Last day to give a laptop & get a laptop (U.S. & Canada)

I can’t help thinking that this kind of thing is typical of the Media Lab approach to computing. It sounds cool, but nobody has actually bothered to do any research on what people in the majority world might want in the classroom (books? dry classrooms? Teacher’s salaries?). In general, technology developed in the first world, by first world technologists, without consultation with likely end users fails disastrously. I can’t see why this computer would be any different.

The record of computers in the classroom in the first world is not particularly impressive (some plausibly argue that they’ve had zero affect, certainly its hard to measure if there has been one), and $399 buys an awful lot of education in Africa. I hate to be negative about something with so much goodwill behind its design, but the third world is littered with failed technology projects of this kind. There are people who know how to design effective technologies for Africa, India, etc – but none of them were consulted (and those I’ve spoken to were not terribly optimistic about its chances).

Would that the people who write the articles for “PC Magazine” could be replaced by your 12 y.o. reviewer…

Cranky

Imagine – a computer review with actual, usable information (both positive and negative).

IMHO it would be more useful to give them potable water.

But that’s so 19th C.

The reviews by Westerners are going to be roughly “It’s a cute little laptop”. People love the Eee PC, and that’s a standard commercial product which isn’t all that much more money. There’s a market niche for that type of product, and the OLPC sounds like it isn’t an especially bad machine in that class (it’s not clear it’s an especially good machine either, as opposed to a quirky one).

Fitting it into what poor people need is an entirely different matter, and as other commenters have pointed out about, typically a disaster.

But you don’t get on the high-tech visionary conference circuit saying that.

By the way, I suspect the “offer” is going to be renewed or extended. It has no logical reason behind it. Instead, it seems to be “Call now” type marketing.

I do think there are many hundreds of millions of people in the world who will benefit from low cost computing (and internet access), but they’re not the ones who are lacking chalk boards and bowls of millet porridge.

But, I believe — as has been the case with TVs, VCRs, DVD players, satellite dishes, and cell phones — computers and net access will be low cost versions of the devices we all use rather than custom MIT-designed technology for poor people. In fact, I won’t be surprised at all if most have internet access first through the cell phone networks (which seem very successful in developing countries) and Blackberry/iPhone type devices rather than laptops.

[deleted – leaving comment up so the numbering of responses doesn’t get too confusing]

So much ignorance, so little time. First, as to #9:”computers and net access will be low cost versions of the devices we all use rather than custom MIT-designed technology for poor people.” The XO-1 is a low cost device (it costs about $180 US at the moment). It is the most environmentally sound laptop ever made. It is designed to be highly energy efficient, and to have a low impact when it is finally disposed of. It is highly rugged (for comparison, this ruggedness is only found in a few highly expensive laptops in the $4000 range) and well suited to use by children in humid or dusty environments. The battery is much better than the battery in any of the laptops you are currently using. The display is revolutionary, twice the resolution of ordinary laptops and able to be used in black-and-white mode as an ebook reader outside in sunlight. It has built in wifi reception that can “mesh-network” with other XOs to allow the extension of network infrastructure from a school network access point throughout a village. These devices have already changed the way western manufacturers conceive of the laptop — note the fact that in the bidding in Brazil, Intel felt the need to modify its design for the Classmate to incorporate at least some of the features of the xo in their bid.

As to software, at present it is stronger for students in the upper grades than the lowest ages for which it is targetted at the moment. This is because development hardware has been scarce, and the earliest work has naturally been aimed at making the platform itself work robustly.

As someone who has spent several years volunteering in elementary classrooms helping with the use of technology there (as well as assisting with the science and math curriculum), I can tell you that there is a world of difference between providing a child friendly, untethered laptop for every child, that can be taken home and experimented with, versus having a handful of computers sitting at the side of the room or in a lab, which is what most technology-in-the-classroom efforts have entailed in the US.

As to the trade-off between books and this technology, the pricepoint was aimed at to enable a country to provide their textbooks electronically rather than as scarce, out-of-date paper resources that children needed to share in the classroom and could never take home. The xo allows every child to have a full, up-to-date set of textbooks that can be taken home easily and studied even in environments without electricity.

I’ll stop here with a last comment: there is room for many paths to aid people in the developing world. If you feel that a contribution to food aid or clean water development is better, then that is what you should give. Some of us feel that a world-changing approach to bringing 21st century education to many third-world children is equally or more capable of changing lives in the areas where it is tried.

#13 – I don’t think anybody was arguing about the technical innovation of the laptop. That your immediate response was to defend its technology says a lot about the drivers of this project – technology, rather than people.

Take the ebook reading capabilities. The problem, and its a real problem, is that textbooks are limited and expensive. Why are they limited and expensive? Are there perhaps different solutions here? New printing technologies that could be built and maintained locally? Is it that the books don’t survive well in the climate? How about different paper? Are there problems with an ebook reader. Well yeah, a couple. If a textbook is damaged (or stolen) it can be repaired, or replaced. One book is lost. if an XO is damaged, then its harder to repair and all the textbooks on it have to be replaced. Low tech solutions have a massive advantage – they’re cheap to maintain.

As far as I can see, the people working on this project came in assuming the solution was a better laptop and then applied that solution to as many problems as they could. Its a bad approach, that tends to fail (the third world is litered with technology solutions, that failed to find a problem).

Is the software that will be provided effective, appropriate? Could the same education goals be met in other ways, combined with other lessons. Why programming for constructivist learning, instead of perhaps mechanics, electronics, farming, etc? Has anybody asked these questions? Apparently not. Given how little evidence there is suggesting that using computers offers any educational advantage (including Papert’s approach) – in normal classrooms (rather than special programs set up by researchers), I think there are good reasons to be skeptical. In general in education there is an assumption that technology is a good thing, but its a largely unexamined assumption with very little empirical evidence supporting it.

#15 – Nobody said that this thing would fail because the technology was rubbish. The nearest to such a criticism was Slocum’s, but he was actually making a very different point (which I partially agree with).

The third world is littered with failed top down technology projects, of which the OLPC is an example (which was the point I was making). The initial requirements for the device came from Nicholas Negroponte’s assumptions about what was needed for a third world computer. Wherever those assumptions came from, they didn’t arise from any familiarity with the third world, or technology development there. The “need” for such a device came from Seymour Papert’s (lovely) ideas about education. Unfortunately, Papert has never had much success in proving those ideas, and they didn’t have a huge affect on education either. I have no objection to further research in this area, nor would I have to Papert testing them in the third world. I do see it as highly problematic if you’re going to try to sell them to impoverished third world countries as the solution to their problems.

The production and demand for the product was largely driven by Negroponte lobbying the UN and government heads. Is there demand on the ground for such devices? Nobody knows and nobody much seems to have bothered to find out. Was there serious testing of the prototype? Any exploration of other designs, other approaches? Apparently not. It has lots of innovative ideas, like the wireless networking [nice idea], but has it been tested in realistic conditions? Do they even know what realistic conditions are (and how much variety there is likely to be between an African village, an urban slum, etc, etc)? Lots of ideas like that which seem like a good idea in the west, turn out not to work out so well in the field. Good to know before the things have been sold.

And I still don’t understand why nobody thinks that very poor families won’t sell the things. $50 is a fortune in many of the places that they’re talking about placing these things. Hell, it could pay for a child’s school fees for a few years – or food.

OLPC has worked closeley with education faculties and technology groups in Latin America and elsewhere in developing the technology.

Well no. They’ve worked closely on developing some of the educational software. This is very different. Has anyone run trials in villages, urban slums? Asked teachers what they think? Carried out projects with teachers? These are all standard practice, and yet…

This is another project that is in the line of SUCCESSFUL technology projects, because it is small, distributed, and maintainable in country.

