Reading the resulting commentary, I’d like to declare success. I feel we have found a new model, that is an child of these two parents, mixing genes of both to create a new, better ICT4E model where multiple platforms plus a single learning environment equals more educational beneficiaries.

Multiple Platforms

From the beginning, this discussion recognized that different communities allocate their limited resources differently. Some will have the resources for high saturation of computing tools, while others will not. In fact a single community may have multiple computing models within its own educational system, based on age, maturity, and progress of its students. Mark Beckford gave us a great example:

In Macedonia, NComputing deployed over 100,000 virtual desktops which made Macedonia the country with the greatest density of computers to students. But Macedonia also issued a tender to deploy a smaller quantity of netbooks. They cannot afford mobility for all students, and yet even at 1:1 desktop computing they see the advantages of mobility.

So educators need not feel that its a either-or decision. Communities can have both personal and shared computing environments in the same school. And as Alex Van de Sande points out, its not the technology that matters, but the way educators use it:

The most important is that in either case, the experience must be saturated, shared and free. The shared PC lab experience, where there are many peers around you who can quickly teach you is invaluable. But all that is nullified by models with restrict hours and usage rules. The 1:1 laptops are great on the fact that the freedom from “this is how you are supposed to use this” rules make you experiment more. But doing it alone may lead to the laptops being used for more private entertainment – like gaming.

In that context, a mixed environment may be the best choice. One where students use computer labs in the school setting, where usage can be monitored and directed, and on a more personal basis when outside the school.

Single Learning Environment

With all these platforms, there quickly becomes the need to maintain a homogeneous learning environment. One familiar look and feel that follows the child as they access different platforms during the day and their education. Walter Bender is working on such an environment with Sugar on a Stick.

This USB memory stick-based educational software platform is based on the principles of cognitive and social constructivism, and contains its own operating system (Fedora 11) so it can be run from just the memory device itself – no hard drive or specific operating system needed.

Caroline gives us her thoughts on the advantages of such an approach:

Sugar on a Stick should make mobility cheaper. If kids take their sticks with them they can use them on clusters of computers in day care centers, community centers and at home if the parent has a computer. Thus by using computers in different places in their environment they can get quite a bit more hours of computing time per week and their desktop and all their work is mobile. I wonder if we can run numbers on that type of solution, and maybe instead of running them per machine, run the numbers to compare $ per hour the child uses a computer.

And Walter Bender confirms that the Sugar on a Stick approach can be complimentary to current and new platform investments:

It is great that there are many different such platforms being developed: a diversity of hardware configurations is necessary to meet the demands of schools, budgets, and cultures. But one can remain agnostic about hardware platforms and configurations, while providing a great learning experience, better utilizing the installed base of computers while tapping the potential to engage every child in critical thinking, arming them with the complementary tools of science and the arts.

More Beneficiaries

So with a single learning environment on multiple platforms, let’s start talking about the real numbers of beneficiaries. Either in school or at home, let’s move away from the assumption that only the child assigned to the computer is using it. At any given point in time, children are usually in groups, learning from each other. In fact, it seems children learn best when learning with others. Alexa Joyce notes that:

Sugata Mitra’s research suggests that groups of 3-4 children per computer can be more fruitful than 1:1. In groups of such a size, children readily exchange ideas and knowledge about the topic they are investigating, as well as the computer itself.

Let’s not stop at children. When they are home, they are not necessarily alone. Siblings, parents, and others are nearby and they too hear the call of a glowing screen as Walter Bender tells us:

A study done by Claudia Urrea in Costa Rica found that the majority of parents use the computer at home for their own learning – a further leveraging of the investment. Other programs, where it is infeasible to let the children travel between school and home with a computer, have instituted “technology goes home” programs – a subsidy to parents to purchase new or used equipment to have in the home. The goals of such programs have been to bridge learning from school into the home and to engage parents and siblings in the school community and in their own learning.

This new usage model, where a single learning environment over multiple technology platforms, is used by more than just students, may change the way in which we think about costs, which is one of the largest barriers to adoption, just after plain inertia & fear of change.

Costs are often calculated on a per-student basis. Yet, with siblings and parents as co-learners with their children, education leaders may change their mindset around platform costs. Instead, divide platform costs by student + 1 parent & 1 sibling. Yet also reduce costs, as there is only one software system to maintain.

And so I say we have a whole new ICT4E model with multiple platforms, a single learning environment, that empowers more beneficiaries to learn at a lower cost. A success, eh?
.

Less Top-Down Approaches

In this post, I frame the discussion somewhat differently. I assert that different communities are going to allocate their limited resources differently – not exactly a stretch. Economics, infrastructure, inertia, and pedagogy all play a role. Typically, there is a inhomogeneous collection of old and new, mobile and desktop, network-enabled and stand-alone machines available in a school, at home, and in the community at large.

