goals both professors as well as several hundred students are working on a broad variety of projects, e.g. special programs for single-mothers, in this area.

ceibalJAM mascot

ceibalJAM is an independent NGO that is focused on developing high-quality software and content for learning. Some examples of work ceibalJAM has supported are:

• Conozco Uruguay, a Sugar Activity for learning about Uruguay’s geography.
• JAMedia which turns every XO into a TV and radio tuned to Uruguayan online channels as well as being a versatile video- and audio-player.

Additionally ceibalJAM is regularly organizing events and meetings in Montevideo that bring together teachers, parents, students, artists, and other people who are interested in learning more about Plan Ceibal and how to contribute to the project.

Last but not least RAP Ceibal (Red de Apoyo al Plan Ceibal – Support Network for Plan Ceibal) is a volunteer network of individuals and groups of people supporting Plan Ceibal in many different ways. These cover basic activities such as handing out and repairing XOs as well as the previously mentioned compiling of surveys about the state and use of the XOs or introducing parents to Plan Ceibal in general and the XOs in particular.

At one point, 50,000 XOs across the country refused to boot due to a software issue and only the large-scale participation of RAP Ceibal volunteers enabled the issue to be resolved in a relatively short period of time. (More information about RAP Ceibal can be found in the RAP Ceibal – Uruguay’s volunteer network article on OLPC News.)

Additionally some groups and organizations are working on more temporary efforts within the context of Plan Ceibal. One example is eXpO fotos: an exhibition based on photos taken by pupils with their XOs during a series of photography workshops run by a museum in Montevideo.

The situation in Uruguay offers interesting insights into the role the various groups mentioned above as well as others play in ensuring the sustainability of a project such as Plan Ceibal. The case of the 50,000 disabled XOs is an important example that shows how informal communities or independent NGOs can often address needs and situations that more traditional organizations and hierarchies such as Ministries of Education – or in Uruguay’s case CITS – aren’t well equipped to deal with. Similarly these entities can provide grassroots, community, and service components that are often underestimated key factor in ensuring the support and buy-in of stakeholders such as parents, teachers, and school administrators.

5. Teacher training

Teacher training within the context of Plan Ceibal has undergone a number of iterations over the past three years. With the pilot project in 2007 no teacher training took place before the laptops were handed out which led to a variety of issues.

In 2008 the training was focused on building capacity of regional inspectors as well as informatics teachers who were in turn supposed to train all the other teachers in their region or school. This approach combined with a broader lack of understanding of the laptop’s abilities and potential resulted in the training being too focused on how to use the machine itself, and not focused on how to use it in the learning process.

In 2009 the concept of champion teachers and “formadores” (teacher trainers) who were meant to lead and inspire by example was introduced. It turned out that the several dozen people in these roles, in combination with a revamped training program that focused on learning how to use individual applications, also didn’t have the desired large-scale impact.

Using XOs to learn about the environment

Now in 2010 the training program was again radically redesigned. This process was still in somewhat of a limited pilot phase when I visited Uruguay in July, and it is supposed to be introduced nation-wide towards the end of the year. So it remains to be seen how things will work out over the next 12 to 18 months. In any case some key components of this new model are:

• The introduction of support roles such as “maestros de apoyo Ceibal” (Ceibal support teachers) and “amigo Ceibal” (Ceibal friend) who train and help teachers both inside as well as outside the classroom
• The creation of groups and meetings in and between schools to facilitate the exchange of experiences
• The start of the television program Canal Ceibal
• The inclusion of distance learning via a learning platform built around Moodle
• A redesign of Plan Ceibal’s Educational Portal
• Separate training sessions for teachers working in special schools

Given the large scale and long-term vision of Plan Ceibal another important component are efforts to better integrate the knowledge about the educational use of technology in the education and career paths for future teachers. While some ideas and initiatives in this area were discussed, to me it seems like there’s a lack of a comprehensive plan which ensures that the next generation of teachers is well versed in the tools they will encounter in the classrooms.

Overall I would argue that teacher training efforts within Plan Ceibal are still in an early experimental stage. Different approaches have been tried out over the past three years but it seems like none of them managed to meet the required combination of effectiveness and efficiency. As a result the 18,000 teachers aren’t utilizing the laptops as extensively and effectively as envisioned.

There’s no doubt that good teacher training is one of the most important, complex, and expensive parts of any ICT for Education project. While not having been able to completely solve this puzzle yet Uruguay’s experiences do point to what a suitable solution could look like:

• Training that takes place before the laptops are handed out combined with in-service training and in-classroom support
• Training components that take place in both physical and virtual environments
• Training that is really focused on how to use the laptop for learning rather than spending too much time on simply learning how to use a particular application
• Creating suitable spaces for teachers to exchange ideas, experiences, and materials they made while using the laptops
• Inclusion of training of methods and abilities required for using connected digital tools in schools in the education of future generations of teachers

6. Evaluation

Downloading new Activities from the web

Given that Uruguay is the first major country to actually have given a laptop to every child in its primary school system there’s of course a significant amount of interest – both inside as well as outside the country – in seeing what the results and impacts of Plan Ceibal are.

In broad terms there are two different categories of impacts that are being evaluated in ICT4E projects, and Plan Ceibal is no different here:

Educational impacts can cover a broad variety of topics such as school attendance rates, attitudes towards school and learning, grades, cognitive skills, acquisition of ICT abilities and many other metrics.

Social impacts can include looking at secondary users and potential beneficiaries of ICT4E projects, the reduction of the digital divide, use of the Internet outside of school, use of Internet based communication services such as e-mail and other aspects concerning the use and impacts of laptops outside the education setting.

An interesting development in Uruguay is that there several evaluation efforts are underway in parallel. CITS itself has a small team of pedagogists and sociologists whose work encompasses both the educational and the social dimension. Additionally an independent project called ILATIS is evaluating Plan Ceibal as part of a larger effort to compare four different ICT4E projects in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. Most recently a local sub-chapter of the previously mentioned RAP Ceibal volunteer network has undertaken its own study to get a better understanding of how the laptops are being used.

It’s important to note that the majority of the evaluations are still in relatively early stages given that the distribution of the XOs was only completed in late 2009, and hence many schools have barely had them for a year.

Yet when looking at evaluations as a tool for continually monitoring developments it becomes clear that even though in many cases it’s too early to draw any final conclusions there are some trends which can already be observed.

One important comment at this point is that CITS isn’t particularly interested in measuring the impact on traditional achievements such as test results or grades. This is mainly due to Plan Ceibal being primarily meant to be a social equity project which uses the education system as its catalyst. Hence the focus is firmly set on exploring impacts such as ICT skills, collaboration between students, group learning, critical thinking, and autonomous learning.

One fairly simple metric that is gathered is how often teachers plan to use the XOs in class. According to this early CITY evaluation report from December 2009 a bit more than half of the teachers were planning on using the XOs once or twice a week for individual or group activities during class with 12% and 21% using them for these activities on an (almost) daily basis. Tasks to be completed on the XO at home were significantly less frequent with 33% doing this once or twice a week and only 3% on a more regular basis. These numbers also align quite well with the results from the more recent RAP Ceibal San Jose study mentioned earlier.

Looking at use outside the education context it is interesting that early results from 2009 indicate that on average children use the XOs for 10 hours and 20 minutes outside of school with the median being approximately 7 hours. During that time a broad variety of use can be observed which include

Playing a Plan Ceibal detective game

• playing games
• taking photos and videos
• writing
• painting
• looking for school-related information
• downloading videos and music
• composing music
• sending e-mails
• writing blogs

The earlier mentioned broad availability of Internet in schools is the basis for the popularity of the many online services. This applies to both the pupils themselves as well as secondary users such as siblings or other family members. In some cases the desire to be online has also increased the importance of the schools as community gathering centers outside normal school hours. Similarly, another data point which I consider to be interesting is that mothers often seem to use their child’s XOs to search for health-related information online.

Overall it seems clear that many more in-depth evaluations are needed to be able to assess the short- and long-term impact of Plan Ceibal. I believe this is both necessary and beneficiary for Plan Ceibal itself as well as the larger ICT4E community. Such an understanding of the variety of educational and social impacts, both expected as well as unexpected ones, can likely best be achieved via the efforts of different organizations and entities coming at evaluation from different angles.

Summary and Outlook

There’s no doubt that Plan Ceibal has managed to build a solid foundation in terms of technology, logistics, capacity and infrastructure. However in order to utilize the full potential of that basis it now needs to focus significantly more attention and resources on crucial factors such as maintenance, teacher training, and the usage of educational content and materials. At the same time it needs to provide continued support for community initiatives as well as ensuring that internal as well as external monitoring and evaluation efforts receive the resources and attention they require. These are all crucial challenges which mustn’t be underestimated and will require the aforementioned attention and resources to be properly addressed.

