Ghana's Windows Blackboard Teacher And His Students Have a Rewarding Outcome (qz.com)

Quartz: A lot has changed in the life of Richard Appiah Akoto in the fortnight since he posted photos of himself on Facebook drawing a Microsoft Word processing window on a blackboard with multi-colored chalk, to teach his students about computers -- which the school did not have. The photos went viral on social media and media stories like Quartz's went all around the world. Akoto, 33, is the information and communication technology (ICT) teacher at Betenase M/A Junior High School in the town of Sekyedomase, about two and half hours drive north of Ghana's second city, Kumasi. The school had no computers even though since 2011, 14 and 15-year-olds in Ghana are expected to write and pass a national exam (without which students cannot progress to high school) with ICT being one of the subjects.

The story of the school and Twitter pressure from prominent players in the African tech space drew a promise from Microsoft to "equip [Akoto] with a device from one of our partners, and access to our MCE program & free professional development resources on." To fulfill this promise, the technology giant flew Akoto to Singapore this week where he is participating in the annual Microsoft Education Exchange.

Comments

race skeptics assemble!

[PopeRatzo]

In before the racist ACs show up for this thread. It's probably already too late, except for the fact that it's Sunday morning so most of the racist ACs are probably in church right now.

That guy's got some skills

[rsilvergun]

his chalkboard diagrams looked pretty amazing. That's some serious dedication to his students. Glad they got computers. There's so many old PCs getting trashed that often just need a new drive or a few caps replaced.

Re:That guy's got some skills

[Track07]

Definitely. If you think about it, a teacher in the USA would simply project an image and have a cue to its purpose. On the other hand, this guy needed to completely memorize every glyph including its location and purpose. I hope he doesn't use a carriage return as a paragraph formatting technique ;)

Re:That guy's got some skills

[Bing Tsher E]

Carriage return is a line break formatting technique, you fool.

Re:That guy's got some skills

[thegarbz]

There's so many old PCs getting trashed with literally no technical problem.

FTFY.

Re:Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

At work we throw out perfectly good laptops because they are out of warranty,where do they go? In the big "electronics recycling" bin where they're damaged and ransacked for parts by the techhobos that roam the citys e-recycling bins for goodies. The amount of shit we throw out in America would probably furnish most 3rd world countries several times over with technology.

Unless they also buy one for every student too.

[nadaou]

They'd be better off sending him one of these, although I'm not sure why this particular kit costs as much as it does and not $45.

https://www.adafruit.com/produ...

Is the OLPC project still active? Haven't heard anything about them in ages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re:Unless they also buy one for every student too.

[mohsel]

Totally agree.

I think there will be more benefits in equipping them with RPIs rather than PCs. it fits the purpose in an educational context and you reach more with the same amount of money.
and yeah, M$ can still be the sponsor and preinstall the IoT version of their MalwareOS 10

Re:Unless they also buy one for every student too.

[freeze128]

Even a raspberry pi requires a TV/monitor with an HDMI input, and a keyboard, and a mouse, and maybe speakers. It adds up.

Re:Unless they also buy one for every student too.

[Bing Tsher E]

I'm not sure why this particular kit costs as much as it does and not $45.

It's not just a Raspberry Pi. It has a $15 keyboard, a cheap plastic case and even comes with two stickers! That's why Adafruit jacked the price up to $149.95!

So, what happens ...

[PPH]

... to all those chalk-board drawings when Microsoft pushes a new Office version that moves all the controls around?

Re:So, what happens ...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's lucky he hasn't been sued by them...

Re:So, what happens ...

[tlhIngan]

... to all those chalk-board drawings when Microsoft pushes a new Office version that moves all the controls around?

He draws them anew.

Seriously.

That blackboard is IT. He draws it fresh every time. He doesn't have access to a million blackboards to which he can simply draw it once and use a different one. (Well, he may have two or three, so he can keep one of them up if he's willing to sacrifice one for his other subjects).