These are hardly primary criteria – its supposed to be an educational device. How do any of these make it more effective educationally? They’re infrastructure. Its like saying a school will be successful, because the building has a roof. I’d agree that such things are important, but…
As for the criteria. Well maintainable I agree with. The other two may be true, but they’re hardly iron cast rules. A small computer is very easy to steal, for example. Distributed tends not to work very well when you have small communities separated by considerable distance.

In addition it bears the hallmarks of successful projects done in the US, namely by the association with the education ministries and universities in-country to provide integration with the local curriculum standards and practices.

As well as the hallmarks of failed projects carried out in the US. All projects of this scale will involved these things for what should be obvious reasons.

As for the “little evidence of effectiveness” perhaps that is because it has not been possible to try on a large scale. The only large school laptop experiment in the US of which I am aware is in Maine, and it was carried out solely in middle schools.

Little evidence that widespread use of computers in US schools has had any affect on education. Evidence on laptops is mixed, but broadly similar. The Maine study could only find evidence of an affect on writing (though they give the usual bullshit excuses for why no other affects were found on any of the other tests), due to the ease of revising (this putting it broadly in line with other work looking at word processing). However, given that there was no control group its impossible to say how much of that was due to laptops (the fact that not all groups used laptops is indicative, but there could be other reasons for why they didn’t use laptops, which would independently affect their performance on the writing tests – and of course there may always be a group that doesn’t want to use laptops, thus limiting their effectiveness). In addition, obviously this study only shows the affect on particular types of teaching (those practiced in Maine), and there may be non-technology based forms of teaching that, while less trendy, achieve equal or better effects. The US school system is fairly unimpressive globally, so I wouldn’t expect to find best practices there and interestingly countries with better educational systems often use far less technology.
The other link is largely a puff piece, with most of the benefits being about student and parent attitudes. These may, or may not, have an affect on actual education. These may, or may not, last. They really don’t tell us anything about what will happen elsewhere in the world, though.

the magnitude of the change they introduced is dwarfed by the impact of OLPC in places that have no access to the Internet or computers at all.

Most places have access to the internet and computers – even in Africa. Experiences in America don’t really tell us much about what will happen in places that are culturally and linguistically very different.

17, 18: Some cites backing up your allegations might be useful. In fact there have been several trials, in Peru, in Thailand and in Nigeria (that I know of). By the way “most places have access to the internet and computers – even in Africa” is rather like saying “most people have access to Rolex watches”. Adults may have access via costly internet cafes in cities, but I believe you are blowing smoke if you are asserting that most children have such access.

ack, the comment @#4 I wanted to cite:

you don’t need to do research to know that the money spent on a computer would be better spent on things like maize porridge

#19 There have been trials, but long after the OLPC design was pretty much finalised. You’re pretty limited in what you can fix by that stage. How good/thorough the trials were is hard to say, given that not a lot of details have been officially published.

By the way “most places have access to the internet and computers – even in Africa” is rather like saying “most people have access to Rolex watches”.

Actually it isn’t, and that was my point. Outsider’s views of what is and isn’t available in much of the third world tend to be fairly inaccurate. In most of the world’s urban centres (which is where most people live) internet cafes are available and reasonably cheap when one factors out the infrastructure costs. Even in rural areas, email is often available, and actually used fairly widely as an easy and fairly cheap form of communication. In Africa the main problems are language and the backbone to the rest of the world being very expensive and slow (the OLPC doesn’t address either of these problems, and currently the writing/reading software is hopeless if the child doesn’t speak English, or a major European language). In addition electricity is extremely expensive, which is why in one of the trials in Africa carried out by the education ministry (possibly Nigeria, though that doesn’t sound right) the OLPC was abandoned when they realised that the long term running costs would far exceed the cost of the device and exhaust the education budget. Total Cost of Ownership is what has killed other ambitious computing education projects in the third world (for instance, Egypt).

