Two months ago a heated discussion took place in Educational Technology Debate after an article by C. Derndorfer described what seemed to be a hopeless outlook for the Peruvian OLPC program. What Derndorfer described were not problems with a particular ICT strategy but the daily problems you face when trying to improve an educational system in which many things have been failing at the same time for decades.

You simply don’t get three hundred thousand well educated, passionate, committed teachers overnight, nor you overhaul ninety thousand schools in two or three years. This article describes one possible way to face the challenge of improving the Peruvian public education system by using a mixed strategy:

Let children and teachers have ICT available and explore it in a non threatening way, try not to get involved in the quasi religious discussions between those who “believe” in the Wintel approach and those who interpret Negroponte as an enemy of teachers, and face what happens in the real world where there is no easy way to 100% Internet access, there is no money to give every child one computer, there is no way to “train” teachers who haven’t been properly prepared to teach, and teachers’ salaries will not improve overnight.

This article outlines the considerations for implementation of massive computing access projects aimed at systemic low impact long term improvements through what we call “Technology Resource Centers”, where teachers and students may have access to ICT and additional technologies at their own pace and in their own terms.

Several authors: Holt (1983), Kozol (1993) and Conroy (1987), have suggested that school education, as we know it, has lost its value as an instrument in the development of the individual. With different arguments and perspectives, they point out how the interest in processes and methods has shadowed the required genuine concern for the personal growth of students, transforming the educational system in a purposeless organism where everybody pretends: Teachers pretend to teach by delivering information according to established methods, students pretend they are learning by passing tests requiring repetition of the information received and society as a whole pretends this is good.

Some authors, Perelman (1992), Holt (1964) even suggest that there is no possibility for improvement in school education and the only hope for improving it is to replace traditional education with a completely new mechanism.

Gardner (2000) is more hopeful, he advocates for an Education aimed to the teaching of truth, beauty and morality and questions theorists who focus in the instrument rather than the purpose of Education. What can we do in an educational system where even the traditional is poorly performed and we are not able to attain even the modest aspirations of traditional educational settings? How can we prepare our new generations to cope with the challenges of the XXI century in a system where many want us to believe good teachers are the exception, infrastructure is poor and society as a whole seems to have been ignoring Education (in spite of discourse and writings about it) for decades? Guggenheim’s movie “Waiting for Superman” seems to be documentary aimed to demonstrate how poor is the American Public Education but has been severely criticized (also read R. Weingarten and G. Stager) for its lack of objectivity and biased point of view.

A few days ago I attended the opening of a demo center where a supposedly ideal ICT4E setting was showcased. It was really impressive in terms of the technology available: Fully wireless connected computers of all sizes, interactive networked whiteboards, etc . etc. I really got some really good ideas and information of what is available, my only objections were:

1. It was all conceived based on children and teachers as consumers of content; and
2. In order for the wonderful things described to happen great teachers in charge were needed.

I am not against consuming good contents, my concern is children usually learn more when they are producing contents than consuming it, unless it is really interesting for them, which takes me to the ideas R. Bao and myself wrote about in 2004: the lack of meaning crisis in the educational system. A crisis happening in spite of a well thought sensible curriculum designed and validated to be a tool for development of competences preparing children to succeed in the XXI century. Some specific characteristics define that meaning crisis:

1. Students do not perceive the educational system, as useful, or having a purpose, and conclude education is meaningless. In many cases, failing students regard formal education as useless.
2. School curriculum requires what Spiro calls oversimplification (Spiro, 1990, 1991, 1992) or reductive bias in order to be taught in the required periods. The result is that students usually forget most as soon as they pass tests. This can be easily demonstrated by asking simple questions about any school subject to adults who have been disconnected of the school environment for a while.
3. Teaching methods emphasize memorizing and repeating information. Even when teachers try to change these methods they are not concerned about giving students reasons why it should be important for them (the students) in their real lives to acquire any piece of knowledge. Teaching should emphasize a key factor in knowledge construction: cognitive flexibility (see Boher-Mahall paper)
4. The constructivist approach, which aimed at transferring control from teachers to students and set the foundations for learning in the students’ willingness to learn, can also fail if the teacher lacks the required knowledge to become an informed guide in the quest for knowledge construction. An ignorant constructivist teacher can be as negative as a well informed behaviorist one as described by Cromer (1997).