Then again, if he's the technology teacher, then he draws it once at the start of the unit, then draws a new one when he needs to.

Ramming Microsoft down third-world throats

[itomato]

Teaching rote MSFT junk. Like in India, where it is some supposed "benefit" to receive free licenses and materials, it's an attempt to undermine the efforts of a society under the guise of assistance as benevolent market leader. Garbage.

Re:Ramming Microsoft down third-world throats

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

Teaching rote MSFT junk. Like in India, where it is some supposed "benefit" to receive free licenses and materials, it's an attempt to undermine the efforts of a society under the guise of assistance as benevolent market leader. Garbage.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's the EXACT same tactic Apple Computers, Ltd. (which has since renamed itself to "Apple, Inc.") used in the 1980's and probably 90's as well, to boost adoption of their (at the time, clearly inferior) computers, such as the Apple ][, Apple //e, etc. versus the far-superior IBM PC, (superior for the purposes we'd have put them to if we'd had them in computer labs then, instead of crappy little Apple 2's,) since otherwise they'd probably never have gained sufficient foothold to matter, and the Apple Macintosh (later Apple Mac, then eMac, then iMac, etc.) would not even exists. Actually, those I think Apple just DISCOUNTED, rather than gave them outright, but... it's the same idea. "Get 'em hooked while they're young."

You're right though, but we can all take solace in the thought that as these Ghanaians grow up, they'll figure out that the "gift" is really a Trojan Horse, and then they'll put GNU/Linux on the computer(s,) and LibreOffice, and join the better, smarter members of the developed world in giving the bloated, decaying, stinking corpse of Microsoft the finger, as they turn to F/L-OSS like the rest of the world SHOULD.

Re:A what board?

[pablo_max]

If you going to bother being a racist, at least post with your ID. You fucking coward. Typical racist though. Will only say something when they are sure no one can figure out it was them. What a little bitch.

Viral marketing.

[Col. Bloodnok]

This story reeks of it.

*A* device?

[rainwalker]

That's nice, but donating one laptop seems...stingy? Very "thoughts and prayers"? A reasonable laptop is like $300, less for corporations, especially for a $90 billion dollar company.

Re:*A* device?

[Sarten-X]

I built a computer lab in Ghana. One laptop is plenty.

A single laptop is enough to make a huge improvement in the students' lives, through demonstrations and guided lessons. Despite the promises of the Ghanaian government, a lot of these kids won't actually be taking the ICT test, and a large percentage of those that do will not be using computers in their daily lives for the foreseeable future. Having a laptop demonstrating key concepts is a good first step towards the education they need if they're one of the lucky few.

A lab is stuck in one location. It's a prime target for theft. In time, it will be neglected, repurposed, and broken. A laptop is portable. It can be secured in a cabinet, carried discreetly in a bag, and taken to a repair shop (there's was a nice one in Kumasi a few years ago) frequently. The logistics of handling a single laptop are far easier to manage than a classroom full of them, and far easier than desktops.

Re:*A* device?

[whoever57]

I thought the same. They spent money flying the teacher to Singapore. Would a better use of that money be buying more computers for the school?

Re:*A* device?

[Mr_Silver]

That's nice, but donating one laptop seems...stingy? Very "thoughts and prayers"? A reasonable laptop is like $300, less for corporations, especially for a $90 billion dollar company.

I don't disagree that one laptop would be stingy, however that doesn't actually appear to be the case.

From the linked article it states that that they received a gift of a laptop from the University of Leeds, followed by a further 5 computers (not clear who from, but not unreasonable to assume it's from one of Microsoft's partners) and then a further laptop for Akoto's personal use by NIIT, a computer training school headquartered in Accra, the capital of Ghana.

By my count, that's 2 laptops and 5 desktops.

Re:*A* device?

