> Part of the problem is that students learn faster than many of their teachers
Interesting. Seems that it's not that the laptops aren't teaching the children anything, but that they aren't being tested on the things they are learning.
Well, it's no surprise that the laptops didn't turn out to be silver bullets for education, of course they are just another educational material that requires support in how the teachers use them. The government needs to invest in teacher training, clearly, which I guess is what the article is getting at.
Meanwhile in India, the Hole-in-the-Wall project, providing internet access with no direction, assistance or teachers to illiterate street urchins, continues to produce amazing results as completely uneducated children teach themselves to read, communicate in English, do math, and many other skills.
This is a key distinction. Attempting to integrate laptops into existing curriculum with teacher training is a sisyphean task for deployments in countries where teachers haven't used (let alone taught with or seen someone teach with) any computer or smartphone before. OLPC made its classroom-transformative ideals clear, but, and this is purely speculation, the popular and misguided notion of what "ICT for Education" should be wins out nearly everywhere. Purchased laptops ended up being seen as something they can plug-and-play insert into the existing educational curriculum instead of complementing or supplanting any part of it.
OLPC's recipe, followed to a T, would probably work quite well. But the economics and politics of the situation mean these ideals are mutated to the point of inefficacy before the laptops reach the kids.
Technology can be plug-and-play and transformative for kids without adult supervision. Watch kids play games. The kids in OLPC deployments pick up the difficult-to-use laptop UI quickly, clicking around and finding ways to have fun with the cameras and make silly videos of their friends singing in the schoolyard when the teachers aren't looking.
But in the newly-laptopped classroom the teachers just can't help but revert back to the comfortable pattern of stepping kids through pointing and clicking all the while juggling laptops running out of battery, touchpads on the fritz, and the realities of a classroom full of children. And the teachers are not comfortable with this technology. It's another chapter in their teacher's manual they have to spend their free time to learn, however exciting and novel it is.
Get the kids anything with a thriving App Store and give them an internet connection. Set up computer clubs outside of school for structured growth and let them play.
Bringing every child a free laptop should be considered an essential starting point to reduce social inequality and poverty. Giving the opportunity to the poor child that has born in the countryside to be connected and teach him about technology since is a 5 years old bring an amazing democratizing tool of opportunities to them. And perhaps the only one.
I'm from Uruguay and starting in 2006, this is exactly what the government has been done. This has become a national cause. And as far as I know, this has been the most successful implementation to date of this.
Uruguay is a relatively small country (similar to Greece but with a lot rural areas) and with a modest population of 3M people.
In less than two years (by 2009) the government implemented free wifi connectivity for OLPC kids across the country. The country is very close to 100% wifi connectivity for OLPC kids (run on a separate network) and we're near to 100% 3G costless as-well across the country which works at least at 5Mb / second.
In addition to that, the government declared internet as a right that anyone should get, for free. Any uruguayan can claim at least 256k in their houses for free on any part of the country. There's no barrier anymore to be connected. And truth is, people is getting interested in the opportunities of it. The little kid who goes to school in a horse because is 20km far from his house in rural areas now he's aware of a new previously unseen potential and see the opportunities of becoming a designer or a programmer. And this is really happening.
However, is naive to think computers alone will do the trick. Bringing computers is just the starting point of something bigger which is not only the connectivity, but mostly the educational foundations that should be instrumented afterwards and carefully followed up based on all the feedback. Real iterations based on data and adjusted as the project goes. It may resonate like the same principle of a startup.
I heard the people who contribute to this in UY is now beginning to help the Peruvian and other countries with the experience and all we have learned of this to re-create the same kind of educational environments.
I agree that the OLPC was a good equalizer and brought opportunities to our children, and I support the project.
However, I don't think it has been a good tool in the classroom. I've talked to some teachers, and they feel they weren't prepared to deal with it or to utilize it, it has actually disrupted classes in some cases.
As someone who bought an olpc to have one donated back in 2008 or 2009, I was underwhelmed to say the least by the product. I expected a more intuitive ui for non-pc savvy users, but it was cludgy and hard to use. If my friends 2 year olds can operate an iphone, then maybe that is a more suitable ui for new computer users to dive into.
I half hoped that the olpc would come with build in curriculum and learning games and videos that the kids could do on their own. i.e. faster than the teacher could teach them. I do believe there is still plenty of potential for these types of programs to work, just need to understand how the end users will use them better, and have properly designed curriculum.
I have to agree with your sentiment about the machine. I too bought one as part of the G1G1 program and it is a horrible device. I've played around with it extensively (even building a temperature sensor so that school kids could do some simple experiments with it: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/01/simplifying-my-olpc-xo-1-tempera...) and it's an ugly machine.