Let’s try to describe the educational reality of Peru: There are 8.6 Million students: 75% public, 25% private; 80% urban, 20% rural, 200,000 children attend almost 10,000 one teacher schools. Of a total o 490,000 teachers 65% are public school and 35% private; 83% urban and 17% rural. There are 75,000 Schools, 75% Public 25% Private; 52% Urban, 48% Rural. Pre-K & K coverage is 66.3% . Primary (1-6) coverage is 94.4 and 76.5% for secondary school. According to 2009 reports almost 80% children 12-14 have finished primary school (6th grade) and over 60% of 17-19 youngsters have finished school (11th grade). In all cases the trend is growing.

In spite of the above the Latin-American average coverage ratios, quality remains an issue: Peru rated among the worst in Math reasoning and Reading comprehension in 2001 PISA (the last reported year available). Irresponsibly, Peru opted out of PISA and returned in 2009 (results to be reported in 2010). A census evaluation applied to 180,000 teachers in January 2007 showed 62% were below primary school level reading comprehension with 27% at 0 level; also, 92% were below primary school level in Math reasoning. Since then US$ 300 Million have been spent in teacher in-service education.

Test results on entry evaluations to teaching positions show dramatic increases since then. DIGETE alone has trained more than 80,000 teachers but it should be easy to understand these teachers need much more than training, they need to be completely re-educated. The Peruvian response is being developed in several simultaneous fronts:

1. We have developed a curriculum structure which aims to develop skills and competencies and is not based in specific items of certain disciplines to be covered (Ministry of Education, 2004);
2. A massive initiative to improve quality of teachers is being put in place;
3. Information and Communications Technology is being distributed to students and teachers to saturate the system with learning and teaching tools that are simple to use and available in a nonthreatening environment and long term.

The 1 to 1 One laptop per Child approach has been described and is being discussed globally, I will try to describe what we call the Technology Resource Centers as a first step towards 1 to 1 that allow us to get the benefits of ownership without waiting for the computers, connectivity and great teachers to arrive. We will show how this strategy can actually be a leap to better teaching and learning.

The whole idea was born one day Walter Bender entered my office and transformed my personal computer in a Sugar based machine just inserting a memory stick and downloading his Sugar interface into it. He actually transformed my workstation into his computer.

I wondered what would happen if we could find a way of making a child’s own personal computer to reside somewhere in such a way anytime they got hold of any computer it may turn into his or her computer. By then we had already developed the “portable Internet”: a 2GB memory stick with enough content from educational portals to give primary teachers and students the actual feeling of navigating the web without connectivity and more educational contents than would have been expected for their whole lives under their “normal” conditions.

We had also found that children loved to share interesting things like building artifacts with Lego bricks, making videos or solving puzzles (with or without computers). Of course these are not new ideas but would allow us to share resources in such a way that four children working with one Lego robotics kit and one laptop will have the feeling of having all the computers they need. The same thing happens when one teacher shares with the class some interesting contents using one laptop and a multimedia projector for as many as 36 children: Everyone feels they have all the computers they need.

The whole idea was to allow children and teachers to get involved in the construction of personally meaningful artifacts, whether they are graphic presentations, video pieces or computer programs as advocated by Seymour Papert.

Our approach to the project differs with most educational computing initiatives which have not necessarily helped answer the basic question: What purpose does Education serve for students? If we take into account the way Viktor Frankl (1959) quoted Nietzche in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how”, we may conclude that the educational system fails because it is more involved in supplying how’s and lacks the ability to provide why’s.

This also reinforces the findings by De Volder and Lens (1982), because seeing education as instrumental in reaching personally significant goals in the future is providing students with an answer to the basic question of why should I learn what I am expected to.

Systematic observation of schools’ outcome shows that, even for students with high GPA, most of the information acquired during school years, is lost and has to be relearned when it becomes necessary. During a series of meetings with parents associations, school boards, teachers training seminars and educational computing conferences from 1988 to 2001, Becerra and Bao (2004) attendees were asked some simple questions about concepts, facts and figures that are part of the school curriculum. The result was invariably they did not remember anything. On the other hand, skills and information not lost by students share certain characteristics:

• They were acquired in a natural learning process, what Gardner (2000) describes as apprenticeship or Stone-Wiske (2006) calls Teaching for Understanding , and we will call the natural way, i.e. the amount of time involved in learning is short, when compared with the time spent using the abilities acquired during the learning process.
• The role of the teacher during the learning process was to contextualize knowledge, i.e. provide examples of ways to use the new knowledge in solving meaningful problems or to accomplishing personally meaningful goals.
• Students had positive attachments to teachers and viewed them as resources in reaching their personal goals (Bandura (2007).

In most development economies’ school environments it is not unusual to find 45 and even 50 or 60 student classrooms which severely limit the options for school teachers to develop participatory approaches where students can use information to do things, instead of just hearing about them. Lowering the class size has not significantly impacted quality of Education in the developed economies, in spite of huge investments made towards attaining that goal.