[Mr_Silver]

From the linked article it states that that they received a gift of a laptop from the University of Leeds, followed by a further 5 computers (not clear who from, but not unreasonable to assume it's from one of Microsoft's partners) and then a further laptop for Akoto's personal use by NIIT, a computer training school headquartered in Accra, the capital of Ghana.

Actually, re-reading it again, it looks like the 5 desktops and 1 laptop for personal use was donated by NIIT. I assumed the word "further" was to differentiate between donors but that might not be the case.

Either way, better than one.

Re:*A* device?

[rkordmaa]

[quote]will not be using computers in their daily lives for the foreseeable future[/quote] That is very "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" type of thinking, Ghana it may be, but these kids have entire lifetime ahead of them. Changes are to be expected over decades. And if Africa does indeed continue to lag behind for the next century, well it's a bit of a catch 22 situations isn't it? Can't progress because majority of population has never even touched a computer, can't get population familiar with modern tech because they are too poor. Knowing your way around a computer is fast becoming nearly as important as basic literacy, what kind of jobs you can't do if you are illiterate or unable to use a computer overlaps nearly completely.

Re:*A* device?

[thegarbz]

They spent money flying the teacher to Singapore. Would a better use of that money be buying more computers for the school?

No. Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for his life. Now it's not quite like that, but in many cases bringing the issue to the surface can do far more good than a single donation.

Case in point, MS gave him a laptop and a ticket to a Microsoft event to meet others. Since then the school has received several computers both new and old.

Marketing is more valuable than a donation. Kind of like when stories were coming out where Apple gave a guy an iPad after his wife told him to return it because it was too expensive. That had nothing to do with that one guy or that one iPad.

Re:*A* device?

[Sarten-X]

I'll concede that's what it looks like, but that's not really what I meant. Perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be that for most of those students, the ICT lessons they're receiving will have minimal impact on their daily lives.

The Sekyedumase region is very near where my lab was... it's a big (by local standards) city in the middle of a farming community. The crowning achievement in the area at the time was a 3-story building. The vast majority of employment is local commerce or farming. When I was there, the city of Ejura had just gotten Internet access, delivered via microwave from a tower on the hill nearby. Despite English being the official language since it was a colony, many school classes are still taught in Twi, and there is a widespread reluctance to do anything non-traditional, mostly because parents don't want their kids to do anything differently from what they did.

That "good enough" culture has had some very interesting effects. Students consider school as completely optional, with 50% attendance being very high. Farming equipment is still usually pulled by oxen. Having a car is seen as an extravagance, like Americans view having a private plane. A shopkeeper having a calculator is high-end, and the really fancy stores even have a functional cash register!

At the same time, there's the incredible advancement of the African continent. While the farmer's oxen are pulling the plow, he's carrying a smartphone, connected to a high-speed cellular network, at least as good as anything in America. Everyone, even the beggar outside the market, has a cell phone. The Internet cafe' doesn't even have a land line telephone... their connection is data-only. As a culture, they've skipped a generation of technology, because they're arriving late to the game, and get to jump in without having anything left behind from inferior implementations.

I would predict that Ghana has a market for highly-integrated convenience devices far more than desktop workstations. That cash register will eventually be replaced by a standalone NFC POS terminal, completely managed from an office in Kumasi or Accra. For personal computing, I'd expect the majority will be tablets and other portable devices more compatible with the open-community lifestyle, where the notion of privacy is almost entirely foreign. Note that most folks don't have valuables, so most doors don't have locks, so most folks try not to keep valuables at home.

In short, I expect that Ghana (and Africa at large) will see rapid adoption of technologies that don't follow the UI/UX paradigms that America has had since the 1970s. While America moves slowly toward IoT and tiny personal systems, Ghana will embrace the new technologies from the start, completely skipping the old. Yes, the students do have their whole lives ahead of them... but the lessons they learn today in an ICT class will be roughly as useful for them as New Math was for American students.

