"OLPC is of course also a laptop project because at its heart sits the X0. Without that laptop at its core the education project wouldn't work, it wouldn't even exist. For these reasons I think that Negroponte's famous quote "It's an education project, not a laptop project." is quite misleading."

Actually, Ivan Krstic talks only about education in the first part of his talk in Massachussetts.

Movie:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid988327368

Audio only:
http://www.peapodcast.com/msc-oss-sig/index.html#osssig-2007-06-21-17-47-10

So I wouldn't agree with you. I see the OLPC more as a child-centered automatization project for education.

ICT has improved productivity in other sectors of economy and society. So, the OLPC expect ICT can be used to improve the "productivity" in education. And to me the XO looks almost ideal for that aim.

What I would really want to know is whether these countries, or all countries, have a plab B? Do they have an idea what to do if they don't implement the XO?

In another post "OLPC in Nigeria by the Numbers"
http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/nigeria/olpc_in_nigeria_budget.html
I have added some numbers on educational spending.

So if Brazil or Nigeria would like to bring their educational spending to par with the developed world, what other options do they have?

The obvious one: Train teachers is rather complicated. Because, who will train these teachers? It can easily take up to 10 years just to get enough teachers in the most optimistic of scenarios. And that would cost really a lot of money too, and keeps costing money just to keep them in the schools.

Winter

Winter wrote:

"So if Brazil or Nigeria would like to bring their educational spending to par with the developed world, what other options do they have?

The obvious one: Train teachers is rather complicated. Because, who will train these teachers? It can easily take up to 10 years just to get enough teachers in the most optimistic of scenarios. And that would cost really a lot of money too, and keeps costing money just to keep them in the schools."

The reality is that *any* solution *must* include teachers.

The alternative is to just make home delivery of laptops to kids not in school and pretend that mere posession of the device will result in an education.

So, yes, teacher training is unavoidable. If the choice is between teachers and laptops, everyone will go with teachers; it is hard to believe that the laptop project can be successfully implemented in a scenario that excludes them.

"For these reasons I think that Negroponte's famous quote "It's an education project, not a laptop project." is quite misleading.

In my opinion what he should have really said is "It's an education project for children, not the silver bullet solution to extreme poverty, the digital divide, Microsoft's monopoly on the operating system market and a million other issues." (Of course that does make for a less sexy marketing slogan;-)"

How true!

Hype has killed this cat. The promises are so outlandish, they went into ridiculous territory a long time ago.

I remember reading an article where Nicholas Negroponte described the XO as a "home theater". I couldn't stop laughing for 5 minutes.

Un Indio Independiente y Jodedor.

"So, yes, teacher training is unavoidable. If the choice is between teachers and laptops, everyone will go with teachers; it is hard to believe that the laptop project can be successfully implemented in a scenario that excludes them."

Sadly, there is not much of a choice.

If training teachers was a real alternative, it would have been chosen already. But the whole point of the OLPC is that there just seems to be no way to get enough teachers.

So, if it comes down to XO versus Teachers, it will end up to be XO versus nothing. So the real choice is, can the XO be used to increase the productivity of the existing base of teachers enough.

And seriously, the 3 dozen employees of the OLPC program cannot, in no way, try to "include" the hundreds of thousands of teachers involved in education in the developing world. Teachers living on three (four?) continents, speaking dozens (hundreds?) of languages. That really is the task of the countries and local organizations. The same holds for ebooks for dozens of curricula.

My question remains, what is a real alternative? A plan B that can use the money for development and education better than the OLPC if the XO is found lacking?

I really wouldn't know.

Winter

> From what I heard at the Computex tradeshow in Taipei earlier in
> June there's still not a single confirmed order from any of the
> countries that have demonstrated their interest in the project!

Not that an anonymous confirmation is worth much, but I heard the same thing.

@Winter:

> My question remains, what is a real alternative? A plan B that
> can use the money for development and education better than the
> OLPC if the XO is found lacking?

Each country can make its own "plan B", which of course includes
the status quo as a possibility. If they feel unqualified to
formulate an educational program satisfactory to them, there are
hordes of westerners full of fancyful ideas, available for
advisory contracts.

"Each country can make its own "plan B", which of course includes the status quo as a possibility."