The situation is especially critical in multi-grade one-classroom/one-teacher schools in rural zones. Peru has almost ten thousand of such schools where an average of 22 children from first to sixth grade share a classroom and one teacher. As a consequence, the perception of school education as non-instrumental in reaching personal goals for the future is reinforced.

The consequences of this situation are critical for development: Students drop out rates climb, discipline problems increase, teachers commitment decreases, community frustration reaches levels that threat social peace, just to name a few.

In a situation like this, when Information Technology is introduced in the classroom, the results are what Forrester (1971) called the counter intuitive behavior of complex social systems, with the result that the attempt to reform education using technology makes worst what it aimed to improve. 20 years of multiple educational computing projects in Peru does not seem to have improved the system as a whole, in spite of promising, but isolated, results.

Examples of the above mentioned situation are classes where students learn the parts and components of a personal computer, or spend one school year learning numberless functions of a word processor or spreadsheet or programming language, without ever having the opportunity to produce something useful with the knowledge they are supposedly acquiring.

In many development economies, this situation is aggravated by the fact that computer courses in schools are taught by technicians with little or no background in Education. It is a hopeful symptom, however, that teachers are increasingly taking control of Computer Lab’s as was the case with project “Huascarán” whose driving factors were pedagogical rather than technological.

There are almost 36,000 public primary schools. Prior to 2007, as many as 3,000 schools have been receiving computers, as part of different government programs. In 1987 there was a National Committee for Educational Computing who developed a program to introduce computers in education. The emphasis was on CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) packages and teaching programming languages.

During 1988 and 1989 a group of 200 public school teachers were given sabbatical time, to attend a program developed between the Ministry of Education and the National University of Engineering. As in most programs, the results were never evaluated or published. From the original 200, just 50 teachers concluded the program. It is very probable most of them are now working as computer programmers, since that was the emphasis of the whole program.

In 1989 the Ministry of Education announced a national contest for teachers to design CAI packages. The results were never reported, the packages were of dubious quality, mainly because the schools didn’t have the tools to make the development of such packages possible and the whole program for computers in education faded until the committee was dissolved.

During the nineties Peruvian teachers involved in ICT4E felt in love with Seymour Papert’s ideas. Constructionist projects mushroomed and the seeds of many projects still alive were sowed. G. Ruiz, who had founded INEDIC, an education research group, organized a live video conference with Seymour Papert; and the local representative of Lego Education translated the robotics software into Spanish and Quechua. Many of the kits acquired by the Ministry of Education back then, are still in use, which was an incentive to think of Educational Robotics as an important component of a Technology Resource Center.

Since those initial efforts, the number of computers in public schools by 1997 was estimated by the Ministry of Education, to be any number between 10,000 and 15,000. It was not known how many were operative and/or used. The configuration ranged from 8086 diskless machines with monochrome monitors, to some 486 processors with multimedia, the later ones acquired during 1995. There had also been a public effort to formalize the software licenses for all the computers since most of them were acquired with no software.

There was no evaluation of the official programs to provide schools with computers, but it was generally accepted the results had been poor or null. The main reason for this was the lack of support to the program, from the educational point of view. Most teachers had to improvise what to do with the computers; many of them took courses at local training centers, just to be able to use the computers for word processing and to be able to teach some programming.

In the 6 years of Huascaran, there was a strong will to improve the situation but it was not initially clear how this could be accomplished, since the results obtained had led many people to the conclusion that computers were of little or no use in education and it seemed there was evidence to support this idea.

There were also private initiatives aiming to improve the situation; in 1995, the Catholic University in Lima was the first Higher Education institution to introduce Technology in Education as part of the curriculum in the Faculty of Education and established a Research Laboratory for Computers in Education. It was expected this laboratory would be instrumental in the development of policies to improve the support for the use of technology in education.

The University Of San Martín De Porres put in place an Educational Computing strategy, which allowed a cadre of university professors to obtain their Masters’ degrees in Educational Computing and Technology at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. This seminal group served as an internal motor to transform ICT usage at the university and led to the creation (December 2003) of a Master’s Degree Program in Educational Computing in Peru. Eventually one of the members of that initial group of professors was appointed as the highest Education government officer in Peru (Mr. Jose-Antonio Chang, current Minister of Education since July 2006).

During the late 90’s, the Ministry of Education, supported by the World Bank, established several pilot programs to evaluate different approaches to integrate Information and Communications Technology in Education under an umbrella project named National Program to Improve the Quality of Education. The main approaches chosen were:

• Lego-Dacta material for primary schools
• Internet access for secondary schools

Each approach had some variations, which developed into sub-projects. This time the driving force behind the project was mainly educational not technological and the results seemed to be more rewarding. Evaluative studies showed the projects were yielding better results than their predecessors. But there still seems to be ample room for improvement, especially in the training of teachers which seems to be the critical success factor to those approaches.