The OLPC doesn’t really address any of these problems, Negroponte being rather dismissive of infrastructure problems (though I think some of the other team realise that these are critical now). The handcrank is of course a joke (you only have to do the calculations on the back on an envelope to see that), which is probably why Trevor Bayliss wasn’t very interested in getting involved, so you have the problem of paying for electricity still (which in much of Africa will kill its use at home, and possibly in schools), access to the internet will be limited by the infrastructure. Now if the project had addressed these problems first, that might have led to some interesting solutions.

“Adults may have access via costly internet cafes in cities, but I believe you are blowing smoke if you are asserting that most children have such access.”

Most children don’t have such access (though given what most children actually use the internet for, I can’t say that this seems terribly important – is the ability to plagarise wikipedia really that educationally useful?), however given the speed and cost of internet access in Africa, I can’t imagine the OLPC doing much to change that.

Stostosto,
I take your point, I think. But my problem with projects like this isn’t simply that there’s something else that people should be doing with the resources that I happen to think would be better, but that this kind of project is just one more iteration of a very long and thoroughly failed strategy of Western aid, a strategy that has precisely the reverse effect intended. Using technology as a magic bullet in a country that lacks the infrastructure to support and maintain that technology (on a necessarily massive scale, no less) would produce a structural dependence, and would make that country’s education system wholly an offshoot of the West’s benevolence. Do you disagree? The library of the school I taught in was filled with totally useless books (I’m talking Goethe’s Faust for 14 year swahili speakers olds) that had been donated by well meaning people, while the kinds of books the library actually needed were too expensive to buy more than a handful (and were printed in Kenya). If there was talk of building computer building facilities in Uganda or something, that’s a wholly different conversation, but not one that seems to be going on. I mention the “maize porridge” example not merely because there’s something perverse about giving very expensive computers to kids who can’t concentrate because they’re hungry (and I’m not talking about real famine, I’m talking about the same problems you find in a American schools where free lunch programs have been eliminated), but because buying grain from local farmers would buoy up depressed grain markets, particularly if done on the massive scale that these planners seem to propose. If the money is there to buy computers, why isn’t it there to subsidize agriculture the way our government subsidizes American farmers? That’s a rhetorical question, of course; “Capacity building” always seems to mean finding new ways to sell Western products to the third world (and loan them money to buy it), instead of actually building the capacity of the third world to produce for itself.

zunguzungu,

Using technology as a magic bullet in a country that lacks the infrastructure to support and maintain that technology (on a necessarily massive scale, no less) would produce a structural dependence, and would make that country’s education system wholly an offshoot of the West’s benevolence. Do you disagree?

No, you’re quite convincing. I haven’t thought very hard about this, I just thought it was a neat idea.

While some developed-world technologies clearly do have useful applications in poor countries — drugs and medical technologies, agricultural methods, transportation, cell phones — it’s also true that post-WWII experience is littered with ill conceived technology driven projects.

I also happen to think that in the case of computers in the class room, this applies to rich-world experience as well: Lots of PCs have been installed in schools without properly thinking through what they’re really good for.

The OLPC project may be similarly flawed. But at least it has gone to great lengths to radically rethink the laptop based on a Ford-like vision (“a car for the multitudes”) rather than just pushing some off-the-shelf thingy. I’d also hope the national education authorities will have the good sense to address your concerns and device good ways to introduce laptops to schools and integrate them in useful ways. After all, it’s their responsibility.

What is sometimes tiresome in discussions of this and similar projects is the frequent appearance of an almost Pavlovian cynicism which I find superficial and unconstructive.

It goes without saying that your comments don’t fall under that heading. Your skepticism is reasoned and passionate and you bring personal experience to bear.

