On Tuesday 09 Oct 2007 12:47 pm, Gautam John wrote: > MIT Prof. Nicholas > Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child non-profit this month is coming out > with its first machines, designed with kids in poor countries in mind. > (See this story by my colleague, Steve Hamm, about OLPC's attempts to > jump-start its program.) Intel has a project of its own, the Classmate > PC, that's also meant to meet the demand for a low-cost way to provide > Internet access in poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
On this topic http://www.pcworld.in/columns/index.jsp/artId=6520866 Blindly throwing technology at a problem and hoping for a solution is a bit thick. Many moons ago a host of schools in the US started to equip their students with leased laptops in a state and federally funded project. Despite home computer penetration of over 70 percent, the drive dubbed the “one-to-one” program was designed to increase interactivity in teaching and help kids pick up skills like creating multimedia presentations and being able to use the Net for research. Skills that were expected to help boost their success in the real world. Seven years and hundreds of million dollars later the program seems to have gone off its aims, with parents questioning its need, teachers finding it difficult to integrate the boxes into the curriculum, taxpayers asking for its closure and schools actually beginning to do so. Interestingly, the schools rolling back the program span the spectrum. Rich and poor schools, urban and rural schools, large and small schools — they want out of providing 24x7 computer access to their students. Even more interestingly, though the opposition to the program grows, the number of kids being covered under it is growing at about 15 percent a year. So why are so many stakeholders against it? For one there seem to be few upsides. While it improved attendance rates and reduced dropouts, schools found that it’s had little or no impact on grades (reading comprehension and math are still best done with paper, they learned). Worse still schools view it as a critical distraction with the laptop actually getting in way of teaching. The cost of training teachers, creating new lesson plans, putting infrastructure into place, maintaining the machines and policing the network only adds to the problem. Some institutions found themselves spending more time and effort on repairing laptops than on training teachers to adapt to teaching with them. The only ones who are deliriously happy with the scheme are predictably the kids, who’ve also used them to get really good at typing, network games, instant messaging to cheat on tests, downloading porn and hacking (in a New York school, a tenth grader not only ran rings round network security but also posted detailed instructions for his classmates online). Will the situation be any different in India or other developing economies? The problems endemic to the system are many. In our country, 23,000 schools don’t have a single teacher, with 3 percent of schools still looking for a single student. Or take Africa where many countries are part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLTC) plan promoted by digital oracle Nicholas Negreponte. The program to dole out $180 devices in schools, has come in for criticism from the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. The UN body maintains that “computers can’t solve the problems of a place where almost half a billion people live on less than $1 a day, and many lack clean drinking water. When textbooks, chalk, water and teachers are in short supply, high-tech investments should not be a priority.” This is just an example of how technology is more often than not promoted with all the best intentions as a way to fix systemic issues, without a thought to how the technology bits will fall in place and integrate with existing frameworks. Governments and corporates trip doing this all the time – just check out how many big bang tech rollouts actually succeed. When I started out as a journalist I filed on rusty typewriters and edited by hand. Page making apps, broadband, cellphones, blogs, SMS and IM have radically changed the way I work. I believe IT is a great lever to boost productivity. It’s also a great a leveler helping countries such as ours to compete with knowledge economies. But, and this is the important bit, just blindly throwing IT at a problem and hoping for a solution is a bit thick.