It is becoming clear that a constructionist approach as the one suggested by Papert (1980, 1993) and others (Harel, 1991; Kafai & Resnick, 1994), by helping rethink the role of Technology in Education, may in fact do to Education what Reengineering has done to Business Administration (Hammer & Champy, 1993). Technology can be a powerful resource for the improvement of education, specially the development of critical thinking skills (Jonassen, 2000), and if it hasn’t yet it is because its use has not been properly directed and supported.

The emerging and increasing role of INTERNET in building school and classes networks (Lucena, 1997, 2002) with its almost infinite capacity for sharing and accessing information, paired with the availability of ever faster and more powerful computers and communications facilities is rendering the role of teachers, as sources of information, obsolete.

This of course does not mean, as some naively think, there will be no place for teachers in the schools of the future; teachers are the key success factor for learning in the classroom if they are prepared to assume a new role in the knowledge building process, because it is becoming equally obvious that students need informed guides to survive in the avalanche of information of dubious quality now available. Postman (1996) quotes several examples of utopian views of teacher-less education making it clear the proposed remedy could be even worse than the problem.

A recent report by McKinsey&Company (2007) shows how the best educational systems in the world are those with the best teachers and the best teacher selection processes. At the same time information is available, the need for critical judgment becomes a crucial necessity, in face of the vast amount of information now at the students’ fingertips. The paradox of being thirsty and unable to drink from the firemen’s pipe exemplifies the new kind of needs that education must satisfy.

As Stone Wiske (2006) explain there is a growing need to define the new role of teachers, as guides and counselors in the students’ quest for understanding; and also the role of schools as places where students will share and construct positive images of their personal futures and find ways to acquire the skills and competencies necessary to make them possible.

Our initial experience in Arahuay as reported by Carla Gomez (Arahuay Chronicles) and Businessweek journalist Gerry Smith (slide show) showed how lives of children could change if we provided them an environment where they could work with tools allowing them to reach personally meaningful objectives whether they were recording their favorite singer from the scarce radio receivers available in town, making digital pictures of their families, reporting the local festivities in video or finding out the meaning of words in the “Real Academia Española” dictionary available in Internet. Even the apparently trivial task of copying what teachers wrote for them in the blackboard acquired a new meaning because all involved felt their school was getting into the future. This kind of feeling and improved self esteem is the first step of any growth project.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in Peru responds to the growing demand for quality and equity in education. It is aimed to provide one laptop to each child living in areas of extreme poverty countrywide. These are mostly rural areas with high rates of illiteracy, social exclusion and human development in general. An April, 2010 study published by OECD (Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade?) has found a positive correlation between frequent home use of computers and no positive correlation between frequent school use of computers. This finding was a really welcome boost to our approach of letting children and teachers use the computers in “their own ways” and gave more confidence to the team who had worked on the framework for the Technology Resource Centers.

The pedagogical approach is Constructionist as described by Papert (1980, 1993). Students have access to a set of technology components, much in the way kindergarten teachers set their classrooms in special interest areas (“rincones de interés” is the Spanish name). The Technology resource Center is comprised of:

• A group of XO laptops enough to allow individual work by children at least two hours a week during class time and free access during off school hours. The XO is a versatile tool that enables them to use individual learning styles, offering a variety of learning applications, ranging from visual tools (still-image and motion camera with sound recording) to advanced programming environments of easy usage, to sophisticated music production software that is accessible to children as young as 5 years old. The laptops’ collaborative tools and immediate networking capabilities foster cooperation among students and between them and their teachers, thus contributing to raise students’ self-esteem and social skills. As mentioned earlier each of the 1.7 million students in connected schools will have an individual environment defined in the Internet Cloud (we use Google Apps and Microsoft Life@edu). Non connected students will have their environments defined at the “local cloud” residing in a school server.
• One Educational Robotics module enough for a group of 16-20, allowing children to work in teams of 4-5 kids sharing one computer. The idea is children will enjoy building models while learning teamwork and curriculum matters will be built into the construction process. Sensors will allow to explore science in a recreational way.
• One server to function as the “local cloud” and access point to Internet where connectivity is available. The offline portal is loaded at the server where there is no connectivity.
• One conventional laptop and a multimedia projector to allow teachers to project contents when required.

The strategy is completed with Technology Resource Centers being provided to every public higher education institution in order for them to provide pedagogical and technical support. The Technology Resource Centers will also leverage local government initiatives, like the one in place at Los Olivos where children produce TV programs that are broadcasted through Internet. By mid 2011, more than 800,000 XO laptops equipped with webcams will have been deployed so the 1,7 million children in connected schools, the Los Olivos pioneering experience of learning through video producing will be expanded nationwide.

The Technology Resource Centers will allow the integration of ICT taking into account fundamental capacities: development of creative thinking, critical judgment, problem solving and decision making, as established in NCD.

The initial experience which began in May, 2007 with ten schools around the country will by 2011 have expanded to 100% of K-11schools countrywide. By then, the longer running school will be “Apostol Santiago” in Arahuay, at 2,600 meters above sea level in the Andean mountains 4 hours from Lima. In general terms there is a new work dynamics at the school: teachers’ attitudes have moved from resignation to enthusiasm and development of new teaching strategies.

The sense of self control given by the ownership of laptops helped teachers plan more carefully and better organize class time. Of course this is not a panacea; the complete overhaul of the Peruvian education system will take 10 to 15 years of multiple strategies consistently put in place, meanwhile there will probably be many schools where the impact will be far from expected but we like to compare our strategy to Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) The Star Thrower story.

Perhaps the most surprising and unexpected result was the impact on the community as a whole as reported by Associated press journalist Frank Bajak in the Herald Tribune, where a wide commitment to support children development has emerged and a inner sense of proud can be noticed widely.

Apostol Santiago School has three levels: Pre-School, Primary and Secondary. 110 students are enrolled in those three levels, 47 of them in primary:

• First-Second grade: 8 students
• Third-Fourth grade: 21 students
• Fifth-Sixth grade: 17 students

Most students are required to help their parents with agricultural chores and this means they miss school several weeks a year when their crops require more attention. Since many of them live more than 4 hours away from school (walking time) a board house has been implemented where children spend from Monday to Friday in order to be able to attend school.

The secondary section of the school participated in Huascarán project and one computer classroom with a VSAT connection is available. It should be noted how technology guided the localization of the classroom because it was placed far away from the school (for technical and security reasons) and its usage is very limited and isolated from NCD.

From the beginning, OLPC was different from the previous approach:

• Students would be given the laptops to own them as an educational resource (same as textbooks or notebooks), they would take them home and bring them back to school every day. Intentionally, no special care instructions were given in order to test the laptops ruggedness.
• Teachers were offered limited and only basic operation training, in order to validate a model that might be easily replicable countrywide.
• The computers use would not have specially allocated time slots. Each teacher and student will use them as they think it best fitted their style, need or willingness.

The initial laptops used to implement the project were B4 prototypes of the XO laptop which by now have long been replaced by the 1.0 version, designed by OLPC foundation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. 120 units were donated by OLPC to the Ministry of Education in April, after an evaluation visit to their headquarters by a research team of the University of San Martin de Porres. The computers were equipped with several Linux based applications:

• Abiword (basic text editor)
• Paint (drawing tool)
• Video and camera (digital photography and video recording)
• Web navigator
• Calculator
• Tam Tam (music creation)
• E-Toys (multimedia programming environment)
• Block Party (logical game)
• News reader and PDF visualizing software

Prior to the beginning of the project a baseline evaluation test on reading comprehension and mathematical skills was applied. Data on the December 2006 national evaluation to second grade students is also available. A survey on attitudes towards ICT was applied to students and teachers.

The initial teacher training session was one day long and teachers were left with the laptops for one week without supervision. After one week a second session was held and the laptops were distributed to children during a special meeting with parents and authorities present. The principal reported it was the first meeting with 100% attendance in the school history. The objective of the meeting was getting everybody’s commitment to help the project succeed. Each child received a XO laptop and the whole community celebrated the event with a traditional ancient Inca meal. This kind of meetings has been replicated in over 10,000 towns since 2007.

The first day after receiving the machines, students had already explored them on their own and were eager to find out what could be done. Teachers kept on teaching, letting children explore their new laptops and encouraging them to do the class work. The children did all the activities. Some would put away the laptop while writing on the notebooks. Some others would write quickly on the notebook and then start punching here and there on the laptop.

Still others were totally into the laptop and so excited that they would be doing something totally unrelated to the class and calling the teacher to come and see what they had discovered. Teachers were pleasantly surprised by the little attention they had to pay to disciplinary problems so usual before.

The electric layout was not prepared to support so many devices connected simultaneously and some kids got entangled with the cables and some machines felt down, a few of them stopped working but students were able to fix them with their teachers help and the little training teachers received from the deployment team. Eventually, secondary students were trained as “support team” and they learned how to disassemble and reassemble the computers in order to fix minor problems.

Some software and hardware glitches were found and reported to the development team in Cambridge to be fixed in ulterior versions. About a month after the initial deployment, an OLPC server arrived and was installed at the school, making it the first OLPC server installation worldwide. It worked seamlessly and allowed easier communication and smoother Internet access.

Of course the initial enthusiasm has since then faded and the work done has settled to a more nature one with new teachers being trained by the senior ones and their students on the different ways they find the XO’s useful for school work.

Really important and unexpected collaboration came from international graduate and undergraduate students. The OLPC foundation helped the Ministry team to promote support missions to the Andes among American universities. Since 2008, about 100 students have gotten funding to spend 5 weeks in rural communities helping them take advantage of the XO’s received. Among them was former IBM Thinkpad University World Program manager Man Bui and his son who spent 5 weeks travelling through the Peruvian Andes helping students and teachers find their way with the XO. The French Peruvian Mision Andes Foundation has also supported more than 50 French students support missions to Andamarca in Ayacucho. German, Finnish, Spanish and Argentinian volunteers have also participated in support missions throughout Peru.

Some important considerations to engage in a project like the one described that we have found important are:

Students:

• Absenteeism and dropout rates in rural schools tend to be high. As a result of OLPC projects, a dramatic reduction in these rates should be expected and planned for in terms of machines availability and school service level.
• Students’ interest level in school matters increase and, as a variety of new class activities emerge, a robust support structure to capitalize on it is required.

Teachers

• The 24×7 availability of a personal computer will modify pedagogical strategies. Teachers will be able to personalize curriculum development planning. It was important that the new NCD allows for great flexibility in terms of localization and introduction of new resources. A rigid curriculum would definitely jeopardize the outcome of an OLPC initiative.
• Teachers’ engagement in discovery of new tools will require a support team to help them master them in their classroom settings.
• Time for student teacher interaction should be planned. The improved communication between teachers and students will require more teacher time than the traditional class schedule. Not planning for it might result in frustration. Rural schools will probably be better of than urban schools where teachers could be part time or have double jobs.
• Increased attention from students will mean additional pressure on teacher class preparation quality. Teachers should be prepared to expect more questioning and engaged participation in their classes and prepare accordingly.
• Improved peer to peer communication among teachers will help cope with the challenges posed by the new technology and must be encouraged and supported.

Technical Aspects

• Internet connectivity is a very important factor; when not available, a local server or a memory stick with the offline Internet application is used instead. A periodical refresh process is planned based on teachers’ feedback and request. Since most rural school teachers travel periodically to urban centers, their visits are ideal refreshment vehicles we are planning for.
• Electricity tends to be scarce and poorly reliable in rural areas. Plug outlets are scarce and one per classroom in the best cases. Children are not used to electrical devices and it is important, at least in the beginning, that teachers organize the battery charging to ensure safety. Community involvement in cabling and connectivity improvement is encouraged though there is a long way to go, mainly due to limited resource availability in extreme poverty areas.
• Solar power is an option for places where regular supply is not available. Location and scheduling becomes critical in this case and require special attention.
• Rural schools are usually isolated and hard to reach. Maintenance of sophisticated equipment could become a burden to any attempt of improving Education with technology. The special design of the XO laptops deals with this issue by allowing self maintenance service by students and teachers, however, lack of confidence is still a major obstacle in this area which we expect will reduce in time and with the involvement of nearby higher education institutions.

Other factors

• Many stakeholders’ interests are being affected by large scale project deployment. Lobbying and public arguments take significant amount of time and many times jeopardize the implementation. Hardware and software vendors advocating for particular products may and in fact attempt to affect the outcome of the project. A solid educational and technical deployment team is crucial to cope with these issues. We have to keep working on this matter.
• Educational theorists and opinion leaders who did not have a direct role during the planning process usually question the pedagogical approach or implementation. A sensible communication strategy is necessary to ensure all genuinely interested parties’ contribution will be capitalized and taken advantage of. So far we have failed on this, the project execution has taken most of our energies, leaving little time for “advertising”.
• The focus on fixed features and decreasing prices that is behind the XO laptop design guidelines goes against the ICT industry trend of increasing features and more or less constant price. Since these affect major players’ bottom lines, an aggressive reaction from their sales teams has been an important factor. Careful attention to common and conflicting interests between Public Education and commercial enterprises is hard to implement. We have partially succeeded in this, with Microsoft being a specially committed partner whose approach has been able to balance a genuine interest in education support with their logical expectations of market share. We try to work in order to ensure mutual gain whenever possible and minimizing of conflict in other cases.

