OLPC problems in Peru
economist.com
economist.com
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.
Here's a summary I found of a pilot OLPC experience in Uruguay. http://www.divms.uiowa.edu/~hourcade/ceibal-workshop.pdf
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.
IMHO it would increase inequality, but I'm generally pessimistic about any issue.
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18924
http://www.slideshare.net/rabble/building-a-hacker-culture-i...
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
(Disclaimer: I work at OLPC, as an engineer.)
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?
I wouldn't believe anything they say - it's unfortunate that the writer didn't try to find data from any other source.
OLPC was never going to improve test scores. That's not to say it can't produce better, more educated human beings.