Re:*A* device?

[Sarten-X]

Thank you! That makes me so very happy! I can now describe my life as "unbelievable!"

You're actually the first person on the Internet to notice the variety of things I do and have done, and I wish you had a name so I could recognize you. I've been expecting it for a while, because I realize that a lot of the context in my life is lost in comments. If you don't mind (and even if you do, really), I'm going to rant off-topic about how I have come to have "been there" and "done that" for so many (but certainly not all) topics. If it helps, picture me as a crazy old professor, getting overly excited about his favorite branch of mathematics. Apart from the fact that my hair's not gone white (yet), and I'm not very good at math (despite minoring in it in college) the stereotype is a pretty accurate picture.

In short, I've lived a good life, and been fortunate enough to be a lot of places, do a lot of things, and meet a lot of folks. I've also been able to turn a lot of my hobbies into careers, and overlap a lot of my time into several different aspects of my life.

For instance, this lab in Ghana was built just after a turning point in my life, when I left my crappy-but-fulfilling teaching/tutoring job near a university and my side business working IT and sysadmin for a small radio station. I was in Ghana for about 6 months, during which time I proposed to my girlfriend, who had convinced me to volunteer. I then came back, went back into software development, realized in a year that I'd lost my passion for the daily grind of programming, and moved to full-time sysadmin, with my radio experience moving into live audio production (building on some stage experience from before the teaching position) on the weekends, and getting involved with my church audio as well, which in turn got me involved in an occasional role with a film crew making several short films. That continued for several years, until I moved across the country for a new sysadmin/technician/installer/engineering/whatever job that has sent me to many places doing engineering work, but I still get enough time off to reunite annually with a group of chemist friends back near that university, where we engage in some energetic demonstrations.

That one paragraph describes ten different jobs/hobbies, seven US states, four countries, three continents, and countless friends and colleagues, all spread across about a decade. That's been the pace of most of my adult life, and reflecting on that pace has led me to a few important realizations.

First, every moment in a life is connected. What I do for fun now (like taking up running again... currently at a 15-minute mile pace) will become a story later (next month I race against a 7-year-old!), and could become the next big opportunity (does Elon Musk run 5Ks, and does he run them ridiculously slowly?). Living in the moment and taking every opportunity is a great way to get new experiences. One principle I've held to is that as long as I'm acting how I believe to be right at the time, I have nothing to regret. Sure, I've done some awful things that turned out to be wrong, but I was acting on the best information I had at the time, so I don't regret my choices. I just keep moving forward.

Second, everyone else's story is just as connected and as screwey as mine. Now, I don't really know you, and you're an AC so I will never really know you much, but I'd expect you've done a lot in your life, too. You've worked jobs with crappy bosses, you've done stupid things, and you've had some really fortunate moments. I'd love to hear those stories, but be warned that you'll be added to the list of folks I know. If I say I "have a friend" or "know someone", it's usually someone whom I've convinced to tell me their stories. Tonight, I heard that a colleague of mine (who coincidentally was in Ghana two years before I was) was running as a child, and ended up running into a palm tree and getting a piece of a frond embedded in his arm. That's not a story I'm likely to tell again, but it's fascinating to me

Re: Sad

[j33px0r]

OLPC was about making money. The scam played out, pockets were lined and new profitable opportunities have since ensued. Similar events are seen when NSF grants run out and researchers move on to the next shiney trend.

It was was never really about the children.

Now they only need electricity and security...

[FeltLion]

...or the law of unintended consequences will take effect #TheGodsMustBeCrazy

Re:Now they only need electricity and security...

[Sarten-X]

Ghana has both fairly reliably. Petty crime like theft is present, but mostly towards outsiders... the sense of community is still very strong.

Re: Now they only need electricity and security...

[FeltLion]

Thanks for the reality check!