This situation might change over time as in-bulk purchases for “top-down”, government-sponsored deployments of one-to-one laptop programs or terminal-server solutions become more common place, but such deployments remain the exception, not the rule. One size doesn’t fit all.

Maine's laptop learners

Even in places where such programs are being put into place on a large scale, sustaining the deployment is often a local burden. (The Maine Learning Technology Initiative has evolved along these lines – local townships are being asked to fund the “refresh” of the program, which is resulting in more diversity of both equipment and configurations across the state.)

Further, the way in which these resources are used is quite varied from place to place and program to program. Again, making reference to the Maine program, the choice of whether or not the laptops go home with the children is a decision made at the school or even the classroom level. In the case of computer labs, the schedule of access also varies – from daily use across all classes to occasional, specialized use.

Empowering a Bottom-Up Approach

It has be argued that teachers are able to incorporate computers into their day-to-day teaching only when they themselves are comfortable with the technology and cognizant of its promise. How can we help teachers and learners experiment and explore, regardless of the configuration or setting? How can we support a teacher with computers in the classroom but – as is most often the case – no administrative access to those computers and little support from the central information technology (IT) department? How can we support a school that has a computer lab, but again with little customized support from central IT?

At Sugar Labs, we are trying to address the diverse needs mandated by heterogeneous computer environments while trying to support “bottom-up” grassroots adoption by teachers, parents, and informal learning communities. Regardless of the constraints imposed by a school-district’s IT, we want to maximize learning opportunities and provide a consistent framework for teachers and students.

Taking advantage of the Fedora LiveUSB Creator, it is possible to store everything you need to run the Sugar Learning Platform on a single USB memory stick (minimum size of one GB). “Sugar on a Stick” gives children access to a personal Sugar environment on any computer with just a USB memory stick.

Sugar on a Stick on Classmate

It is the Sugar Learning Platform packaged onto a memory stick that can be plugged into almost any computer and run without affecting its “host”. It bypasses the software on the hard drive. In fact, Sugar on a Stick will work even if the host computer does not have a hard drive!

With Sugar on a Stick, the learning experience is the same on any computer: the operating system, the Sugar software, and the child’s work are stored on the stick, ensuring a consistent learning experience in school, in the classroom or the lab, and after-school, in the library, the museum, at home, or at grandmother’s house.

The initial targets of Sugar on a Stick are early-adopter teachers with “geek” parental support; but the model can be readily adopted more widely across a school district. There are a number of advantages to the Sugar on a Stick approach:

1. It reduces costs with flexible hardware choices by allowing institutions to continue using their existing investment in hardware while reducing support costs and user frustration.
2. It enables low-cost options when purchasing new computers.
3. It also makes it easy to accept donated older machines; it increases the life of older computers, reducing disposal costs and enabling the reuse of existing resources.
4. It provides a coherent and consistent computing experience even during times of fluctuating technology funding and changes in hardware choices.
5. It allows communities to take advantage of the increasing household computer ownership, while still providing a consistent, comparable computing environment.
6. It gives learners access to the projects and creations and explorations they have previously done regardless of where they did them.
7. It provides off-line access to applications and content: not every learner has access to broadband or the Internet in the classroom or at home.

Platform Agnostic Yet Education Focused

Live USB distribution need not be restricted to the Sugar Learning Platform. For example, there is a beta version of “Squeak on a Stick” being developed by Bert Freudenberg that would enable access to the Etoys environment in much the same way as Sugar on a Stick allows access to Sugar.

Also, harking back to last month’s Educational Technology Debate on the potential of mobile devices for learning, essentially the same “bits” that go on a LiveUSB image also run in a virtual machine. We are exploring the use of a Sugar VM on a mobile phone (of course, this would require a relatively high-end phone) that would provide many of the same advantages outlined above.

Our goal at Sugar Labs is to put an emphasis on learning through doing and debugging: more engaged learners are able to tackle authentic problems. Sugar on a Stick combines powerful tools with a simple and flexible medium of distribution. All of the necessary tools for guide discovery are on the stick. It is also possible to include training and curricula materials targeting specific audiences on the stick. Sugar on a Stick allows one to experience learning software with almost no effort and no risk.

The Live USB approach to distribution of learning tools to a large extent by passes the theme of this debate. The Sugar on a Stick approach allows us to emphasizes access to a learning process over any specific technology or platform.

It is great that there are many different such platforms being developed: a diversity of hardware configurations is necessary to meet the demands of schools, budgets, and cultures. But one can remain agnostic about hardware platforms and configurations, while providing a great learning experience, better utilizing the installed base of computers while tapping the potential to engage every child in critical thinking, arming them with the complementary tools of science and the arts.

