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Why OLPC Struggles Against Educators, Big Business
afabbro writes "The current issue of BusinessWeek has an expansive article of the history of OLPC and why it has, to date, been a flop. Among the reasons: no preparation for the educational systems expected to use it, uncertain pedagogical theories, poor business management, competition from Microsoft/Intel, and no input from education professionals in designing the software. As BusinessWeek quotes one educational expert, 'The hackers took over,' and the applications are too complex for children to use. To date, 370,000 laptops have been shipped — a far cry from the original 150 million planned to be shipped by end of 2008."
If you let the IT folk articulate the business process, you're going to get the same exact thing. That's why we have business analysts whose job it is, ostensibly, to figure out what the business people want and translate it into a swiss army knife that's going to be wildly popular and successful.
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure. The problem is that it is visible to more people, sad to say.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
OLPC had a good mission when they wanted everything on the system to be fully open source, with simple point and click applications and the ability to view the source of any application. However then they got into talks with microsoft, and started to include some very complicated applications with their product, and their mission kind of went down the crapper
Educational software is hard to write. Really hard. Except for very well defined skills, like typing or flying an aircraft, most educational software doesn't help much.
The OLPC should come with one or two really, really good applications for teaching reading or arithmetic, ones smart enough to self-adjust to the user's level and move them forward. That alone would justify the thing.
If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.
Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
What you are describing there is called "task-based learning." It's a pretty common pedagogical approach in secondary education, first showing up in medicine and law. The idea is that by intelligently creating a task/project, you can be sure that students will follow a fairly predictable path towards completing it, learning things along the way. The biggest learning advantage to this is that, more than learning how to complete the task, the student learns how to learn how to complete a task.
It seems, however, that in the US educational system anyway, we are moving away from this model, which encourages creativity, self-sufficiency, and autonomy, and toward a "cram for this standardized test" model, like where I live now: Japan. This is a mistake. And that's coming from one of the guys who writes and coordinates a large standardized test!
In the case of the OLPC, this pedagogical concern has been and continues to be at the heart of all the questions about its efficacy as a world-changing tool, whether the critics realize that or not. It has never been clear what one could learn from having a little green typewriter which may not even have internet access.
As an educator, tester, and geek, I have mocked the dunderheaded goodwill of this project from the first time I heard about it. The cry for more computers in the classrooms of the world is very rarely raised by the teachers themselves. Computers are great for education mainly as a means of finding information, and in such a case, the essential ingredient is internet access. Once that requirement is satisfied, any terminal is fine. Beyond this, what is a student to do with a PC? Type? Is this substantially different from writing by hand? No. It's just more convenient.
I have seen it argued that the OLPC project would expand IT/programming to impoverished children and give them a means of developing their economy. Rubbish. I have a master's degree and teach at a university and do statistics-heavy research, but if you handed me an OLPC and said, "your project is to write a program that alphabetizes this list," which--if I remember correctly--was one of the first assignments in my friends' programming classes, I would have no idea of how to even begin. I have done zero programming. I would require some explicit instruction to at least know how to get started. Explicit instruction requires access to a knowledgeable person. If I live in the boonies of Kafoonistan, and I don't speak English, how am I going to get access to such a person? Even if I were to use my OLPC to read up online about how to begin... I don't speak English. How do I learn English? I need access to a knowledgeable person.
You see where I'm going with this.
The OLPC project overlooks the single most important thing to any educational system: People. We learn from other people. I didn't get into stats until I was 30, and I've done a lot of self-study with books to get where I am now, but if I didn't have access to teachers in graduate school and knowledgeable colleagues at work, and the money to take distance courses on some of the arcane procedures and programs I use, I would still be totally in the dark. If I hadn't had a string of great teachers, there's no way I could have learned Japanese.
The OLPC is gadget. It's handy, to be sure, but without the infrastructure--and by that I'm referring both to net access as well as a functioning education system--all it can really be is a toy. Even in your example, the teacher was an important component, if not always a helpful one. He/she would ultimately look at the output you created--the outcome of the task--and tell you whether it was acceptable or not.
This is how we learn. You can't just give people a tool and a task and say "go." Someone needs to show you how to use that tool; someone needs to design that task; someone needs to be available to guide people through it and get them past the bumps in the road; someone needs to tell the student if the task has even been completed.
People really do love to learn. But learning is a social act, even if it's done on the internet. Without people, the OLPC is just a pencil for someone who doesn't know how to read or write.
"the hackers took over?" - what a bunch of molarchy. I and the rest of my generation cut our teeth on Commodore64's and AppleII's. Those had no gui, or wysiwyg tools in the beginning. BASIC was taught in 7th grade as a class! Kid's today don't even have "computer science" class where they actually learn how to use a computer and why it does and how it does what it does. Instead they have "MSFT Office class". As a result they don't know that the Word icon is actually telling the computer to run c:\program files\office\word.exe (for example) so they are stumped when an icon gets deleted and wonder why they get viruses after using KAzaa so much. OLPC is an attempt to go back to really teaching computers. The system isn't "hard" it's just not familiar because we've let MSFT hold people's hand to freaking long which has made us all lapdogs.