The supplied software is really poor in general (or incredibly limited) and there isn't much of a decent ecosystem of software around it. And the default launcher is hard to use.
It is one thing, however: it's really robust. Can't count the number of times local school kids have dropped it on the floor or generally abused it.
I participated in the program, too, and have struggled to find use for my machine. But I have no regrets. To say because "my friend's 2 year olds can operate an iphone, then maybe that is a more suitable ui for new computer users to dive into" misses the point of the OLPC initiative:
- OLPC was at the vanguard of the Netbook revolution. In fact, I remember it being given credit for having helped spur it.
- iPhone is significantly more expensive and less resilient and the goal of the OLPC was not to create a polished consumer device.
- Someone with no previous computer usage will adapt to become savvy with the UI. Most (all?) spoken languages are pretty kludgey and hard to use at first, but kids become quite savvy with them.
I realize these are all common defenses/apologies for the OLPC, but I think they hold up. It's enheartening to read @PelCasandras report (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811282) on the success of the program in Uruguay.
As for my machine, it hasn't been entirely demoted to paperweight. It has become my leisure travel laptop because of its durability and great wifi reach. I just don't tend to travel that much.
I'd argue the class of power in an ultra book is diff from net book. Ultra books are a response to MacBook air giving real usable performance in slim package. Net books were sub 9" under powered devices who were just eaten up by tablets
The iPhone UI is a consumerized, touchscreenized version of the OLPC UI.
Think about it: a home screen with icons for activities ("apps"), that dominate the screen and can be started and stopped without losing their state; an eschewing of the file system for activity-specific storage; etc.
The one really innovative thing that Apple (and Android) didn't integrate was the concept of the Journal. I love the idea of a log of what you did, that you could scroll through and instantly resume prior work with.
The problem is not with the OLPC, as said in the article it's problems with Peruvian education. And maybe it would have been wiser $225m on better teachers than giving the children a laptop. I really like the OLPC program, but there are skills that are more important to learn than computers.
I think one of the goals of the OLPC project is to make those skills easier to learn by using a computer, rather than having the computer as a goal itself. That's why so much time has been spent on creating an entirely different desktop paradigm than we are used to for example. The whole UI is designed to make it easy for children to interact with, not to teach them computers. That's one of the reasons/benefits for not having Windows pre-installed on the devices.
That being said, I know/have heard a lot more about the OLPC operating system itself than the OLPC's proposed courses. I think this is the big problem. The OLPC project should have focused from the start on not only creating and disseminating these devices, but also on developing a curricula to go with them.
I don't mean paying more, as I have no reason to say that it will make them more effective. But using money on teachers can be anything from education to the environment the teachers have to teach in.
This program started in 2007 with children between the ages of 6 and 10 (primary school age). It is a bit too early to dismiss the project as a failure especially on the grounds that motivation and test scores did not go up. These indicators are influenced by many other factors such as teaching quality and poverty levels.
I am still hopeful for the long term effects of these projects and I expect that a fair number of these children will be able to raise themselves out of poverty and even become wealthy on the back of being exposed to a computer early in life. I don't expect this to be fulfilled before they reach adulthood.
This sounds like special pleading - so now we have to wait another decade or two before we're allowed to pass judgment? What sort of effects are you expecting to pop up then, that we can't observe now over a sample of <850,000 laptops?
I think giving computers to children is a long game. It is unreasonable to expect short-term miracles, but for example I probably wouldn't be programming if we hadn't had computers available for playing and exploration when I was a kid. But from that time it was nearly ten years before I did anything productive with them...
There are a few other studies on this matter both indicating effect and lack of effect of the OLPC in Math and Literacy (this study mentions them in introduction). Apparently, the OLPC has not produced very good results in Literacy and Maths in Peru and its use must be reviewed but changes in education always take a long time to produce results, sometimes as much as a full generation, and depend on a number of factors.
As for the long term effects: I expect that the children that had access to the OLPC will have a measurable advantage in the labour market when compared with children that did not.
OLPC made big claims that never materialized. They originally promised battery life that "measured in days." I never got more than a few hours life out of mine. But really the biggest problem with OLPC was that they were too proud to admit that their custom distro "Sugar" was a POS. If they had gone with an established Linux distro that was useable they might have had a chance. Any criticism towards the machine's usability was dismissed as "this was designed for children, not adults, of course you don't understand it!"
To make things worse, last month a fire on the ministry of education destroyed tens of thousands of laptops, solar panels and other educational material. It is very,very sad to know that all these materials where sitting there for more than a year waiting to be distributed to the poorest areas of the country, only to be consumed by fire.