In summary, the OLPC experience has renewed our hope that school education has not lost its value as an instrument in the development of the individual. Committed teachers can benefit of ICT availability and, without abandoning their concern for processes and methods, they can improve their performance with genuine concern for the personal growth of students, resulting in improved learning outcomes and commitment levels to school.

We are convinced the educational system can abandon the image of a purposeless organism where everybody pretends and get involved in a meaningful system providing not only instruction but the most important ingredient to success: Hope in a better future that may be beginning to be built now. December, 2007 seems long ago now, but we still remember our surprise when we found sixty Arahuay children reading comprehension level had risen 100% above the national average when the base line showed 0% performing at the expected grade level. Initial intrinsic motivation measurements in 139 schools showed dramatic improvement after the first year, though the results are not statistically reliable. The Interamerican Development Bank has committed the funds for an impact study which is underway. As expected no significant results have been found after 6-12 months and we are waiting for the second year evaluation which will be available by March 2011. So far, a more critical student body and increased community self esteem are on the positive side, while need for more teacher training is on the negative side. The last can be explained in the poor quality of teacher education, which has been an endemic problem in Peru for the last decades and cannot be solved with ICT training to in service teachers.

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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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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?
.

So the debate we’ve been asked to participate in is to posit which computing model is better suited in the developing world to proliferate computers to enhance learning and education.

Intel's Classmate PC

Back in 2006, when I was co-General Manager of the computer division at Intel that was developing the Classmate PC, Intel was heavily promoting notebooks (which had higher average selling prices and higher margins than desktop CPU’s).

It may surprise some given my involvement with the Classmate PC, and Intel’s overall strategy, that I was not a proponent of 1:1 computing in the developing world. My passion for significantly increasing the access to computers for those in the under-served markets ultimately brought me to the role I have now at NComputing.

Access to fully functional, ultra-low cost, highly energy efficient connected computing is a critical component of enhancing and enabling the learning experience. My belief continues to be that shared access continues to be the best starting point for developing countries that are introducing computers to their schools for the first time.

First and foremost, if mature markets have not adopted 1:1 computing in any great degree beyond higher education, how can we realistically expect emerging markets with more limited budgets to adopt 1:1 computing?

The math is simple. Is it better to have 1.8M students share access to 50,000 computers for the first time vs. wait until the government can afford to proliferate notebooks to the same 1.8M students.

In the 1:1 model, who get’s these computers first? This particular example is from the state of Andra Pradesh in India:

The government saved $20M by deploying the shared model in acquisition, maintenance and electricity costs. They were able to

1. deploy more computers and
2. purchase generators to keep the computers running during power outages.

The $100 target price of the OLPC laptop was originally only the purchase price, regardless of being able to achieve it or not. There are other significant costs occurred during the life of a single computer, including maintenance and electricity. Secondly, where is the point of diminishing return where the farthest extreme is having a computer at a student’s fingertips 24/7?

As a longtime professional in the IT industry, I would be lost without my notebook by side. Blackberry’s, iPhone’s, etc. have reduced that dependence. But what about the kindergartner or sixth grader. I would agree that having increased access to shared computer model (more than one hour a day) would be better, but surely these students don’t need a computer with them all the time?

You could argue by digitizing textbooks you reduce their backpack load, but I have not heard of an outbreak of K-12 student back problems.

The portability aspect is another challenge, especially in developing economies. Kids drop and lose things in general. They have not developed their judgment skills to a point where they can be responsible for a notebook. I finally broke down and got my son a mobile phone – he lost it within six months, and if you looked at its shell, it is considerably marred.

I am not entirely against 1:1 computing, and in the subsequent debate we will discuss hybrid models that could work, but when it comes to primary and secondary schools, I do feel strongly that economic realities strongly support shared usage. I try to illustrate this in the chart below:

This is not a hybrid model. This is an evolutionary model. As students’ age/mature/progress, the need for a computer all the time becomes more critical. In addition, everyone has different needs, abilities, talents and skills. Some will gravitate towards the computer as if it is an extension of their body. Others will find it mildly useful but will prefer paper, pencil, books, etc.

This is where “try” vs. “buy” comes in. I would argue that 99% of people in the developed and developing world over the last 30ish years since the PC was introduced “try” before they “buy.” Whether it is a parents PC, a school lab, a cyber café, telecentre, or work place, they will be exposed first then build the interest and knowledge.

This is why, at Intel, before the Classmate PC “creosote bush” squashed all other projects (Rural Community PC, Amazon Kindle… yes, we were partnering with Amazon and e-Ink on a text book replacement product, and more), we had a significant push towards “shared access.”

In conclusion, I laud the efforts of Intel and OLPC who have significantly increased awareness of the importance of computing in education. The question and debate remains, though, as to how computing is deployed. The most economical and scalable solution is shared access computing.