Finally, given that Plan Ceibal is the first 1-to-1 computing in education project to reach full saturation there’s no doubt in my mind that it is one of the most interesting ICT4E initiatives at the moment. It is only a slight overstatement to say that the whole world is watching Uruguay closely to see what’s happening, Montevideo will be the OLPC capital of the world, and experiences there will have a large impact on how the whole notion of 1-to-1 computing in education develops over the years to come.

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

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ICT is coming to education

The first thing that comes to my mind is that the initiative solidified in the world’s mind what most ICT4ED-ers may have accepted since Logo or even before: that ICT in Education will be a permanent fixture, only varying in scale and technique. That is, the evaluations, discussions and policy assessments about whether or not to have computers in the classroom will very soon be entirely obsolete, if not already.

It is a matter of resource allocation determining how many computers, which kind of deployment, etc, but the details on scale and approach of deployment are more a function of resource allocation capacity than a matter of: should we have computers in the classroom?

But Construnctionism is not

I’ve worked with and observed OLPC initiatives in Harlem, Haiti, Peru and Mozambique, each having their own merits, challenges and approaches. I’ve seen very scant evidence of constructionism in practice. It has been my experience that only in exceptional outlier cases does the use of the XO begin to approach the constructionist ideals.

I think Negroponte’s (and Papper’s and Kay’s) vision of what could happen with a tool like the XO is admirable, but in most places the projects are very far from those scenarios of the “radical reorientation” of the classroom the constructionists envisioned. Mark Warschauer’s studies of OLPC pilots in the US points to a similar finding and reinforces one of his most resounding ideas: the digital divide has little to do with the student:computer ratio.

ICT4E needs local buy-in and support

Each deployment needs the human capacity to create, innovate and develop the use of the technology itself. What we are seeing in OLPC projects around the world is enforcing this: successful deployments are the ones lead by dedicated teachers, administrators and support staff that have the will to make the project work. If unsupported, the project either grinds to a halt or the students end up using the XO for little other taking pictures and copying what the teacher writes on the board. This, unfortunately, is the norm. For now.

Most importantly, teacher training and acceptance

Negroponte originally posited that the OLPC project needed absolutely no teacher training or evaluation to succeed. He quickly changed his stance, but the reality is that the introduction of the XOs into classrooms in the developing world is a radical and in some cases very alienating concept.

Here in Mozambique, as in many places, teachers hold absolute power in the classroom. Giving the children a laptop is sometimes threatening to the teachers, and the kids often dominate the technology much faster than the teachers, but we have also seen that few use the XO to its potential. Sugar Labs is helping to change this, albeit slowly.

Finally, the OLPC approach is reminding us that, unless you have the teachers on board with the program and motivated for its success, the use of the XO and its subsequent benefit for the students will be minimal, if not negative. This reinforces what many ICT4E studies in the past had shown. What was new about OLPC is really the scale of it.

Dozens of countries with the same tools, all at once. It has been truly amazing to see what different places do with the same tools and observe the effects of context. I think many countries are learning a lot about their own goals for education and its development, and that none of the participating countries so far will be taking a step backwards in this sector in the foreseeable future.

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?
.

Less Top-Down Approaches

In this post, I frame the discussion somewhat differently. I assert that different communities are going to allocate their limited resources differently – not exactly a stretch. Economics, infrastructure, inertia, and pedagogy all play a role. Typically, there is a inhomogeneous collection of old and new, mobile and desktop, network-enabled and stand-alone machines available in a school, at home, and in the community at large.

This situation might change over time as in-bulk purchases for “top-down”, government-sponsored deployments of one-to-one laptop programs or terminal-server solutions become more common place, but such deployments remain the exception, not the rule. One size doesn’t fit all.

Maine's laptop learners

Even in places where such programs are being put into place on a large scale, sustaining the deployment is often a local burden. (The Maine Learning Technology Initiative has evolved along these lines – local townships are being asked to fund the “refresh” of the program, which is resulting in more diversity of both equipment and configurations across the state.)

Further, the way in which these resources are used is quite varied from place to place and program to program. Again, making reference to the Maine program, the choice of whether or not the laptops go home with the children is a decision made at the school or even the classroom level. In the case of computer labs, the schedule of access also varies – from daily use across all classes to occasional, specialized use.

Empowering a Bottom-Up Approach

It has be argued that teachers are able to incorporate computers into their day-to-day teaching only when they themselves are comfortable with the technology and cognizant of its promise. How can we help teachers and learners experiment and explore, regardless of the configuration or setting? How can we support a teacher with computers in the classroom but – as is most often the case – no administrative access to those computers and little support from the central information technology (IT) department? How can we support a school that has a computer lab, but again with little customized support from central IT?