Problem Solved

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the perfect story for our brave new world of microsecond attention span and viral feel-bad/tweet/feel-good mindset:
-- see touching photo
-- do something trivial and symbolic about it
-- tweet and market that symbolic action
-- extra points for a "thoughts and prayers" tweet, as those are particularly transparent (= "please think of me as a caring person" [not caring enough to actually do anything other than tweet, of course])
-- go home feeling good.
There are some very smart folks at Microsoft; I wonder how they feel about this particular charade?

Re:A what board?

[PopeRatzo]

Somebody just got out of church, apparently. We've been expecting you.

Re:A what board?

[Bing Tsher E]

You're expecting? Let's hope the little brat is nothing like his father.

He underestimated it.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The drawing with chalk was actually an attempt to real-time emulate Word starting up.

Story is on qz.com, so be careful

[93 Escort Wagon]

I tried reading the linked article with scripting disabled because - why would you need JavaScript just to read a story on a random website? Turns out qz is one of those sites which, bizarrely, puts up an extremely blurry version of its stories’ photographs by default and then afterward replaces them with the real photos with a JavaScript call. So if you use NoScript or a similar tool, you might as well read the story using Lynx.

What on earth is qz.com trying to do with its visitors’ computers that requires JavaScript, I wonder?

Re: Sad

[cheesybagel]

It got outcompeted in a large part of the world by the Intel Classmate. Right now I guess it's superceded by Chromebooks and tablets.

Until the battery no longer holds a charge

[tepples]

At work we throw out perfectly good laptops because they are out of warranty

I tend to keep a laptop longer than that. I replace the battery once it no longer holds a charge, but once the replacement battery no longer holds a charge, I have considered that the time to replace the laptop with one that probably has longer runtime out of the box. Is it practical to expect every PC user to, say, learn how to replace lithium ion cells in a laptop battery pack?

Caps and first meaningful paint

[tepples]

Including a low-resolution image directly in the HTML using a data: URI has two purposes.

Respecting viewers on capped plans If a server sends an image that the user never scrolls to, the data transmission is wasted. If a server sends an image whose resolution exceeds that of the viewer's display device, the data transmission is wasted. When viewers are on cellular or satellite Internet connections with a usage allowance of 10 GB per month or less, wasted data transmission costs these viewers real money. Making the site respond faster First meaningful paint is when all the layout and text are in place above the fold, and things won't move around as more resources load. A site with an earlier first meaningful paint feels faster to viewers. So a site might optimize for an earlier first meaningful paint up by loading basic styles and fonts before images.

Re:Caps and first meaningful paint

[Voyager529]

I think the GP's point was that the website is sending stories in image format. Both purposes you state are solved by using garden variety text; even the lowest resolution photo takes more data to transmit, and increases the time of the first meaningful paint, than just transmitting text. Since the site is intentionally using methods that are less effective at accomplishing either task you suggest, then it stands to reason that there are other reasons to be putting stories in an image format.

Re:Caps and first meaningful paint

[bug_hunter]

I don't think that's the case, from that post
> bizarrely, puts up an extremely blurry version of its stories’ *photographs* by default and then afterward replaces them with the real photos with a JavaScript call

Anyway, tepples response sums up everything quite well. Not everything is a conspiracy.

Re: Caps and first meaningful paint

[c6gunner]

Including a low-resolution image directly in the HTML using a data: URI has two purposes.

He didn't say "low resolution", he said "blurry".

I've seen that before. The included image isn't a low-res version of the final image; it's a high-res version of the image which has been intentionally blurred all to shit. So the rest of your comment is irrelevant; not only are they not saving bandwidth by providing a low-res photo, they're actually wasting even more bandwidth by including a high-res but blurred photo, and then using JavaScript to load the non-blurred photo.

Re:Caps and first meaningful paint

[Voyager529]

Tepples gives two reasons that are far better solved with actual-text than low-res images. If QZ's means of addressing the issues described by Tepples is both less effective and more complicated, then it's not a conspiracy to say that there's another 'problem' being 'solved' with image-based articles.

