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OLPC Project Disappoints In Peru
00_NOP writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has disappointed in Peru, reports the Economist, apparently because in general teachers did not make creative use of the technology. As in other cases the computers seem to have been regarded as ends in themselves rather than tools to help change the ways kids are taught. Quite disappointing for those of us looking for Linux-Global-Domination but not really much of a surprise given the experience in richer countries either."
In some circles the project seems to be more about pushing Linux-Global-Domination as opposed to helping educate people.
One Van de Graaff Generator per Child
What if we made sure that every classroom in the world was supplied with a solar-powered, fully recyclable, free-trade produced Van De Graaff generator? We've seen how such devices can spark the interest of physics students in western classrooms over the years. Surely it will have the same effect in classrooms throughout the world! Just present one to the teacher and . . . science!
This kid seems to have gotten the right idea. Maybe even if the teachers aren't using them properly, giving naturally curious kids access to a whole world of information will help them out anyway.
Or maybe that guy was just a unique case, I don't know. That video made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside however.
(If you can't be bothered to watch the video, shame on you! But also, it's about a child in Peru who works cleaning people's shoes on the streets. He has an OLPC laptop, though, and he uses it to educate himself with wikipedia.)
The concept of needing laptops at all for good education is questionable, I think. I'm a teacher in a business college for 15-19-year-olds (Austrian education system has these sorts of schools), and we run some student groups with laptops, while others only use computers for IT classes.
There is a difference in how you need to teach the students, depending on their equipment. But there's no absolute need for laptops, or technology beyond a calculator. For business concepts or for accounting, it's actually better to run things via pen and paper because the students are less tempted to copy and paste, and because it slows down the pace so they have time to think about what they're doing. There is a time and place for internet research, use of spreadsheets for complex accounting or finance calculations, and for plenty of other areas. Get them computer literate, definitely, because a lot of our students end up working in offices and they need the knowledge to use the tools available. But there's no need to get them addicted/dependent on technology to a point where they can't perform simple calculations without Excel anymore, or use their brains without prompting from Google.
The OLPC project is worthy, that's for sure. But I can't say that the results surprise me, they mirror the experiences we're making in a completely different environment. You can run lessons without laptops, and depending on the subject, it's often the more effective way of teaching.
Almost ALL teachers from the richest of schools to the poorest of schools have a horrible education level in computer technology operation and use. I have met multiple PHD holding professors that cant operate a projector to save their life. Even ones that have been dumbed down with a control system that have an ON and OFF button that will do everything. IF the ON button did not work they freak out and never use it again.
WE need to start with all education degrees being REQUIRED to have several computer operation classes. Something a lot more than "how to type letters in word 101" and "internet for idiots 102" They whould be requlred to go through a couple of more advanced classes like "education systems troubleshooting and use 204"
Once you get the teachers comfortable with the technology, they will start using it. Did the OLPC people give the devices to the teachers a YEAR before the kids? Because the teachers should have been given them AND classes on their use in the classroom.
I will bet you the OLPC people simply dropped a shipment in the schools and said "we givith! use this wisely" and walked away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I own one of the first OLPCs. The problem isn't Linux. (I hate to think of Win XP running in 256MB system, 1GB storage.) The problem is the whole philosophy of "it's not a computer, it's an education tool." (Or however they put it.)
No. A computer is whatever the user wants it to be. If you try to make that difficult, it'll fail sooner or later. The less money behind it, the sooner.
The educational philosophy they were pushing works for some subjects, some of the time. But they should have made it easy to use the OLPCs any way people wanted much earlier. It was only some time last year that a simple desktop switcher (sugar - gnome) was included with the basic OS. For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper. I'd been dualbooting debian since the beginning, but all the trial and error to accomplish that isn't something a lot of teachers would do. But initially, for the first four years!, there was a lot of resistance to just giving people a familiar interface.