“It’s an education project”, after all.

“OLPC’s key development in our view is the software – who cares about the hardware as long as it gets the job done inexpensively?”

Nonetheless, it is still worthwhile discussing the advantages (and disadvantages) of various hardware approaches to deploying learning software such as the Sugar Learning Platform. I am ignorant of the current total-cost-of-ownership of the various options available; I leave this complex calculation to Mark Beckford and assume that he will take into consideration not just the lifetime cost of the hardware, but also training, administration, maintenance and repair, energy and disposal costs.

Other important factors, not often considered, include where the cost is born and to whom the investment brings benefit. For example, can support be delegated to enterprising high-school students (or some other local community resource) or must it be outsourced (out of district or even out of the country)? All other factors being equal, it matters where you make the investment.

What I will discuss here is “reach” in terms of who is learning, what is learned, and how it is learned. If we set our sights higher than using the computer to access information and learn “21st century computer skills”, the choice of model needs to be taken into consideration.

1:1 Computing in the USA

Of course, the principle advantage of a saturated model of computing is that the computer is available to every child at all times. In a middle school in Massachusetts, the children use their laptops to write in every class, including music, dance, and gym.

The children learn computer skills, but they also learn to use computation to enhance other curricula goals, through demonstrations, projects, and critiques. Learners develop craft, engage and persist, envision, express, observe, reflect, stretch and explore, and understand. Computation is used as a critical-thinking tool in the context of open-ended exploration and discovery, going beyond the use of the computer as a tool of instruction.

It is often the stated goal of one-to-one computer programs that laptops go home with the children. This is desired in that not only does child ownership result in less breakage – statistics from the Maine laptop program bear this out – but also, the computer, which otherwise was only available at school is now available to the entire family.

A study done by Claudia Urrea in Costa Rica found that the majority of parents use the computer at home for their own learning – a further leveraging of the investment. Other programs, where it is infeasible to let the children travel between school and home with a computer, have instituted “technology goes home” programs – a subsidy to parents to purchase new or used equipment to have in the home. The goals of such programs have been to bridge learning from school into the home and to engage parents and siblings in the school community and in their own learning.

Mobility and form factor also play a role. In a trip to rural Thailand, I got to see first hand how netbooks were being used to change what is learned and how it is learned. Two examples really resonated with me. In one example, the children organized a orchestra in which they combined computer music with the traditional instruments of their village. They sat on the floor with their parents, performing together.

Here, the form factor of a netbook computer was an enabling element to their physically being able to interweave the new and the old into a community and musical synthesis. In a second example, the children took their netbooks into the forest to capture the sights and sounds of their habitat. In some schools, students attach sensors to their netbooks so as to capture data such as temperature “in vivo”. Back in the classroom, they process these raw data as part of their science curriculum.

Mobility has also played a role in extra curricular activities. For example, an elementary-school student established an after-school photography business in a community for Afghani refugees in Pakistan, using a netbook.

But the most dramatic example is one that Benjamin M. Schwartz recently brought to my attention. Ben is the author of the Distance Activity, which measures the distance between two OLPC XO-1 computers through a measurement of sound-wave prorogation. It is incredibly engaging and has been used in a wide variety of situations, including gym class, where it has be used to introduce measurement and calculation to activities usually not considered academic.

Acoustic Tape Measure

Ben recently blogged about Stephanie Selvick’s experience with the use of Distance in a school in Senegal. A previously skeptical teacher enthusiastically began to brainstorm about connections to traditional curricula goals, such as “assignments for his kids to measure the distance around their homes or rooms” and to “figure out area from those numbers.”

As was reported from Senegal, “The goal of making teachers the experts for each other felt underway.” Opening the door to teachers to engage in learning “constructively” is of tremendous value.

Opening their eyes to the fact that they have ideas to contribute and that the software and hardware are able to be shaped to meet their needs is hard to put a price on, but also should be a factor in estimating the cost of deployment. While such “awakenings” could take place in a school computer lab, they are much more likely to occur when computation is always at hand, as part of everyday life.

I have largely avoided discussing the saturation vs. shared-use dichotomy. The same software, e.g. Sugar, can be used in both configurations. I echo Dukker in being supportive of whatever means we can deploy to get great software into the hands of children, inexpensively. However, we should not lose sight of the benefits afforded by the form factor and mobility of the netbook computer.

“21st century computer skills” seem to be about the acquisition of some specific knowledge – necessary but not sufficient. Learning is about the acquisition of a new “outlook” – what we are capable of doing with that knowledge .

So the debate we’ve been asked to participate in is to posit which computing model is better suited in the developing world to proliferate computers to enhance learning and education.

Intel's Classmate PC

Back in 2006, when I was co-General Manager of the computer division at Intel that was developing the Classmate PC, Intel was heavily promoting notebooks (which had higher average selling prices and higher margins than desktop CPU’s).

