Tablet form factor computers are undoubtedly an exciting way to interact with technology, especially, when they are touch screen enabled. The intimacy and immediacy of the personal screen and the ease of use and intuitive design of modern touch screen operating systems greatly eases user fears and facilitates user adoption.

This ease of use is exciting technologists and educators, both of whom are thinking of new ways to use technology like the iPad in educational systems of the developing world. Now I agree with them. I believe the iPad’s sleek user interface and ease of use will transform the ICT in education experience – but not for everyone.

As part of the Slide2learn conference in Queensland, Australia this week, I made the following presentation to deep dive into the promise and pitfalls of an iPad education in the developing world. Watch the video or read on for details for why I think that tablets are good, content is better, and teachers are the best educational ICT investments

Content is Better

Yes, the iPad has great promise, especially since there are now thousands of apps that provide an almost limitless assortment of learning experiences through the touch screen tablet form factor. From simple acts like counting numbers and recognizing letters to reading interactive books and connecting with social media, it’s the wealth of digital content that keeps teachers and students engaged.

Yet where is this content in the developing world? The iPad may be amazing when connected to iTunes in the English-speaking world, but it’s of limited use if there is no digital content. For example, the Wikipedia’s article count by language shows millions of English language articles, but the 8 million people Xhosa speakers – 20% of South Africa’s population – are served by only 118 articles in their language. And not a single iTunes app.

There are a number of initiatives that seek to build educational digital content in local languages, and even ones focusing on developing content that aligns with national curriculum in the developing world. These efforts are nascent at the moment, though they are expanding rapidly as more electronic devices are present to access them.

Teachers are Best

What isn’t growing, what is lacking are the skilled teachers that can take a digital device – any digital tool – and incorporate it into the classroom, into student-centric learning.

Right now, the vast majoring of teaching that occurs in the developing world is rote memorization. This “chalk and talk” teaching instruction is often just transposed from analog to digital form when technology is deployed. In OLPC Peru, the largest 1:1 laptop deployment using XO laptops, students use their 400,000+ computers to transcribe texts from notebooks or chalkboards to their laptops. Are you surprised then that pedagogical use of the laptops has decreased among students and teachers over time?

Teachers require training to understand how to teach differently. How methods like student-centric learning can be applied to the classroom, and shown how this learning style will increase educational outcomes. Yet who is investing in teacher training? If you look around, Ministers of Education get excited about shiny, flashy things, not human capacity building. And who can blame them? It’s a lot easier to show off a technology implementation than a trained teacher, and children and their voting parents can see a quick difference with a computer that isn’t so noticeable with a trained teacher.

So regardless of how amazing the iPad is, until we invest in trained teachers who know how to use technology to improve their teaching activities, until we have parents and politicians focused on learning outcomes and not iTunes apps, regardless of how many apps or how easy the technology is, I fear that iPad educations in the developing world will be wasted.

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

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

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

The Promise

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

Consumption or Production?

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

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

Some Considerations

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

The Immediate Future

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

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

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

Let there be more teachers

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we really rely on training more teachers alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology to the rescue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An example of new technical gear: The OLPC XO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example of a global problem and solution: Textbooks fantasies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching the teachers: A program fantasy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion and Conclusions

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Creative Commons (2010). Open Textbook,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

Bibliography

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Fé de Bogotá, Colombia: Mc Graw Hill.

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Janeiro: Brasport

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Papert, S. (1993). The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York: Basic Books.

Papert, S. (1996). The connected family: Bridging the digital generation
gap. Marietta, Georgia: Longstreet Press, Inc.

Perelman, L. (1992). School’s out. New York: Avon Books

Postman, N. (1996). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York: Vintage Books

Spiro, R. J. & Jehng, J. C. (1990). Cognitive flexibility and hypertext: Theory and technology for the nonlinear and multidimensional traversal of complex subject matter. In D. Nix & R. Spiro (Eds.), Cognition, education, and multimedia: Exploring ideas in high technology (pp. 163-205). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Spiro, R. J., Feltovich, P. J., Jacobson, M. J., & Coulson, R. L. (1991). Knowledge representation, content specification, and the development of skill in situation-specific knowledge assembly: Some constructivist issues as they relate to cognitive flexibility theory and hypertext. Educational Technology,31 (9), 22-25.