Re: Sad

[steveha]

What happened to OLPC? The $99 laptop

OLPC still exists, but is now irrelevant. The project is almost dead.

First, they failed to hit their $100 target. The laptop cost roughly double that.

Second, their program focused on the wrong strategy. They tried to make the perfect device but didn't focus enough on volume. They should have made a laptop that they would cheerfully sell to anyone for $100, and shipped hundreds of millions of devices. Instead they made a somewhat boutique device that cost $200 and they wouldn't sell it to you unless you paid $400 for it. (Under their "give 1/get 1" program, you would pay double for a laptop and OLPC would then give a laptop to a student somewhere.) The boutique strategy didn't work out.

Then they spent time trying to design some new devices that never went anywhere. (XO-2 XO-3)

We now live in a world where you can get an off-the-shelf Android tablet for $40. Therefore you can get roughly four tablets plus four USB keyboards for a similar cost of a single OLPC device.

I respect the OLPC project's ambitious design goals. A laptop that is rugged, can work outdoors, is repairable, and has mesh networking features, running nothing but free software! Neat! But compromising on some of these details could have lowered the price and the project might not be irrelevant now. I'd like to see some statistics on how often the mesh networking is actually used, how often schools actually repair these devices.

Around 2012, the OLPC project tried releasing a special OLPC Android tablet for $150. I can't find any information on how many they sold, but I don't think that really worked out either.

At this point I think the best strategy would be to just write educational software to run on Android tablets, and assume the market will take care of making the tablets.

P.S. I personally paid $400 for the original OLPC laptop. I found the thing to be frustratingly slow and hard to use. (In fairness I routinely use computers that cost way more than $200, but even so...) The worst part was the touchpad; I found it wildly inaccurate so using it was frustrating.

Also, I was looking forward to hacking the thing; I wanted to hit that "Show Source" code keyboard button, see some Python code, and make some sort of improvement. I found that most of the time when I hit the "Show Source" button it didn't do anything and my urge to contribute died.

In the end, I donated my OLPC to a church group, to send to a school in a very poor part of India.

I used to use a Palm Pilot to read books and run various programs including games. The display wasn't great but performance was great (you never had to wait for the thing to respond to a click) and the battery lasted a very long time. (If I remember correctly I got about two weeks of life from a pair of AA cells. I switched to using rechargeable NiMH AA cells, and still got days of use before needing to recharge.)

IMHO the OLPC project could have made a tablet device similar to a Palm Pilot, but with a much larger and higher-resolution monochrome screen... and hit their $100 price point. Such a device would be useful for running educational software and very usable as an ebook reader. In particular the long battery life would have been a huge win compared to the actual OLPC hardware. Such a device shipped in the hundreds of millions of units would have had a much higher chance of changing the world. It could have been offered both as a stand-alone device, and in a nylon case bundled with a USB keyboard (kind of like the Apple Newton case). In t

1.5 kB then 72.3 kB

[tepples]

The blurry cover photo in question is not high res; it is 50 by 38 pixels and 1.5 kB, compared to the full-size cover photo that is 640 by 480 pixels and 72.3 kB. I admit I was wrong about it being an inline data: URI; I had remembered that technique from a faster paint tutorial and assumed it was being applied here as well. But even blurred photos compress fairly well in JPEG because most of their energy is concentrated in low-order DCT terms.

It's how i learned

[sad_]

back when i was younger, this was exactly how we learned coding as well.
computers were way too expensive, so we got all the theory and made our programs on paper (guarding and keeping them, until, one day, perhaps, you actually got the chance of typing them into the real thing).

the thing that is different here, is that we didn't have any gui's, so it was far easier for the teacher to explain things on the black board if everything is cli based.

Re: Sad

[steveha]

Minor correction, Palm devices used AAA cells.