It may surprise some given my involvement with the Classmate PC, and Intel’s overall strategy, that I was not a proponent of 1:1 computing in the developing world. My passion for significantly increasing the access to computers for those in the under-served markets ultimately brought me to the role I have now at NComputing.

Access to fully functional, ultra-low cost, highly energy efficient connected computing is a critical component of enhancing and enabling the learning experience. My belief continues to be that shared access continues to be the best starting point for developing countries that are introducing computers to their schools for the first time.

First and foremost, if mature markets have not adopted 1:1 computing in any great degree beyond higher education, how can we realistically expect emerging markets with more limited budgets to adopt 1:1 computing?

The math is simple. Is it better to have 1.8M students share access to 50,000 computers for the first time vs. wait until the government can afford to proliferate notebooks to the same 1.8M students.

In the 1:1 model, who get’s these computers first? This particular example is from the state of Andra Pradesh in India:

The government saved $20M by deploying the shared model in acquisition, maintenance and electricity costs. They were able to

1. deploy more computers and
2. purchase generators to keep the computers running during power outages.

The $100 target price of the OLPC laptop was originally only the purchase price, regardless of being able to achieve it or not. There are other significant costs occurred during the life of a single computer, including maintenance and electricity. Secondly, where is the point of diminishing return where the farthest extreme is having a computer at a student’s fingertips 24/7?

As a longtime professional in the IT industry, I would be lost without my notebook by side. Blackberry’s, iPhone’s, etc. have reduced that dependence. But what about the kindergartner or sixth grader. I would agree that having increased access to shared computer model (more than one hour a day) would be better, but surely these students don’t need a computer with them all the time?

You could argue by digitizing textbooks you reduce their backpack load, but I have not heard of an outbreak of K-12 student back problems.

The portability aspect is another challenge, especially in developing economies. Kids drop and lose things in general. They have not developed their judgment skills to a point where they can be responsible for a notebook. I finally broke down and got my son a mobile phone – he lost it within six months, and if you looked at its shell, it is considerably marred.

I am not entirely against 1:1 computing, and in the subsequent debate we will discuss hybrid models that could work, but when it comes to primary and secondary schools, I do feel strongly that economic realities strongly support shared usage. I try to illustrate this in the chart below:

This is not a hybrid model. This is an evolutionary model. As students’ age/mature/progress, the need for a computer all the time becomes more critical. In addition, everyone has different needs, abilities, talents and skills. Some will gravitate towards the computer as if it is an extension of their body. Others will find it mildly useful but will prefer paper, pencil, books, etc.

This is where “try” vs. “buy” comes in. I would argue that 99% of people in the developed and developing world over the last 30ish years since the PC was introduced “try” before they “buy.” Whether it is a parents PC, a school lab, a cyber café, telecentre, or work place, they will be exposed first then build the interest and knowledge.

This is why, at Intel, before the Classmate PC “creosote bush” squashed all other projects (Rural Community PC, Amazon Kindle… yes, we were partnering with Amazon and e-Ink on a text book replacement product, and more), we had a significant push towards “shared access.”

In conclusion, I laud the efforts of Intel and OLPC who have significantly increased awareness of the importance of computing in education. The question and debate remains, though, as to how computing is deployed. The most economical and scalable solution is shared access computing.

Yet this seemingly natural order has a whole other life when we look at information and communication technologies in educational systems. Especially when we focus on computers. Educators and technologists promote either full saturation, a 1:1 model where each student has a computer, usually a laptop, or a shared-use model where computers, often desktops, are deployed in school labs.

Between these two models there is the initial debate around the different computing platforms and their different benefits, which highlights a more subtle difference in pedagogy, and through that, the basic foundations of what “school” means to a society.

For July, the Educational Technology Debate we will examine the two models, 1:1 and computer labs, and their respective benefits. Our goal will be to understand which benefits are key, and look for a way in which we can fuse these key benefits into a model that can be deployed in the many educational environments of the developing world.

Our two respected discussants on this topic will be:

• Walter Bender
  Walter Bender currently heads Sugar Labs, focusing on the award-winning Sugar Learning Platform (download it now). Previously he was president for software and content development at One Laptop per Child, and is on leave from MIT, where he was executive director of the MIT Media Laboratory.
• Mark Beckford
  Mark Beckford is currently Vice President of Global Business Development at NComputing, Inc, whose virtualization software and hardware allows multiple users to work off a single computer. Previously, he led diverse global teams at Intel to extend its market leadership and promote growth in new and emerging markets.

Please join us for what we all expect to be a lively and informative conversation – your input can start right now in the comments below, and Walter and Mark will post their opening remarks beginning Monday, July 6.