From robert.kozma at sri.com Tue Jul 3 03:21:20 2007 From: robert.kozma at sri.com (Robert Kozma) Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:21:20 -0700 Subject: OLPC and Economic Development Message-ID: <01fa01c7bcde$2c8a4810$0b00a8c0@BobKozma> I just contributed the following article to OLPC News: OLPC and Economic Development Posted on July 02, 2007 by Guest Writer in Commentary : Academia , Use Cases : Business , Sales Talk : Donors OLPC is about eliminating poverty Nicolas Negroponte's claim that One Laptop Per Child is an education project, not a laptop project is well known and often discussed. What is less well known is his claim that OLPC is about eliminating poverty: "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." As I mentioned in my last posting, OLPC and Education Reform, I am Robert B. Kozma, Ph.D., an international consultant on technology in service of developing countries. I have just returned from Kenya where I had an opportunity to reflect on the claim that OLPC is about eliminating poverty. For the past two years, I have been working with the Education Committee in Sauri, a set of rural villages of about 5,500 people in western Kenya. I have served as a pro bono (or should that be pro-Bono) consultant to the Committee members as they formulated their plans for a community learning resource center. I have also supported their efforts by donating a dairy cow to the school lunch program, providing scholarships, and purchasing equipment and supplies for the center, including books, a digital camera, and a laptop. Sauri education committee Approximately 67% of the people in Sauri live on less than $1 a day. Most are subsistence farmers, growing maize, beans, tomatoes, onions, and kale. Until just a few months ago, there was no electricity in Sauri. There is now an electrical line to the clinic and soon there will be one to the learning resource center. Economic development efforts in Africa will have to address the needs of people like those in Sauri because 70-80% of the labor force in most Sub-Saharan countries is in rural areas. And poverty is the highest in the rural villages of Africa. Furthermore, the dramatic increases in economic output and standard of living that we are seeing in countries like China and India were built on twenty years of increased farm productivity in the rural areas. Africa has yet to experience this Green Revolution. In fact, during the last twenty years, agricultural productivity in Africa has actually dropped each decade and hunger has increased. Given this context, it is perhaps not surprising that members of the Education Committee in Sauri want to build a community learning resource center that can help them increase the productivity of their farms and improve their lives. The Committee's emphasis on this learning center is particularly appropriate since 90% of the students in Sauri do not go beyond primary school-not because they are incapable or unmotivated but because their parents can not afford the tuition and uniforms. So the Education Committee sees the center as a means to provide education for out of school youths as well as adults. Sauri community radio station In planning their center, the Committee members wanted to know how technology might be used to achieve their goals. In response to their interests, I visited eight community telecenters in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya; interviewed the managers, staff, and community users; and then returned to Sauri to report what I learned and make my recommendations to the Committee. While technology was a common feature of all these telecenters, the key was the role that it played in providing villagers with access to needed information and the means to communicate it. I found computers in all the centers, but bicycles, books, cell phones, community radio stations, and video tapes were also used to obtain and share information. This information often related to farm practice and productivity: information on seeds, planting, fertilizing, weeding, and harvesting, as well as animal breeding, feeding, and treatment of diseases. Information on current market prices was also highly valued. But desired information also included that on water harvesting, energy efficiency, education, health, nutrition, culture, local news, and even national sports. Like Nicolas Negroponte-and the villagers of Sauri-I believe that technology has a role to play in supporting economic development in Africa and reducing poverty. But my conclusions about how technology should be used are quite different than those of Negroponte. Based on my research in other rural villages, I recommended that the Sauri community learning resource center be equipped with a variety of means of obtaining information that was needed by the community. This included books, magazines, videos, and a single computer with access to the Internet. Nakaseke village telecenter In addition to making these resources available to villagers as a means of distributing information, the center should also use a low-wattage radio transmitter. They should also set up small satellite centers in various locations across the geographically dispersed set of villages that constitutes Sauri and equip them with a radio receiver and a cell phone that villagers can use to call into the telecenter with their questions. Finally, a key to the success of the center is having a manager who is not only technologically skilled but familiar with the informational needs of the villagers and is capable to searching the vast resources of the internet to meet these needs. So to return to the issue of OLPC and economic development, it is important to start with an understanding of what people need and their context rather than what the technology can be made to do. Taking this perspective, it is not clear that the widespread distribution of computers to children is the way to eliminate poverty in Africa. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on XO machines, wouldn't it be better and cheaper for national governments to support rural villages in their efforts to set up and staff internet-connected community telecenters where villagers have access to the information they need to improve their livelihoods and their lives? ____________________ Robert B. Kozma, Ph.D. Emeritus Director and Principal Scientist Center for Technology in Learning SRI International 2151 Filbert St. San Francisco, CA 94123 USA CTL Website: http://ctl.sri.com Personal Website: http://robertkozma.com Phone +1 415 292 2471 Mobile +1 415 623 4340 Fax: +1 415 651 9954 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 36624 bytes Desc: not available URL: From roypea at stanford.edu Sat Jul 14 06:49:11 2007 From: roypea at stanford.edu (Roy Pea) Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:49:11 -0700 Subject: BIG announcement: Intel joins OLPC Message-ID: <006EF269-7B73-4FC8-9271-32A756193086@stanford.edu> Intel endorses One Laptop Per Child; crank calls to Barrett's house end: Almost from the beginning of his One Laptop Per Child project, Nicholas Negroponte as been sniping at Intel, not just for its lack of support but for its seeming desire to win with a competing product. "Intel ... is just being silly," he said in February. "I went to them first. They dismissed the idea. ... After Intel Chairman Craig Barrett called One Laptop Per Child a 'gadget,' Intel developed their own gadget and talks of 'competing with One Laptop Per Child.' Huh? ... For Intel to be criticizing One Laptop Per Child is a bit like Johnson & Johnson picking on the Red Cross because they use Ace bandages." Intel's Barrett just rolled his eyes. "We're not trying to drive him out of business. We're trying to bring capability to young people," he said in May after another volley from Negroponte. "And it's more than just Intel. It's going to take the whole industry to do this. There are lots of opportunities for us to work together. That's why when you say this is competition, we're tying to drive him out of business: this is crazy." Well, apparently the craziness is over. Intel announced today that it would join the board of the OLPC project and kick in money and expertise. Happy talk ensued. "Joining OLPC is a further example of our commitment to education over the last 20 years and our belief in the role of technology in bringing the opportunities of the 21st century to children around the world, " said Paul Otellini, Intel CEO. And a now gracious Negroponte said, "Intel joins the OLPC board as a world leader in technology, helping reach the world's children. Collaboration with Intel means that the maximum number of laptops will reach children." What this likely means is that OLPC's crank-powered XO laptop and Intel's plugged-in Classmate PC could be made available to governments in the developing world in package deals, perhaps with the XO serving rural areas and the Classmate going to urban districts. "There are an awful lot of educational scenarios between K and 12," said William Swope, Intel's director of corporate affairs. "We don't think all those are going to be served by any one form factor, by any one technology, by any one product." Meanwhile, AMD, which until now was the exclusive special friend of the OLPC, bit its lip and hoped it was not on the way to getting pushed aside, saying, "Intel's apparent change of heart is welcome, and we're sure they can make a positive contribution to this very worthy project for the benefit of children all over the world." Comment on this post From Good Morning Silicon Valley -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From robert at robertkozma.com Sat Jul 21 13:44:49 2007 From: robert at robertkozma.com (Bob Kozma) Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 22:44:49 -0700 Subject: OLPC and Premature Scaling Message-ID: <005201c7cb5a$4158c3e0$1205470a@BobKozma> >From http://www.olpcnews.com/ One Laptop Per Child and Premature Scaling Posted on July 20, 2007 by Robert B. Kozma in Commentary : Academia , People : Negroponte , Hardware : Production olpc robert kozma Students in Latin America Prior to becoming an independent consultant, advising government and non-governmental agencies and corporations on the use of technology to support developing countries, I was a professor and research scientist for thirty years. I did a considerable amount of research on the impact of technology on teaching and learning. I also developed educational software for the Macintosh. Consequently, I can attest that empirical data are the sin qua non of both scientific research and engineering design. Scientists posit their theories as testable hypotheses and conduct experiments to validate their propositions. Engineers design artifacts to achieve goals or solve problems. They test out these designs on a small scale and refine them before implementing on a large scale. Collecting test data is a standard practices in both fields. But apparently Professor Negroponte doesn't follow these standard engineering or scientific practices, at least when it comes to OLPC. Without the benefit of a single study in support of their efficacy, Professor Negroponte feels that developing nations should spend hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase millions of XO computers to hand out to its students. At a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank, he claimed that developing nations: ". . . need to do things which isn't futzing around and moving deck chairs. And they can spend the next five years planning. But that's not what they should do. They have to take action. They have to take big action. To do a pilot project is ridiculous!" Now, the suggestion that drew Professor Negroponte's ire at the IADB meeting was a rather modest one. It was made by Dr. Andrew Zucker, a former colleague of mine at SRI's Center for Technology in Learning. Having done extensive research in on 1-to-1 computing in U.S. schools, he suggested that educators in developing countries would do well to start with a pilot program and test the use of laptops in schools against defined metrics before rolling them out to a larger group. Professor Negroponte disagreed with him. He was even more forceful in his distain of pilot tests at TED 2006 when he claimed about the OLPC: Nigeria OLPC OLPC Nigeria press event ". . . this is not something you have to test, the days of pilot projects are over. When people say 'Well, we'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works.' Screw you, go to the back of the line and someone else will do it. Then when you figure out that this works then you can join as well." I am glad to hear that some countries are thinking of conducting pilot tests, despite Negroponte's reproach. But these have to be something more than a press event when XO machines are given to groups of children as the cameras roll. And they have to be something more than just testing the robustness of the hardware and operating system. The kind of test that Dr. Zucker and I have in mind would involve the introduction of the XO into a small sample of schools and classrooms in a country. Children and teachers would actually use them for at least several months, if not an entire school year. OLPC researchers would observe the teachers and students periodically and collect data on the extent to which the computers are used, the ways they are used, the artifacts that students create with them, and the problems they encounter as they do so. The observed data would be compared to a pre-specified set of desired behaviors related to student interaction with the machine and with each other and to a set of desired learning outcomes - the kinds of things the OLPC has in mind when they say the XO is an education project and the kinds of results that would make governments feel that their investment paid off. Given the "openness" of the project, these findings should be publicly shared with the larger development and educational community. If the behaviors and outcomes are on target, it's ready for full implementation. But if they fall short of the desired set or if the students and teachers encounter significant problems, then the hardware, software, or enabling conditions would need to be re-engineered and retested. This cycle of testing and retesting increases the likelihood of success during a full-scale implementation. Final testing by independent researchers would assure that the results were not unintentionally skewed by the OLPC researchers. OLPC XO's in Uruguay To do otherwise is both contrary to standard practice and irresponsible. Countries that adopt OLPC without pilot testing are in effect conducting a nation-wide experiment. It is a roll of the dice. If the OLPC predictions are correct, the nation and its children win. Of course, had they conducted a pilot test first, they would have also won. Indeed the probability that they would win increases dramatically; it just would have taken a little longer and cost a little more than without the test. On the other hand, if the grand national experiment fails, it is developing countries and their children that are least able to manage the consequences of this failure or recover from the expended costs. This makes Professor Negroponte's dictums not only irresponsible but unethical. _____________________ Robert B. Kozma, Ph.D. International Consultant Technology in Service of Developing Countries 2151 Filbert St. San Francisco, CA 94123 USA http://robertkozma.com Phone +1 415 292 2471 Mobile +1 415 623 4340 Fax: +1 415 651 9954 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 37146 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 49020 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 51977 bytes Desc: not available URL: From yishaym at gmail.com Mon Jul 23 17:36:15 2007 From: yishaym at gmail.com (Yishay Mor) Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:36:15 +0100 Subject: A new type of Nigerian scam? Message-ID: The story about kids using OLPCs to access porn is making the rounds (see links from my blog: http://yishaym.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/mayday-mayday-kids-are-seeing-titties/). But is this the real story? Or is it all about Nigerian officials looking for an excuse to filter the content the web? - Yishay -- ___________________________ Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html http://yishaym.wordpress.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/yishaymor http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com +44-20-78378888 x5737 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From valerie.crawford at gmail.com Tue Jul 24 03:29:15 2007 From: valerie.crawford at gmail.com (Valerie Crawford) Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:29:15 -0700 Subject: A new type of Nigerian scam? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I, too, wonder about this newstory being so widely picked up from Reuters' Oddly Enough column. Why is this the story and not stories about teachers' and students' instructional use of computers and information from the Internet? Educators in developed countries had (have) to grapple with the "appropriate use" issues when laptops began to be adopted. Now the same issues are cropping up in Nigeria -- no surprise. But the coverage is vaguely jeering and cargo-ist -- 'we gave them laptops and look at what they do'. It's the typical of the racism so prevalent in news coverage of Africa. OLPC is a laudable program; but the instructional needs of teachers who use laptops in the classroom should have been better anticipated. The ICT integration issues --both technological and pedagogical-- will be tremendous. I've read and heard from various colleagues that do ICT and education research in African countries that the prevailing pedagogy is highly rote-learning and transmission-oriented. Optimally leveraging ICT for learning will require a huge shift in teacher preparation, pedagogy, etc. Valerie Valerie M. Crawford Senior Research Scientist Center for Technology in Learning SRI International On 7/23/07, Yishay Mor wrote: > > The story about kids using OLPCs to access porn is making the rounds (see > links from my blog: http://yishaym.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/mayday-mayday-kids-are-seeing-titties/ > ). But is this the real story? Or is it all about Nigerian officials > looking for an excuse to filter the content the web? > > - Yishay > > -- > ___________________________ > Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab > http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html > http://yishaym.wordpress.com > https://www.linkedin.com/in/yishaymor > http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=yishaym%40gmail.com > +44-20-78378888 x5737 > _______________________________________________ > connect with G1:1 community -> discussion at g1to1.org > subscribe/unsubscribe G1:1 discussion mailing list -> > http://mail.g1to1.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion > > -- --Valerie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: