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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."
I think the intent of the OLPC is good, and there are tangential benefits to such a program, however I think this justifies all the people that in the beginning asked one simple question: Why?
... well, not how things work really.
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
As soon as i read that article a while back about the guy who complained there wasn't a decent distribution system in place I knew it was doomed.
Hackers like to think they can do everyone's job better even if it way out of their scope. I guess that's the difference between hackers and engineers, engineers understand that it takes managers, PHB's, marketing, sales, and production staff to make it work. Hackers think it just takes code.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
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.
Yes, the OLPC is useless as a computer for a geek. Fair enough, it wasn't designed to be a computer for a geek. It was designed to be a learning (not teaching, learning) tool for a child. That's a completely different thing. And oddly, I notice that all the reports of actual children being handed an OLPC without any instruction or guidance seem to end with the child being entirely comfortable with it, having no problem figuring it out, and generally out-running the adults when it comes to using the thing. They even pick up the networking parts of it naturally. Yes, children are in fact smarter than most adults like to believe.
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
His teacher had told the class to search the Internet for information
on the environment, but the boy was stumped. "I was trying, but I couldn't
find anything,"
What the boy didn't know, was the rest of his classmates *did* find something and
the classroom immediately erupted in a resounding "RTFM!" in response, showing
proof that children in developing nations can at least find Slashdot.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Yep, the kids learn the OLPC just fine. The question remains whether the kids will learn anything else from it. In Negroponte's vision, his educational methodology seems to be "and then some magic happens".
Who says it's a failure? Just because there aren't more people willing to donate a rather expensive bit of hardware during rough economic times doesn't mean the design is bad. There will be one geeky kid in each group who will figure it out and show the rest. As for input from education professionals, I can't imagine a more counterproductive thing to do.
This article seems short of facts and long on assumptions.
So that is what the ??? in the profit meme stands for!
1. Do something.
2. Do something else.
3. "and then some magic happens"
4. Profit!
Oh dear, it seems what we have here is yet another slide towards the desire to forget computings hacker origins.
I was at a Microsoft presentation once where the speaker said Microsoft were not interested in hiring 'hackers', they wanted serious programmers. The concept didn't impress me then, and it doesn't now.
Doing away with hackers will have the effect of homogenising the industry. Guess what tho, not every country thinks this way, some developing nations will look at the stagnant 'hacker free' computing industry and destroy it in a matter of years by producing more innovative products.
I mean innovative in the real sense, not in the bland 'keynote speech soundbite' sense.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I have a friend who is a serious geek, who was once behind some of the major open source projects many of us now use daily, who has an OLPC and loves it. It's not her primary computer, but she never intended it to be, and for the purposes she bought it for, she is very pleased with it.
I agree with you in observing that all the published commentary so far has indicated strongly that children seem very happy with and comfortable with the OLPCs, so the claim that they're too complex for children to use is highly questionable. I have a feeling that "they don't work because the team didn't take input from education professionals" actually translates to "education professionals are rejecting the OLPCs whether or not the computers and software are good because they didn't get to push the development team around."
Remember, contemporary education processes are all about complying with some ideology of how teaching should be done, not about actually successfully teaching kids.
At least don't keep modding this tired, old and long debunked meme up. OLPC is NOT aimed at places with current food/water/shelter shortages. It is aimed at developing countries, not undeveloped countries. Think of many south American countries as perfect targets. They have solved the basic problems of food, water, shelter and education. This project will move education on to the next level.
How can people, especially on slashdot (where this has been thrashed out countless times before), keep remaining so wilfully ignorant of the goals of this project?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The most interesting thing is that the one non-critical voice mentioned in the article (the Peruvian schools using the laptops) is the only voice which seems to have actual experience using the laptops. That seems to me to be a very good sign that those who are shouting so loud aginst it are reading from Microsoft publicity briefings and not from reality. Negroponte's comment that he is acting like Greenpeace lying down with Exxon is kind of telling. If MS is the one responsible for making computers bad for education then working with them really is like working with the devil. Anything you do will be twisted againt you.
I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop".
It didn't start out as someone going to schools and asking the people what they needed. It seems like the most reasonable course of action for a project like this is:
1. Go to the schools and listen.
2. If you still think that computers are the solution, bring some expensive ones into some places as a pilot project
3. If that is proven, then remove functionality from the expensive ones until they operate like the cheap ones
4. If they still prove useful then maybe decide to make the cheap ones
Did this happen? If it did and the cheap ones worked in prototype form but not in their final form, then the OLPC's problems can probably be solved. If not, then it was probably doomed from the start.
The "do something I think is cool and see if people like it" plan of action tends to lead to disappointment when people don't like it. The likelihood of disappointment is proportional to how cool you think the project is.
If you donated $150 per child to each of these classrooms, would they automatically use the money for OLPC laptops? What if they could get real, full-scale laptops and support discounted to $150? Would they buy them? My guess is that the answer is no in most cases. They'd buy the things they need instead.
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.
Speaking as one whose taught for years, your comment is insightful:
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure
Part of the problem may have been that the folks running the show often were "educators" (professors and such), but not of their target audience. Teaching at the K-12 level is not at all the same as teaching undergraduates and graduates at MIT. They certainly should have brought in experienced actual teachers from the K-12 (or K-6) level they wanted to reach.
But this comment from the summary is appallingly clueless or mendacious:
Among the reasons [for failure]:...uncertain pedagogical theories...and no input from education professionals in designing the software.
Anyone who has actually taught knows that "pedagogical theories" and "education professionals" (e.g. those who graduate with PhDs in education, as opposed to PhDs in the subject they teach) are worse than useless, that such things are responsible for half the time-wasting if not counter-productive garbage that clogs the educational system, total sidewalk-supervising theoretician castles-in-the-air bullshit.