Stostosto,
I’m not at all sure my cynicism isn’t pavlovian at this point. But the difference between Afro-pessimism in the worst sense and a conviction that almost everything the West has tried to do to develop the developing world has been spectacularly unsuccessful can look very similar in practice, if not in theory.

Clew,
Well, my experience is limited, and I hope you’re right that they’re not as naive as I think. But the amount and widespreadness of willful and arrogant ignorance that I saw (in my limited experience) was enough to make me tend to think the worst of such projects rather than extend the benefit of the doubt. But hopefully you’re right. It just seems to me that so many of the basic foundational premises are flawed that whether or not they address smaller problems is kind of beside the point. And I’m not sure where these places are that have food security but lack education, and it seems to me like it might be a faulty formulation; I had kids whose parents could *afford* food in the abstract sense, but if a school for budgetary reasons doesn’t feed the kids between the hours of 8 and 3 (and the kids are at school during that period of time), the question of whether the parent’s have food security doesn’t quite get at the heart of the issue. It might be, in this case, that my experience doesn’t match the reality on the ground where they’ve decided to insert themselves, but I tend to doubt it.

As for the issue of computers versus paper, being on a blog doesn’t compel one to have a particular position on the medium in any particular case (blogs can do what they do here for particular reasons, but tend to work more or less well in other places, for reasons that are just as locally specific). Were the infrastructure of a different nature than it is, computers might well be an excellent way to distribute textbooks to kids. In my judgment, though, it doesn’t seem like this is likely to be the case (nor does it seem to me that these people are asking the right questions). Technology, as such, is not the issue; the problem is that solving problems with technology usually seems to reinforce systems of economic dependence, and when the planning process seems to exclude those considerations from the very beginning, I find myself getting very weary.

re: “boys,” well, I had been thinking about how the boys would play soccer instead of eating lunch, which led them (I suspected) to be more difficult to handle in the afternoon (and many of them told me that they found the uji porridge unappetizing; they thought it was funny that I liked it, since it was sort of the cheapest food available). The girls, socialized into gender roles as they were, did not play soccer and the administrators, being just as gendered, put the girls in charge of doling the stuff out, so it was sort of a female space for consumption. Girls ate more than boys, in short. So, yes, it was creepy in a way, but maybe not the way you were thinking. That said, I’m glad you’ve given me the opportunity to go on the record as denouncing hunger-based inattentiveness in any and all genders: I do so.

sc_k, it’s all been downhill since we stopped memorizing literature for recitation. Literacy itself destroyed the romantic experience of poetry and prose.

zunguzungu, true, open-source advocates and techies in general are, characteristically, overoptimistic, oversimplifying, underprepared, and egotistical. They get stuff done anyway, but frequently not what was intended… It’s true that the hardware is very top-down, in both production and administration, but the software is trying to be to-each-their-own and also bubble-up and peer-to-peer and community-knowledge. Like cellphones, but more powerful. What’s your take on cellphones, in the places you’ve taught?

It will work better if it isn’t all in English, yo. So I went and looked at the Project Gutenberg Children’s Bookshelf, and of course it’s preponderously North American (strongest non-Anglo influences: French and maybe Navajo). The OLPC Library-bundles are less so, but clearly could use more ‘content’. I’m discussing this on Distributed Proofreading (which gets books ready for Project Gutenberg); I think there would be enthusiasm there for any work that would go out to under-booked schools, on the OLPC or from the Internet Bookmobile. Or printed by the bale for a gov’t, for that matter. We *don’t* know what the schools want or whether there are public-domain copies of it, though. I assume the OLPC local projects might, so I have a thread there too. Do you happen to know if there are US or UK collections of classic foreign works that are inadequately available in schools? …No reason you particularly should know, but it would simplify the process a lot.

I would have thought that people — even children — who reliably skip a meal and are picky about its social acceptability probably expect a better meal later that day. Maybe not! In any case, that didn’t help either you or them at the time. I join in decrying hunger-based inattentiveness.