Spiro, R. J., Feltovich, P. J., Jacobson, M. J., & Coulson, R. L. (1992). Cognitive flexibility, constructivism, and hypertext: Random access instruction for advanced knowledge acquisition in ill-structured domains. In T. M. Duffy & D. H. Jonassen (Eds.), Constructivism and the technology of instruction: A conversation (pp. 57-76). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates.

Stone Wiske, M., Rennebon, K., & Breit, L. (2006). Enseñar para la comprension con nuevas tecnologías. Buenos Aires: Paidos

Carr argues that there is a good fit between the way ideas develop along a linear path in books, and the way in which human memory works. This match makes possible a certain ‘deep’ style of reading and thinking, Carr claims, while the non-linear designs of the Net and eBooks are not so well suited to human patterns of thinking. New media structures tend to overtax the limitations of human working memory, he argues, in that they offer a surfeit of information, leaving users stranded in the ‘shallows’ of thought.

Carr’s book is a reversal of the usual assumption that up-to-date technology makes its users ‘smarter’ and more sophisticated than people who rely on outdated forms of technology like books or other traditional technologies. But his argument is not free of the deep cultural prejudices that underpin simple oppositions between book culture, orality, and electronic textuality. In particular, by giving book culture the monopoly on ‘deep thinking’ Carr’s work certainly lacks a broader understanding of how communication and thought takes place in ‘continua’ of orality and literacy (Finnegan 1988: 175) as well as through visual communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2008).

m4Lit Example

To illustrate my point, I want to discuss the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project. The findings of this research project showed that South African teens use mobile communication technologies as part of a shifting repertoire of modal interactions characterized by interplay between ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ modes of communication, indigenous languages and English, with their mobile phones providing a site for vital cultural creativity.

Like many people around the world, the teens who participated in the study used media technologies in diverse ways to maintain complex social affiliations or interactions, and to develop knowledge of their social network, and to find information through their interpersonal interactions, rather than only through media.

The problems with Carr’s theory of media can be traced back to two venerable scholars, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong; both can be described as technological determinists in that they claim that modes of communication determine the ways of thinking and cultural characteristics of entire societies.

The notion that there is a causal relationship between literacy and particular thinking patterns may be an old one, but it is far from universally accepted. One famous study of the effects of literacy on cognition (Scribner and Cole, 1981) set out to prove that literacy had cognitive consequences, only to find that actual interactions between thinking, literacies, and schooling were far more complex than the researchers expected. Science and technology studies depict the mutual interdepence between society and technology (e.g. MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985).

Studies of oral literature even find it hard to define what might be distinctively ‘oral’ or ‘literate’ given the huge diversity of cultural forms and human societies. Instead of looking for ways to generalize this diversity away, scholars of the African oral tradition have called for closer attention to the specific circumstances under which various modes, media and genres of communcation are accessed and produced, and to the social uses of communication (Finnegan, 1988). African scholars have also questioned Ong’s argument about ‘orality’, criticizing its ethnocentric, extravagant and totalizing claims (e.g. Biakolo, 1999).

Carr’s argument in The Shallows does not engage with these critiques, but extends McLuhan’s and Ong’s notions of cognitive consequences to a radical extreme. Carr claims that media use causes changes to the structure of the brain thanks to its ‘neuroplasticity’, or the brain’s ability to form new neural connections and lose old ones. Thus Carr believes that changes to society result when changes in communications media reshape the human brain (Carr, 2010:49).

Mobile Literacies

In 2009 I worked on the m4Lit (Mobiles for Literacy) research project with Steve Vosloo (Shuttleworth Foundation) and Ana Deumert (University of Cape Town). We investigated teens’ responses to Kontax, a serialized m-novel for South African teens, which was published on a mobile website and on South African mobile instant messaging platform, MXit (see Walton, 2010 for a more detailed report).