At Sugar Labs, we are trying to address the diverse needs mandated by heterogeneous computer environments while trying to support “bottom-up” grassroots adoption by teachers, parents, and informal learning communities. Regardless of the constraints imposed by a school-district’s IT, we want to maximize learning opportunities and provide a consistent framework for teachers and students.

Taking advantage of the Fedora LiveUSB Creator, it is possible to store everything you need to run the Sugar Learning Platform on a single USB memory stick (minimum size of one GB). “Sugar on a Stick” gives children access to a personal Sugar environment on any computer with just a USB memory stick.

Sugar on a Stick on Classmate

It is the Sugar Learning Platform packaged onto a memory stick that can be plugged into almost any computer and run without affecting its “host”. It bypasses the software on the hard drive. In fact, Sugar on a Stick will work even if the host computer does not have a hard drive!

With Sugar on a Stick, the learning experience is the same on any computer: the operating system, the Sugar software, and the child’s work are stored on the stick, ensuring a consistent learning experience in school, in the classroom or the lab, and after-school, in the library, the museum, at home, or at grandmother’s house.

The initial targets of Sugar on a Stick are early-adopter teachers with “geek” parental support; but the model can be readily adopted more widely across a school district. There are a number of advantages to the Sugar on a Stick approach:

1. It reduces costs with flexible hardware choices by allowing institutions to continue using their existing investment in hardware while reducing support costs and user frustration.
2. It enables low-cost options when purchasing new computers.
3. It also makes it easy to accept donated older machines; it increases the life of older computers, reducing disposal costs and enabling the reuse of existing resources.
4. It provides a coherent and consistent computing experience even during times of fluctuating technology funding and changes in hardware choices.
5. It allows communities to take advantage of the increasing household computer ownership, while still providing a consistent, comparable computing environment.
6. It gives learners access to the projects and creations and explorations they have previously done regardless of where they did them.
7. It provides off-line access to applications and content: not every learner has access to broadband or the Internet in the classroom or at home.

Platform Agnostic Yet Education Focused

Live USB distribution need not be restricted to the Sugar Learning Platform. For example, there is a beta version of “Squeak on a Stick” being developed by Bert Freudenberg that would enable access to the Etoys environment in much the same way as Sugar on a Stick allows access to Sugar.

Also, harking back to last month’s Educational Technology Debate on the potential of mobile devices for learning, essentially the same “bits” that go on a LiveUSB image also run in a virtual machine. We are exploring the use of a Sugar VM on a mobile phone (of course, this would require a relatively high-end phone) that would provide many of the same advantages outlined above.

Our goal at Sugar Labs is to put an emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: more engaged learners are able to tackle authentic problems. Sugar on a Stick combines powerful tools with a simple and flexible medium of distribution. All of the necessary tools for guide discovery are on the stick. It is also possible to include training and curricula materials targeting specific audiences on the stick. Sugar on a Stick allows one to experience learning software with almost no effort and no risk.

The Live USB approach to distribution of learning tools to a large extent by passes the theme of this debate. The Sugar on a Stick approach allows us to emphasizes access to a learning process over any specific technology or platform.

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.

“It’s an education project”, after all.

“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 .

Yet this seemingly natural order has a whole other life when we look at information and communication technologies in educational systems. Especially when we focus on computers. Educators and technologists promote either full saturation, a 1:1 model where each student has a computer, usually a laptop, or a shared-use model where computers, often desktops, are deployed in school labs.

Between these two models there is the initial debate around the different computing platforms and their different benefits, which highlights a more subtle difference in pedagogy, and through that, the basic foundations of what “school” means to a society.

For July, the Educational Technology Debate we will examine the two models, 1:1 and computer labs, and their respective benefits. Our goal will be to understand which benefits are key, and look for a way in which we can fuse these key benefits into a model that can be deployed in the many educational environments of the developing world.

Our two respected discussants on this topic will be:

• Walter Bender
  Walter Bender currently heads Sugar Labs, focusing on the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform (download it now). Previously he was president for software and content development at One Laptop per Child, and is on leave from MIT, where he was executive director of the MIT Media Laboratory.
• Mark Beckford
  Mark Beckford is currently Vice President of Global Business Development at NComputing, Inc, whose virtualization software and hardware allows multiple users to work off a single computer. Previously, he led diverse global teams at Intel to extend its market leadership and promote growth in new and emerging markets.

Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation – your input can start right now in the comments below, and Walter and Mark will post their opening remarks beginning Monday, July 6.