Then there were the hardware limitations. Even for Linux, at least the Fedora they're using, 256MB is barely enough to breathe. The keyboard takes a lot of getting used to. I'm not sure they ever got the expanded touchpad working.
So, like I said, nice idea, but they should have put more effort into improving hardware, providing the software people want, better distribution so they had a larger community of enthusiasts to write code for the project and help on (better organized!) forums, and kept their goofy educational philosophy for the people who wanted it.
If your project is led by somebody who believes that the way forward is to drop OLPC laptops out of helicopters into villages and completely bypass locally respected educators, because of the belief that outsiders giving people technology will educate them, what hope have you got?
If the project doesn't seem to respect local teachers, then claims that the reason the project has failed is because of the teachers, well I am suspicious of the findings, or maybe at least suspect a bias.
Is the project too technology led rather than built on sound pedagogical frameworks to support children's education?
Providing teacher training to enable teachers to better employ the technology in their teaching practice (what The Economist article suggests) before dropping all the laptops into classrooms would have been less media friendly but perhaps a more successful strategy.
It does feel like the old story of rusting high tech white elephants in developing countries: well meaning, lots of money spent, not much time understanding local grassroots needs, working with the local educators on the ground. Stuff just gets dropped in with no support and surprise surprise doesn't get used well or technically maintained.
The technology is the easy bit. Engaging with local communities to understand their needs is time consuming and more difficult.
First, the project couldn't have even been done financially using any other OS/hardware combination. Second, the real reason technology doesn't improve education is we are treating it like magic and not as a productivity enhancement tool. The first computers used by government and business replaced rooms full of people by calculating stuff faster and with fewer errors. Even today, a smart phone replaces the need to have a map, newspaper and phone booth in a strange city when you want to see a movie (recent experience). In education, you don't have the incentive, or the viewpoint, to use technology to make the teacher more efficient at educating, and/or the student better at learning. For example, in the United States, teachers and other workers in education, but not educating, spend a significant amount of time on non-educational activities. Putting effort into automating and reducing the impact of those activities on the learning day, is a good use of technology. A bad use of technology, is replacing an existing working tool with a complex device that does the same thing, but adds overhead and requires more effort.
Before educating the students, they should have taught the teachers how to use the tehnology.
Since once they're out in the working world, they'll find what they're used to already: Windows!
By the time any of them are out in the working world, Microsoft will have gone through several generations of Ribbons and Metro and whatnot other changes. What kids need is to learn to write and structure documents, not the finer points of style and formatting. They need to be able to use their math in spreadsheets, making formulas and chaining them together, not making pretty management reports. That's not to say it won't be important in the future, but that's it's mostly pointless to learn it now to know how it'll be in Word and Excel 2022.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Part of the problem with the standard approach to computers in education is that they are treated as tools for helping students learn how to use pre-computer techniques for solving problems. There is a tendency to treat computers like a combination flash-card/homework-grading system. We give students prepackaged education "solutions" that are supposed to reinforce traditional book learning, and lock down their computers so that they can only use the software they were given.
We should instead focus on teaching children how to solve problems by writing programs. We should have a completely different approach to computers in education, because computers are different sorts of tools than what we had previously. Let students hack, and moreover create an environment that is friendly toward programming. We live in a computerized world; programming should be considered a matter of basic literacy at this point.
Palm trees and 8
I live in a tribal village in Peru, and the kids here have OLPC laptops. The trouble is bigger than teachers who have not been educated to make good use of the laptops (although that is an issue too). There isn't electricity here, much less internet (except my personal VSAT). While a computer loaded with educational resources is useful without an internet connection, it is a nice shiny green and white brick without power. For all of the hoopla about hand-crank or foot pedal chargers, I haven't seen one. When my solar panels are pulling in enough power, I'll charge one up for a kid or even let them on the internet, but my resources are limited in these areas too. So...it will be hard to REALLY evaluate the effectiveness of a machine like the OLPC until we have solved these basic infrastructure issues.