Kontax attracted over 64 000 subscribers in the course of a month-long campaign, a substantial audience when considered in relation to the very small markets for South African publishing. The popularity of the story when released on local mobile instant messaging platform, MXit, showed us conclusively that youth audiences were keen to try out reading fiction on mobile phones.

Kontax was less successful at maintaining readers’ interest and engaging them in immersive reading of the entire series: we estimate that only 7 200 (26%) of Kontax subscribers in the 14-17 age-group were sufficiently engaged by the story to read all 21 chapters.

This was a core group of committed readers, and MXit page-view data suggests that most readers who persevered in reading the third chapter finished the whole story. Nonetheless, almost three quarters of subscribers did not read that far. In fact, most readers abandoned Kontax after reading (or just downloading) only one 400-word episode. This trend may have been even more pronounced for the township teens specifically targeted by the project In interviews, only 10.4% of these teens told the fieldworkers that they had read all the episodes. The rest of the group said that they had planned to read the story, but had not had time to do so, given the many distractions available on MXit and their preference for other forms of literate interaction, such as mobile IM with their friends.

The m4Lit campaign thus appears to have been successful in using the accessibility and novelty of mobile phone fiction to spark interest in Kontax, while it only ‘hooked’ a minority of more committed readers. Our data didn’t allow us to establish whether it was the distractions of the mobile platform (as Carr might argue), the thriller genre, or specific features of the Kontax story that were primarily responsible for this pattern of declining interest.

Carr’s faith in only one mode of literate interaction (lengthy, linear, solitary reading) seems unduly narrow given the rich variety of interactions we observed in the course of the m4Lit project. M4Lit showed that large numbers of teens were eager to try out different modes of engaging with the written word, including reading lengthier texts, correcting errors and typos in the story, writing comments on the unfolding plot, and submitting their own ideas for stories. It also showed how important literate interpersonal interactions through texting and messaging are to their growing knowledge of the world around them, and of themselves.

Teens in fact reported difficulties extricating themselves from highly immersive messaging sessions. Our research showed that their texting and messaging practices centred around peer networking activities. Here the teens valued speed, responsiveness and attentiveness in their mobile conversations. In fact, for them, the marks of orthodox ‘literate’ writing such as punctuation and unabbreviated texts signified ‘newcomers’ who had not yet learned to “write well”, using “MXit language” – a teen ‘hetero-graphy’ (Blommaert, 2008) specifically adapted to this technology, genre of interaction, and social context. As teens grow older and move beyond the context of their local friendship networks these skills are likely to stand them in good stead. Studies of other low income communities around the world show that the ability to use available technology to maintain their relationships, leverage and develop strong social networks are a crucial grassroots survival strategy (e.g. Horst & Miller, 2005, Kolko, Rose and Johnson, 2007, Donner, 2007).

The m4Lit project showed that there could be real drawbacks to using a chatty mobile platform for certain kinds of reading, learning and study. Nonetheless the mobile platform allowed us to reach teens in a way that would have been almost impossible otherwise, and, in the South African context is a highly accessible, relatively cheap option for the growing numbers of people who can access mobile internet (current industry estimates puts this at 9 million South Africans, or about double the number who access the Internet with computers).

At the same time, while exploring all available options for making the most of mobile, we also need to keep up the pressure for government to invest in books, computers, libraries and librarians for schools. I say this not because I share Carr’s cultural prejudices against electronic communication, but because I believe in providing equal access to public education. Mobiles are a private resource which means that students and their parents must shoulder handset costs. They also require ongoing investment in airtime – so inequality of access and participation are built into this educational architecture and are likely to remain its biggest drawback.

Marion Walton is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

References

Biakolo, Emevwo. (1999) On the Theoretical Foundations of Orality and Literacy. Research in African Literatures 1999 30:2, 42-65.

Blommaert, Jan. 2008. Grassroots Literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. Routledge: London.

Donner, J. (2007). The rules of beeping: Exchanging messages via intentional “missed calls‟ on mobile phones. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 1. Retrieved Nov 28, 2009, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donner.html

Finnegan, Ruth (1988): Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Horst, H. and Miller, D. (2005) From kinship to link-up. Current Anthropology. 46 (5):755-778.

Kress, G.R. and Van Leeuwen, T. Reading Images. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2006.

Kolko, B. E., Rose, E. J., and Johnson, E. J. 2007. Communication as information-seeking: the case for mobile social software for developing regions. In Proceedings of the 16th international Conference on World Wide Web (Banff, Alberta, Canada, May 08 – 12, 2007). WWW ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 863-872.

Richard Conyngham and Doron Isaacs. 2010. We can’t afford not to: Costing the provision of functional school libraries in South African public schools. Equal Education

Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. 1981.The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Walton, Marion. 2010. Mobile literacies & South African teens: Leisure reading, writing, and MXit chatting for teens in Langa and Gugulethu. Research report prepared for the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project. http://m4lit.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/m4lit_mobile_literacies_mwalton_20101.pdf

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

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

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

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

Alternative computing models “cross the chasm.”

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

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

Mobile phones and Computers

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

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

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

First I am struck by the degree of consensus. But I am not sure what it means: Maybe we just have a wise bunch here or maybe we’re not hearing from other perspectives that powerfully influence education decisions in the developing world.

Second, with regard to eBooks, in our discussion we have not emphasized sufficiently the importance of reinforcing a sense of “agency” in students. Paper-based books are at the low end of the “agency” scale. Simply replacing them with electronic versions is not a leap forward for learning. We all grew up with paper books and most of us love them.

However a key to learning is the process of creation and problem solving including physical manipulation and reshaping of objects. The digital world enables a level of agency and interactivity with words and numbers that can greatly enhance learning. Thus we should not settle for eBooks as they now are. They are too fixed and passive. At the very least we need to be able to include our own and other unpublished content into them and enable us to share with others our comments and suggestions.

Third, I am intrigued by the suggestion that handwriting is a skill that we should preserve. This is a new thought for me and I am not sure how I feel about it. As a lefty, I have found the keyboard to be more user-friendly that the right-handed desks in my schools. I want to think more about this suggestion. Clearly people need to sign their name, fill out a form and write a thank you card. However my guess is that, once the price is right, most cursive writing will involve keyboards and highly accurate voice-to-text software.

Reframing the Discussion

But maybe we should step back, and take a moment to rethink the frame of our discussion. We have tended to circle around today’s version of a specific technology: eBooks, This is the assignment our teacher (Wayan) gave us.

But what would happen if we changed the frame for a moment and ask a different question:

What kinds of systems are needed in the developing world to facilitate learning – at what different levels of learning, for what different skills and knowledge?

Let’s take a “systems” perspective and see where that takes us to achieve a Quality and Universal Basic Education (QUBE).

A Three-legged Stool:

We see immediately that technology, of all kinds, is only one part of the dynamic that leads to QUBE. In simplest terms, a three-legged stool of content, technology and people is required to achieve our goal. But we must differentiate their functions:

Content.

Content is dependent upon both skill and subject levels. For the early grades learning systems are needed for acquiring basic knowledge skills such as reading, speaking, arithmetic, problem solving, interpersonal relations. Learning to speak and learning to write require quite different systems. These content variables may, but need not, be included in the same technology.

As I have indicated before, the most crucial need in developing countries is for courseware: a lesson plan, textbook, workbook suite that teachers can, with a minimum of change, use in their classrooms with assurance that most of their students will pass their test. The k-12 Siyavula content in English and Afrikaans, developed by Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa, is a good example of such content. Since it is free and open on the Internet it can easily be adapted for use in other countries.

Technology.

I have listed in my opening post the fourteen key device requirements for basic learning. Check them out. I am not aware of any existing technologies that meet all of these requirements. And it is not necessary for one tool to have all. The earliest grades do not necessarily require a keyboard although the later grades do (IMHO). If you have no access to electricity that limits the kinds of technologies you can use. In those cases paper and pencil technology with highly effective content can be excellent. That is what most of us grew up with quite well.