So plan B is: Give up on poor children? It would not be my first alternative.

"there are hordes of westerners full of fancyful ideas, available for advisory contracts."

That is one thing the OLPC is NOT going to get: Money for the people working there. That too is Free Software.

And the OLPC developers have really worked hard and worked miracles. Also not your average run-off-the-mill development carpet-bagger.

Winter

Dear Christoph Derendorfer,

"Some of the main issues that seem to be stopping countries from really committing millions of dollars have been discussed here on OLPCnews in the past: the lack of a real implementation plan, alternative financing options, the role of teachers, the unknown price and features of things like the school servers, the discussions about constructivism and its effectiveness and a host of other topics.
More recently and in discussion with other folks around here I've also realized that the number of games, activities and hardware-gadgets (such as Mary Lou Jepsen's $1 video microscope) available at the moment is quite small."

The current problems of OLPC are IMHO mainly caused by an uncertainty of the target countries about the implementation of OLPC and constructionism in their education systems. I doubt that either the unfinished development of the XO hard-/software nor the lack of games or 1$-microscopes are the cause for the stall of the project.

The OLPC project has assumed they could avoid to address the educational topics in detail by applying their "sly" Trojan Horse tactics. But this predictably failed completely. And OLPC has now neither enough people to address the education side nor people with an adequate training for that. They have computer geeks in the headquarter, computer geeks with the suppliers and almost only computer geeks in the local support communities.

OLPC urgently needs the support of teachers, educators, educational researchers and administrators and the like in order to explain the target countries what constructionism is about, what it can do and what not, how it should be implemented and what educational results can be expected from it.

Now you are helping to start up another OLPC country community, which is fair enough. But then I see that its members are again all computer geeks. Sorry, Christoph, but I think that is not what OLPC needs right now to overcome its stall. If you and your OLPC Austria members decided to develop games and science gadgets like microscopes it is either for your own entertainment or because it is the only thing you geeks know to do. And when you guys have finished your dream games there might be no OLPC and XOs anymore to run them.

If you really want to help OLPC to survive right now, you better deal with those educational topics and recruit specialists for that.

The OLPC Project has been doomed from the beginning, because it is based on a false premise: that bringing laptops to places so poor and remote that teachers are nowhere to be found can result is kids getting an education by virtue of using or owning the laptop.

Logic abandoned Professor Negroponte a long time ago, and it seems he is - to his own disgrace - surrounded by sychophants. Somebody should have told him that there is no chance in hell he will be able to sell millions of laptops to people who can't afford to train or employ teachers.

This patient is clearly DOA.

Christoph,

Negroponte DID say that OLPC is the silver bullet solution to extreme poverty. To quote him exactly for Net Events: http://www.olpctalks.com/nicholas_negroponte/negroponte_netevents.html

But what One Laptop Per Child is, it's about eliminating poverty. And that's the reason we do it, that's why everybody who's involved in the project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple. That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the environment, they all involve education.

In some cases, it could be just with education and in no case is it ever without education. And we particularly focus on primary education. What happens when children start to go to school and just get the opportunity to learn learning itself.

Christopher and Roland,

What is the goal of OLPC???

If you just say that you want to give laptops to kids, most people think of correspondence courses or distance learning.

If you say you want to laptop and an object programming language to kids, most think that you just want to teach IT skills to a large audience.

However, if you say you want to give laptops, software, and constructism to kids...well you have stepped into the world of alternative education. Which is how we got into that whole debate on the Connected Family thread.

Saying things like "real learning starts at home";you are really into alternative education.

These are completely different goals. They are not theoretically mutually exclusive, but budget and management wise they are mutually exclusive. What's the goal?

Robert Lane,

Negroponte told that he wants to fight poverty by education which I agree is the best strategy. Up to not so long ago OLPC officially had constructionism in its mission statement for which in the meantime we found evidence that it is superior to traditional education.

So the goal is clear: fight poverty by constructionist education.

The problem OLPC will run into is that they still need teachers, and very few teachers are trained in Constructivist education. Even in wealthy countries like the USA, it is only the Special Ed Gifted teachers that recieve Constructivist training. If you make Computer-Assisted Instruction and Constructivist Learning Environments the goal,then new teacher training and school faculty training is needed.