Indeed, I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!"). The problems the OLPC people are having ironically self-illustrate the uselessness of "pedagogical theories" constructed in the absence of pedagogical experience.
>and the applications are too complex for children to use.
That line makes me want to say 'fuck you'. The idiots here aren't the children nor the hackers, that much I'm sure of. If I could figure out the C64 [mostly] on my own in a world where there was no 'world wide web' at my fingertips, and adults would go 'compute-what?', I'm sure today's kids will do alright with these computers.
I guess the upside is that even if this guy stood up before 100 children and told them the machine is too hard for them to use, if 99 of them would be naive enough to believe him, there would be that one kid thinking 'oh yeah? This is so on'.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Caveat Utilitor
I have news: Everyone thinks they can do it all.
Since you mention engineers, I'll start with them. I've seen a lot of code written by engineers, and it's been uniformly horrid. Many schools still teach FORTRAN as their first/main language. Good god.
I see a lot of code written by scientists. Not one would think of letting an untrained programmer run their wet lab assays, but they think nothing of having graduate biologists write their programs. Guess what, it's even worse than engineer code!
In an ideal world, we'd all farm out the stuff we're not good at to people trained to do it. I'm not holding my breath...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I have an XO - It has lots of flaws.
But my son loves it, he's 6 and he loves playing sim city, even when I point out that his city has zero population and he clearly does not know what tax is. He will learn about taxes all too soon and in the mean time, he will learn about computing organically. I'm pleased that he has a chance to do so without being force fed "only one way to do things".
And I'm sure the kid who thought the internet was inside the OLPC has learned a lot through having an XO too.
Would there even be a classmate PC if not for XO. Would classmate have been as good as it is if XO and the new OLPC had not pointed the way for how all of these devices could be better. Will the next generation of XO and classmate and ee-whatever be better yet next time around. YBY sweet fat A.
Seems to me that Negroponte has achieved a great deal, and I suspect that there's a lot more to come and that the children are the winners.
I and many believe firmly that widespread education is a dire need as well as sustenance, and that the former could help provide the latter in years to come.
I wouldn't write Negroponte or OLPC off yet, the OLPC foundation (and the Intel classmate team, for what they do) has my sincere thanks.
Nullius in verba
I've reviewed the details of the Sugar UI and the apps that come with Sugar, and I was struck by the fact that every effort has been made to make the operation of the programs simple and intuitive. There's clearly a lot of usability design in there.
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking. They learned computers on Windows, and Windows and Windows app ui conventions are just how it should be, dammit. Anything else is scary and complex, from their solidified-brain perspective.
People aren't willing to give something new (and yes, pretty much objectively better) a chance.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now"
conservative viewpoint.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The work by "Hackers" was a huge success. Take a look at the number of UMPC's that will ship in the next 3 years. Tens or hundreds of Millions.
Yep, the work they dreamed up will sweep the world in ways they did not envision.
As far as the "failure" of the OLPC to sell in the millions.
1. A lot of money was being spent by MS and Intel to sink it.
2. It is hard to get $$$ out of many third world countries without graft.
3. It is hard to scale up the distribution and services side of an organization. 0-150 million in a few years is almost impossible on a shoestring budget.
Then, these problems are compounded by the unwillingness to gain volume by selling at retail. Then, they tick off the hardest core supporters by embracing MS.
Yep, this thing will tank.
Except that the "and magic happens" is actually a fairly routine part of early education. Most kids like to learn, want to learn. It takes the education system several years of intense effort to beat this penchant for learning out of most kids. You may have to teach the kid how the card catalog in a library works, but once you do he'll cheerfully get together with a bunch of his friends and organize finding all they need to know for the essay assignments you give them. And probably more, I usually ended up with three or four essays for every assignment I'd been given. You may not even need to teach them how to use the card catalog, I figured out on my own not just the card catalog but how the Dewey numbers on the spines of the books worked (got a lot of teachers mad at me because I was supposed to go to the card catalog, and instead I'd head straight for the section of shelves I knew had the books on the subject I needed and I Wasn't Supposed To Do That and I should Stop That This Instant, Come Back Here And Start Again And Do It Right This Time).
The /why/ is curiosity. Kids have lots of it, but you tend to lose it over time as they get slapped in
the hand and get told by adults to get serious. There's no telling to the number of great engineers (or doctors, or artists, or what-have-you) that we missed out due to stifled curiosity.
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one isThe OLPC offers unlimited tinkering and very deep and broad educational (education as in building mental models of things and learning to learn, not as in rote memorization) experience for kids, and can help them learn to read and write and communicate and explore the 'net. It is not "a better mousetrap" - there was no mousetrap before, unless you are referring to the school itself as the mousetrap. And OLPC does not intend to displace schools.
Ok, the business model may not be too sound (but the entry of the ClassMate and 3$ Microsoft software bundles can be seen as partial successes - if the goal is affordable computing to 3rd world kids, things look much brighter than a few years ago). Yes, Negroponte is not a finance magician, and I guess he has learnt the hard way that large corporations do not always place developing nations before shareholder value - that's what PR is for, anyway.
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.
"The Intel machine is a lot better than the OLPC," says Mohamed Bani, who chairs Libya's technical advisory committee but doesn't have the final say on buying laptops. "I don't want my country to be a junkyard for these machines." Executives from both companies derided the device as a "toy" and failure before it was designed and then did everything possible to kill it. I would imagine that Intel putting in a sales policy preventing their staff from directly comparing their product to the XO would strongly refute that allegation. Their employees even ran a hostile news site to make bad press. I assume you're talking about OLPC News, a site which has remained suprisingly neutral - unless you want to pick an article out of there which is provably false and designed to create your precious 'FUD'. There's plenty of content there for people on both sides of the fence.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien