Andy, thank you for reporting on the interesting talk by Ravi Venkatesan.
The issues he raises are critical not only for India, bur for the entire world. India and China have about one third of the population of the world, and perhaps the largest share of those art the bottom of the pyramid, with incomes of less that $2 per day. "It's the shortage of skilled teachers, high student to teacher ratios, teacher absenteeism, student absenteeism" that are among India's greatest educational challenges, he continued. However, there are ways ICT can combat these challenges. [Alfred Bork] I think it very unlikely that we will ever have enough good teachers in the world, regardless of what we do. But this does not seem to be understood well by the World Bank and other organizations. Their vast expenditures of money to solve the education for all problem are based on schools and teachers. Unfortunately, no major breakthrough has been achieved on a large, replicable scale, he said. "I don't think anybody really knows; there is a remarkable lack of information on what drives success and sustainability." "When you look across all these projects, there is always a visionary, passionate, committed leader," he continued. "Our problem is that we then become over-reliant on this small group of leaders." There is no substitute for this type of leadership, he said; how do we identify more people to fill these roles? [Alfred Bork] We cannot base a large scale educational system in a few visionary leaders. There is already too much searching for 'successful' examples, ones that are not repeatable. It's quite common for a project's funding to dry up before it reaches critical mass for sustainability, he pointed out. There are many well-intentioned efforts, some led by the government, some by NGOs or the private sector, but they're not coordinated. "I'm constantly surprised" when you look at the projects of major IT companies, running project that have very similar goals, in the same communities, "but we don't come together, so there is a tremendous missed opportunity." Language and illiteracy is also a major challenge, particularly when content isn't available in the local language. "It's incredibly important for us to make sure that the user interface is in the local languages." Microsoft is working to put its software into 14 Indian languages by the end of the year, he said, "but it's not enough.... because of the 40% of people who are illiterate." [Alfred Bork] We need more that Multilanguage interfaces. All the learning material, beginning with very young children, should be in the child's language, the one they have learning since birth. Since there are many languages in the world, this is a major problem that must be faced immediately in an educational system. A lack of content also stifles well-meaning initiatives. [Alfred Bork] But the critical need is not information content, but learning. If we consider what is needed globally for lifelong learning, it is a large array of content. What are the possibilities? As mentioned, I do not think it will happen by building schools and training teachers. We must seriously begin to evaluate other possibilities that would have a reasonable chance of success, both sustainable and scalable. First, we need proposals. These need to be tested by major experiments, in many languages and in many parts of the world. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