There have been many conspiracy theories floating around.. Since the beginning msft lobbied hard against buying those laptops, book publishers recently got caught doing major payola to school officials, Textbooks with controversial material etc etc . (take your pick)
Personally, I never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence.
Peru's education problems have more to do with teacher selection & training, filling children basic needs to enable learning (having a decent breakfast for example) rigid education policies & enormous bureaucracy.
There is not much that a OLPC computer can do to help on these.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by this report. Too many things that fall under the "technology" banner get pushed as somehow improving our quality of life by default. Like the existence of some gadget automatically improves things for the owner. Pushing a computer on children who are in many parts of the world learning in a building that is falling apart or has no real educational infrastructure is a waste.
>Pushing a computer on children who are in many parts of the world learning in a building that is falling apart or has no real educational infrastructure is a waste.
This is one instance of a particular project that didn't pan out well - now we can generalize to all technology ?
Anecdotal evidence - my 16 years younger brother learned to read/type and speak/write broken English (it's not our first language) by the age of 4, simply by playing along with his 14 year old brother - playing GameCube and using the computer with him or on his own. He even learned how to use powerpoint to create "games" ie. slideshow where you click on various things and then it transitions to a different slide to make it appear like it moved. At one point I had to forbid him to use the internet because he figured out how to register and write on forums for some Mario clone development site where he was downloading sprites for his powerpoint games, he was writing them tutorials on how he used their editor - which was both funny, amazing and scary - but it also shows you the his skill level, he was 6 when he did this/not in school. Again - nobody was actively teaching him anything, so unless you're suggesting that my brother is some sort of genius (which he isn't, he is smart but not a miracle child) or that my other brother is some sort of prodigy teacher I would say that acquiring those skills before school age is pretty impressive and largely due to technology.
I didn't generalize to all technology and I didn't mean it to come across as so. I also learned a great deal having a computer when I was younger. It pushed me into areas I wouldn't have been interested in otherwise. The point I was trying to make is that technology gadgets like this often are assumed from the get-go to fix what I see as a non-technology problem. There doesn't seem to be much of a discussion on whether something is actually a solution sometimes and it's rather just assumed because it's a computer or gadget or whatever that this thing is going to fix that by the nature of what it is (new technology).
My old high school has more computers and technology equipment than it did when I was there yet overall the educational statistics are the same or worse. Technology is amoral, it's neither good nor bad, it's how it's implemented that makes the difference. Some view technology as a moral plus in that it is innately better than no technology at all. I disagree with this.
Because the Economist article quotes negative aspects of the report while ignoring the positive ones. The report says:
"Results indicate limited effects on academic achievement but positive impacts on cognitive skills and competences related to computer use. Cognitive abilities may arise through using the programs included in the laptops, given that they are aimed at improving thinking processes."
and found a quantitative improvement:
"students in the treatment group surpass those in the control group by between 0.09 and 0.13 standard deviations though the difference is only statistically significant at the 10 percent level for the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test (p-value 0.055). Still, the effects are quantitatively large. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the estimated impact on the verbal fluency measure represents the progression expected in six months for a child"
I would have summarized the study's results as something closer to "significant improvements in cognition were seen, but improvements against the Peruvian curriculum were not seen".
Yes, I read the report after that. RPM is cool and everything, but runs straight into the issue that it's easy to train RPM improvements of just 0.13 stddev - just do visual exercises and manipulations. (This is a big issue with interpreting dual n-back results.) And what is a laptop...?
Fundamentally, IQ tests are validated by their correlations with real world results (like the strong correlation with academic performance), and so any gains on IQ tests also require real world results if there's even a small chance of them being "hollow". (My standard example: you can improve your score on subtests by memorizing vocabulary, and this would improve your overall score. But has your underlying fluid intelligence increased? Probably not...)
And that's exactly what the small/null result for the academic scores shows.
And further, what we see especially (I'd say infamously) often with kid interventions is that the gains fade out within months or years. When tests are run in a few years, will we see even a 6-month gain on the RPM?
Of course it didn't improve test scores. Why would anyone think a computer would make you better at answering inane, subjective questions about poorly written passages or more accurate/efficient at applying the handful of algorithms about triangles that the government believes everyone should know?
OLPC was never going to improve test scores. That's not to say it can't produce better, more educated human beings.
and..
> Part of the problem is that students learn faster than many of their teachers
Interesting. Seems that it's not that the laptops aren't teaching the children anything, but that they aren't being tested on the things they are learning.
Well, it's no surprise that the laptops didn't turn out to be silver bullets for education, of course they are just another educational material that requires support in how the teachers use them. The government needs to invest in teacher training, clearly, which I guess is what the article is getting at.