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.

To bridge this gap, the Education Technology Debate invites thought leaders and opinion makers that directly influence the confluence of technology and education to focus on constructive conversations and open discussions across groups as much as within them.

Become an Educational Technology Debate Discussant

If you’d like to join in building the Educational Technology Debate conversation, please contact us with your ideas, comments, and suggestions on ways to make ETD more informative and engaging.

Previous Educational Technology Debate Discussants

in Assessing ICT4E Evaluations:

Mary Hooker
Mary Hooker is an education specialist with over 30 years experience working in the educational sector in Ireland and Africa. Since 2007 Mary has been working with the Global eSchools and Communities Initiative. Mary is currently engaged in studies for a Doctorate in Education with Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Rob van Son
Rob van Son participated in early Computer Supported Education experiment in the 1980′s, and since worked on everything from small 8088 PCs and the first Mac to modern multi-core file and web servers. Rob is a linguistics expert with a focus on integrating information in spoken communication for Universiteit van Amsterdam. Rob has a PhD in linguistics.

in ICT4E Sustainability:

James BonTempo
James BonTempo is the Learning Technology Advisor for Jhpiego, an international non-profit health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. He is responsible for strategic planning for the integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into pre-service education and in-service training programs. He also leads efforts to design, develop, implement and evaluate ICT initiatives in both arenas.

Atanu Dey
Atanu Dey works as the chief economist at NetCore, a technology firm in Mumbai. His area of interest are the use of technology in education, economic growth of India, and the development of rural populations. He worked in product marketing for several years at Hewlett Packard in California, before receiving his PhD in economics from UC Berkeley. He developed a model called “RISC — Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons” while a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford.

in How Can ICT in Education Excite Girls and Boys?:

Alexa Joyce
Alexa Joyce is a specialist in education technology with European Schoolnet. She has consulted for UNESCO Bangkok Asia-Pacific Bureau for Education, UNESCO International Institute of Educational Planning and for the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. She has a Masters in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford and an MBA from Solvay Business School, Brussels.

Brooke Partridge
Brook Partridge is CEO and founder of Vital Wave Consulting, which she created to further emerging markets as a new discipline in business management. Previously, she was the Business Director of the Emerging Market Solutions Organization at HP where she lead HP’s first technology solutions for developing economies. She lectured in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University and holds a Master’s of Pacific International Affairs from UC San Diego.

Karen Coppock
Karen Coppock, PhD is Vice President of Vital Wave Consulting with over a decade of experience in strategic business planning for emerging markets. Previously, Dr. Coppock served as the Director of Industry Collaboration for the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, and also held positions with Telcordia Technologies, Williams Communications, INTELSAT, Pacific Bell, AT&T and Harvard’s Center for International Development (Information Technology Group), Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator and the US Peace Corps. She received her Doctoral and Master’s degrees in international business from the Fletcher School, Tufts University.

in Creating Electronic Educational Content:

Richard Rowe
Richard Rowe is the Chair and CEO of the Open Learning Exchange, a network of nation-based NGO’s committed to achieving Quality Universal Basic Education by 2015 . Dr. Rowe has served as Director of Test Development and Research for the West African Examinations Council, Associate Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Technology and Education.

Angus Scrimgeour
Angus Scrimgeour is the President of the International Association for Digital Publications, a program to provide university students and academic staff in developing countries with affordable access to e-books, and support for the identification, development, and effective use of open access e-learning resources. Mr. Scrimgeour is also a former Vice President of the World Bank Group a member of the Knowledge and Learning Council.

in Individual and Communal Computer Usage:

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.

in Mobile Phones and Computers:

Dr. Robert B. Kozma
Dr. Kozma has directed or co-directed more than 25 projects that have examined the impact of ICT on teaching and learning and developed advanced computer environments for education.

Michael Trucano:
Mike Trucano is the World Bank’s Senior ICT and Education Policy Specialist, providing support to World Bank education projects with ICT-related ‘components’, and is involved in a variety of research activities.

in Educational Vision and ICT in Education:

Tim Kelly
Dr. Tim Kelly is the Lead ICT Policy Specialist at infoDev, at the World Bank in Washington DC, where he has responsibility for access for all and for mainstreaming ICTs for development. He was previously Head of the Strategy and Policy Unit (SPU) at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Wayan Vota
Wayan Vota is a is a technology expert focused on appropriate information and communication technologies (ICT) for rural and underserved areas of the developing world. He is currently the Senior Director of the Inveneo Certified ICT Partner Program, publisher of OLPC News, and hosts the Technology Salon.