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."

Comments

Re:OLPC

[Todd Knarr]

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.

I was trying, but I couldn't find anything

[bl8n8r]

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.

Re:OLPC

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OLPC

[cptnapalm]

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!

Re:Don't get me wrong...

[smilindog2000]

I think that OLPC has already been a technology success, and it will change the world, just not the way Negroponte envisioned. Microsoft, Dell, and Intel ignored the under $400 PC market for years. It doesn't make financial sense for them to take the last $70 each makes per machine and cut it to $15. The event of the $200 PC (like like the gOS PC would have been delayed for years if not for OLPC.

With charitable motives rather than financial, OLPC created the next generation machine for the next 2 billion users. The Aus EEE PC and competitors all copied the low BOM of the OLPC, and now target the billions of people world wide who can't afford a Wintel machine from Dell. It's the next big wave in computing, and OLPC led the way.

educators yes, educational theorists NO

[Quadraginta]

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.

Re:educators yes, educational theorists NO

[jc42]

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!").

I'd agree with most of your comment except for the above parenthesized pseudo-quote.

The OLPC crowd has made it clear from the start that their intent was never to provide kids with a computer. Their intent was to provide access to information. The computer was included simply because to most of the target population, the only possible access to good information requires a computer and a wireless network. We have centuries of experience saying that the traditional books just weren't making it; kids in underdeveloped areas typically don't have access to those in any meaningful sense. But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers. So they were aiming at leveraging the Internet, via a wireless-only small computer, to give the kids access to real information.

But you'll find all over in comments from the OLPC folks that the computer itself was never the primary goal. It's just a tool. The goal is access to information, something that the commercial and political systems show very little interest in providing. We might also note that the listed problems can mostly be summarized as the results of commercial and political opposition to providing their kids with such information.

It's not terribly surprising that, with such a goal, the OLPC project might have a certain skepticism about involving education professionals except as occasional consultants. A personal anecdote: As a high-school in the 9th grade, I decided that math was interesting, so I started asking the math teachers if I could borrow their books. I'd read one, return it a few weeks or a month later, and ask for another. After a few months, I'd read all the texts for the school's courses, so I started asking if I could borrow their college texts. Each teacher flatly refused to let me read them. I "wasn't ready" for college stuff. I had some friends at a nearby college, so I started borrowing from them. This got my teachers very upset.

Since then, I've mentioned this experience to a number of teachers, and every one of them has agreed that I "wasn't ready" for the advanced stuff. This was clearly nonsense, since I could understand the college texts. The theory that I developed, which I've seen a lot of support for since, is that the teachers were simply threatened by the loss of control from my going behind their backs and getting more information from other sources. This is a common problem with "educators" everywhere. They control what the kids are supposed to be learning, and they tend to clamp down on kids who try to avoid the controls and advance too quickly or into areas that the teachers don't understand.

This was well before there was such a thing as personal computers, so it has nothing to do with computers. They might not say it too openly, but part of what the OLPC project has been aiming at is breaking the stranglehold of the local authorities, and give kids access to much better information than they've ever had. I'm not at all surprised that this should get "pushback" from the local authorities as well as the commercial world.

And anyone who has ever seen any ads should understand that the commercial world is not interested in education. It is interested in persuasion, something very different. So we should especially expect pushback from commercial sources.

(And my Firefox 3's spellchecker didn't like "pushback"; it suggested "pushcart" as the right spelling. ;-)

Applications are not complex

[presidenteloco]

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.