Electricity, but no Internet connection, gives you more options. It seems prudent to assume that for the foreseeable future most students in the developing world will not have dependable Internet connectivity.  So every educational initiative in developing countries that seek to employ technologies to improve their schools should also plan to provide paper and pencil resources for those without access to more advanced technologies.

We also need to give greater attention to technologies that teachers and school administrators can use to increase their effectiveness. We need to explore the substantial benefits that information and communications technologies can bring to education outside the classroom –their use in testing and record keeping and as tools for following students when they move from one place to another.

Here’s one simple example: Lawrence Massachusetts has the largest concentration of Dominicans in the U.S. Their students travel back and forth between the Dominican Republic a lot. Yet schools in neither country have a way to keep track of their students’ progress when they are in the other country. Everyone would benefit form a simple student tracking system both countries could use. The educational return on investment outside the classroom can be great.

People.

The evidence is clear that QUBE cannot be achieved by simply providing cool technology, such as laptops, without parallel and intensive investments in the development of appropriate content and the preparation of the people involved to use that technology well. In contrast to baseball fields, if you build it they will not necessarily come.

However it is not sufficient to simply hire more teachers. They need to become familiar and skilled with using whatever technologies they have. Beyond teachers we need to give attention to school principals, district superintendents and subject matter specialists all need to be comfortable and skilled with whatever technologies are involved in the learning process.

Resources.

Providing a strong three-legged educational stool requires money. Such funding is a major limiting factor for achieving QUBE in the developing world. The education budgets of most developing countries are grossly insufficient to meet the most basic needs for QUBE. Teachers are often paid intermittently if at all. Few if any books are available for students. Despite the flowery rhetoric one hears about its importance, education is consistently given short shrift in the budget. It is relatively easy to create small jewels of quality learning that one can showcase.

However scaling innovations so that every child, indeed, every person, has access to a quality basic education is much more difficult. Too often we resign ourselves to reaching a limited percentage of people. The rest seem too hard to reach. A large part of the reason for under-investment in education the widespread doubt that more money will make a difference – that things cannot change. Thus for QUBE to be achieved in developing countries at least three things must happen

Working closely with government as a catalyst, giving their leaders credit whenever possible, we must:

1. Demonstrate highly effective and scalable learning systems that include free and open content supported by a combination of affordable new and old technologies,
2. Provide clear and convincing evidence of their cost/effectiveness, instead of relying upon faith-based assertions, and
3. Persuade the stakeholders that QUBE can be achieved economically and quickly.

This last step is the most challenging. It in involves changing the expectations of students, teachers, administrators, politicians, businesses and the public at large and persuading them that the long-term return to them personally as to their whole nation that such investments generate are better than just about any other investment they can make.

These kinds of changes can only be accomplished from the inside of each country. It takes a strong, influential and independent board of directors led by a talented 24×7 social entrepreneur who is irrationally committed to QUBE. Such a three-legged campaign implemented with vigorous persistence and courage, can be successful.

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

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

The growing impact of free and open educational resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Important Demonstration

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

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

Summary

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

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

From this conversation came a very interesting question:

What is the impact of open access resources for primary schools on the current educational content creation models?

Now this question has many angles to it, but for the August Educational Technology Debate, let us focus on how low-cost ICT devices are transforming the creation and distribution of open content in the developing world.

Will educational systems, and the stakeholders that support them, be able to adapt existing and new content onto these devices? Might this adaptation facilitate a more egalitarian content creation structure, challenging the existing pricing structures and vested interests of current curriculum production & dissemination models?

In addition, should this content focus on ebooks and other electronic media that replicates existing content? Or is this an opportunity to change the way in which content is created, teacher’s educate, and students learn?

To lead us in this conversation will be two respected discussants:

• 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.

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 Richard and Angus will post their opening remarks beginning Monday, August 10.

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.