Robert,
I agree. With the Trojan Horse strategy the countries would have been forced to finally train their teachers some time after the roll out. Now that it has failed the training will probably have to take place before the roll-out or constructionism is rejected altogether in order to save that training.

Roland,

Another problem is that in the real world, real students have discipline problems and issues with authority. How do you exert discipline in a OLPC class? Special Ed has few discipline problems, and so American Constructivism has no answer.

For everyone talking like OLPC is over:

OLPC's NOT DEAD YET.

Regardless of whether things play out like any of us think, this project is far from over. I think it will be interesting to see how things really play out. Maybe OLPC will bend to pressure for MUCH smaller quantities, and targeted trials? Maybe a few countries will throw the dice and we'll all see how that goes? However it plays out I'll bet it will progress rather than die.

Robert,
I am not sure this is really a problem. With constructionism - if it is applied right - learning is fun for the students. I guess the teachers would rather have to tame their zeal for learning as compared of dragging them along with traditionalism.

It is not only Negroponte who reports that kids would not want to leave school after classes. Also other constructionist environments like Sudbury Schools report that the kids' own curiosity drove them to learn on their own without the teachers pushing them.

That is the very point of constructionism. It is to continue the natural learning mode used by humans before school that mainly is driven from within the kids, by their curiosity and their urge to become more and more independent from their parents. A kind of DIY mentality. Everybody having dealt with small kids knows that they can really get furious if you're doing things for them that they can already do themselves.

Robewrt Lane wrote:

"Roland,

Another problem is that in the real world, real students have discipline problems and issues with authority. How do you exert discipline in a OLPC class? Special Ed has few discipline problems, and so American Constructivism has no answer."

ROTFLMAO!!!!!

Good one, Robert! After convincing poor Roland that your data proves Contructivism is better than Traditional Education and that Contructivism is "The Answer", he goes all out to defend your claims.
Now you are taking poor Roland on another journey: "The Answer" is Constructivism, but not the "American Type". All this in spite of all your "proof" coming from suspect, hand-picked data from a few schools in the USA!!!!

I guess Roland deserves the mockery for being so ignorant and naive...

ROTFLMAO!

A lot of good questions are being raised. However, let us not make the mistake of assuming that oplc will be dead if it isn't a massive success in the next year or so. There is a lot of money behind it, a lot of big organizations, and a lot of excitement. People are not going to quit if things don't go so well the first year. They will most likely work to correct mistakes and fill in gaps. Windows was a flop in its first two versions, and then look what happened. People and organizations can see how much potential oplc has, so they will keep working away to improve it.

Robert,
It is traditionalism that creates discipline
and authority problems because all children are forced to learn the same eventhough they are completely different. Instead of leaving the kids' own curiosity its way the teacher/school tells them by using their authority what they have to learn. No wonder they are not disciplined. By the way disciplined is synonymous to obedient.

Making mistakes is artificially punished by low grades, not being promoted etc. which is also based on ill-applied authority. Where as with natural learning experimenting and making mistakes is a major and successful learning strategy. And mistakes are - if at all - naturally punished by not yielding the wished results and they are the basis to learn what to try next.

Dick Einstein,

I don't feel mocked by being called ignorant and naive because I am - at least concerning education. I just started to learn about it. But being ignorant and naive also means to be open for new ideas, to check them for their logic and to check them against own experiences. People who always think they already know everything are not open to new ideas and -if at all - check them against their often wrong knowledge and therefore jump to wrong conclusions. Does this ring a bell?

Roland says

> I don't feel mocked by being called ignorant
> and naive because I am - at least concerning
> education.

That, however, does not prevent you from making such foolish remarks as:

"It is traditionalism that creates discipline
and authority problems because all children are forced to learn the same eventhough they are completely different."

If, by your own admission, you have no idea what you are talking about, how are you reaching such authoritative conclusions?

Get real, Roland. The joke is on you.

(BTW, Dick Einstein was right in warning you about Robert Lane, Constructivism, Indigo Children and Scientology - you don't have any knowledge, so you can't see the connection; it is all interesting fiction, though!)

George Huck

Here's one implementation plan: just punt on all that constructivism stuff and stick a heap of books on a USB flash drive.

www.samizdat.com and/or www.gutenberg.com are what I'm thinking of but it turns out that there's quite a thriving little community of open source text book writers. More grist for the mill. For the real dreamers there's MIT's Open Courseware project and other, similar efforts from other institutions of higher learning.

Load the little suckers up with the equivalent of pretty good library and see what that's worth.

I know, I know. The little tykes need skilled, qualified teachers to guide them to an education, blah, blah, blah.

Sorry, you won't find many of those in Nigeria because you won't find all that many skilled, qualified teachers anywhere including the good, old U.S. of A. So, if skilled, qualified teachers are what's necessary to make the OLPC a success then the project is doomed and constructivism won't save it. Constructivism needs those skilled, qualified teachers as well, regardless of my opinions on the subject.

Right now, with no observable plan for implementation, that doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me. Having all sorts of books at your immediate disposal doesn't guarantee you'll get an education but it certainly isn't an impediment to getting an education either.

Selling OLPCs as little, green, portable libraries isn't a winner but it has the merit of being understandable and worth something. That's better then the hand-waving that currently accompanies questions about exactly how the OLPC is supposed to work its educational magic. But I don't think that's a good enough reason for the target nations to come up with the rather substantial funding any non-trivial roll-out would require.

My understanding of the above comments and discussions comes down to:

A very large amount of well trained teachers are needed to improve education in the developing world.

We don't have them, and we couldn't get them in the last 50 years. Even if we start now with a $1B fund, in the most optimistic scenarios it will take us 10 year to get these teachers. Children now in education just have bad luck.

Moreover, not only are there not enough teachers to teach the children, there are also not enough teachers to teach the teachers. Even worse, the people needed to train new teachers will have to be recruited from those who currently teach children, compounding the problem.

In no way can anyone, least the OLPC, provide a comprehensive teaching program for all the teachers in the developing world.

So instead of going for a method that might fail, there is a call for a method that has a proven track record of failure.

The conclusion: It is impossible to improve education in the developing world, just give up.

------------------

I have a very different view.

To improve education without a vast increase in person-power, education needs to increase productivity. The developed world knows how to increase productivity, use ICT.

http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/olpc_effective_violin.html

So the OLPC tries to automatize education by improving teacher-student and student-student communication. It also gives students the tools to work individually or in peer groups.

Which allows teachers to redistribute their time more efficiently: Students who can progress on their own don't need as much attention as those that cannot (this requires good communication). Note that it is rather pointless to distribute XOs to children if you don't change your teaching.

The educational theory who describes this type of education is constructivism (among others). The nice thing about constructivism is, of course, that not only children can do it, teachers can too. Note that teachers get their own (beefed up?) XO and that teaching those with computers increases ones status.

Education is ultra-conservative. People don't want experimenting on their children.

Because it is directed to the children (under control of the parents), the OLPC is one of the very few educational reforms that parents will likely (initially) almost universally support. Any other proposal will be mired in political fights.

Winter

In his Google talk, Ivan Krstic mentiones the use of Linux desktop computers in schools in Extramadura. He was especially pleased with the way parents, in the end, supported this initative after first being rather sceptical.

(Extremadura is mentioned in the questions at the end)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189&q=one%20laptop%20per%20child&total=144&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2#6591290493776424828

This initiative is interesting as it has much in common with the OLPC.

See the case study here:
http://www.iosn.net/government/case-studies/extremadura/

"The project has resulted in large numbers of computers being installed in schools and public sector organizations with an equally large number of users being exposed to ICT and gnuLinEx in particular. Apart from its sheer size, the Education Technology Network programme is unique in that for the first time a government body has initiated the development and deployment of software adapted to the needs of education and identified beforehand the needs of the education community. This is done with a clear objective to provide technological literacy within the framework of a technological network. The Regional Government has also shown its political will and commitment to utilize FOSS both within the education system as well as in public administration, and in providing ICT facilities to the people."

Now I must admit to my shame that I do not read Spanish. So I cannot find any recent news on how this implementation worked, and how it affected the education in Extremadura.

It is clear that the OLPC people are well aware of it.

As there are many readers on OLPCnews who do read Spanish, I would like to ask them whether they have heard how this initiative fared?

Winter

Here is a link in Spanish about the introduction of Linux in Extremadura (which I can't read)

http://www.regiondigital.com/modulos/mod_periodico/pub/mostrar_noticia.php?id=43131

It is all from 2006, although I know the program started years earlier (2003?)

Winter

There seems to be activity on the Educational Materials front for OLPC. Mark Shuttleworth's Foundation is also involved.

See the wiki.laptop news:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Current_events#Laptop_News_2007-06-24

"11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities. "

Winter

Roland,

I am just trying to cover all aspects. In talking to real teachers as to alternative learning methods like Constructivist or Visual-Spatial are not in every classroom, the answers are typically that general education students are stereotyped as being brats, while the special education students are stereotyped as being little darlings. Teachers seem to have a low opinion of general education students, and there is trouble hiring teachers.

I am just stating what is happening.

Since all this involves alternative learning methods and inefficient administrations in other nations, perhaps the OLPC should be implemented as an NGO, that way the people at the grassroots village level can decide for themselves how to educate their children. They are asking poor and troubled governments to do things that US Dept of Ed has been unable to do, except at a very small scale. Perhaps the answer is bottom-up rather than top-down. NGO's in villages may be the way to go...

I found out the source of the confusion in our discussions. There is a new age person named Wendy Chapman that has a degree in Special Educaion. She uses Special Ed jargon to talk about new age stuff. However; she studied: Barbara Clark, Linda Silverman, Geoffrey Caine, Abraham Maslow,etc...but her things have nothing to do with their work. She is just using the Special Education vocabulary that she learned in school. For example, an Idigo child is a hypothetical "Meta-gifted" child (ie spiritually gifted), but she is really twisting the Special Ed jargon of "Profoundly Gifted" and mixing it with Abraham Maslow's theory of "self-transcendence" along with other things that came from eastern religions to create this stuff. I hope this clears things up.

>Perhaps the answer is bottom-up rather than
>top-down. NGO's in villages may be the way to go..

Robert, that's not bottom-up, that's just a different agency executing top-down. The irony is that there's a perfectly obvious example of bottom-up that's already introducing poor people to high technology: the cell phone.

No need to convince government ministers to spend substantial amounts of money on the prospect of improving the education system of the country. Not only is there no cost to the introduction of cell phones, they generate revenues in the form of licenses and taxes and quickly. If you could put OLPCs in the hands of every kid tomorrow how long would it be before the number of graduates could make a substantial impact on the economy?

So one knock on the OLPC is that it's going to cost right now. That's always serious in government whether it's 1.9% of GDP or 1.9 Niaras (Nigerian currency). Every niara is at the center of a political tug-of-war and the purity of your goal won't mean much because in politics purity isn't a characteristic that's rewarded.

The other problem for the OLPC is that it doesn't do very much to impress people ignorant of computers. No explanation is necessary with a cellphone. All you have to do is hear the voice of someone you know and know to be far away. What's the analogous grab-'em-by-the-shorts capability of the OLPC?

That question doesn't have to be asked by people familiar with computers and can't be answered by people unfamiliar with computers.

That's why us rich Westerners will buy OLPC's by the boatload if we could. We understand their value and we can afford them. I'm not alone in that assessment. Intel and Asus aren't jumping in because they want to put government-supplied laptops in poor children's hands although that's what will happen when the price drops low enough. Intel and Asus are in it because they smell profits.

So far, the OLPCs greatest service to the poor seems to have been to establish a new form-factor/price-point. By doing so the OLPC has highlighted a previously unadressed market and worried commercial concerns enough to have them tout their own notion of a poor people's computer.

As a K12 tech director in US, I've been working the constructivist trojan horse angle for a long time.

It is VERY hard to get traction at a systems level because of the textbook, standards, testing hegemony. You get a bell curve of adoption from teachers after a truckload of training.

The irony is that I do think the ubiquitous tipping point model combined with some decent apps would be pretty viral, but they have to climb in bed with the Ministries of Ed to get the bulk buy. Those same M_of_Ed are guaranteed to freak out at the deeply disruptive implications of the Papert vision. So if they do buy them...it is highly unlikely they would follow through on the truly substantive aspects of constructivism.

I agree with the NGO approach...that way you manage the scale and you leverage the open-source model to disseminate the curriculum, training materials, etc. Sort of like eduterrorist cells that are autonomous, but still worship the same gods.