In my opinion, the most significant contribution that the OLPC movement has performed is to illustrate how our current educational systems are increasingly falling out of step with children and the future. In our School Board, with the 1:1 deployment that we have enjoyed over the last six years for all of our students, the issue of “control” vs “input” presented the greatest challenge.

Old School: “Control”

By “control,” I refer to the widely-used Socratic approach to learning, that presents the accepted belief that knowledge is “transmitted” to the learner, who plays the simple role of “receptacle.” What is ultimately integrated into memory, knowledge and behaviour is left, for the most part, to chance. Such learning, as we know it, does not “stick” and as often revealed in any testing, simply disappears to the “back” regions of our brain.

But since we have taught this way for so long, and it produced many of the people who are now reading this article, well, it must have worked!! And it did!! But then again, when we deal with children, it should have everything to do with them and not with our own beliefs, ideologies and philosophies.

Today and in the future, technology will be playing such an integral role in all of our lives that it is increasingly disconcerting reading and hearing adults diminish, denigrate and deflate the role that technology can play in the classroom. The walls of our classrooms are becoming increasingly permeable. Any thought that schools, classrooms and educators should confine their activities and actions to these walls and not explore the world around them is very scary.

New School: “Input

By “input”, I refer to how children can play an integral role in their own learning process. Becoming active learners and actually playing a significant role in the pedagogy of the teacher. is a wonderful outcome of the OLPC movement. Technology, as we have experienced with laptops, enables this to happen and if the teachers are open and willing to change to this new reality, it creates the “win-win” context that is so desired in our classrooms today.

The teachers “win” because their pedagogy is enhanced, in ways that were not available a few years ago. The students “win” because they are now active learners, and all research is unequivocal: high interest and engagement leads to deeper learning.

The Challenge in Change

Why has the OLPC movement encountered some stiff resistance? Simply put, regardless of the level in the institution (State Department of Education, Ministries, Superintendents, Principals Teachers, Non Teaching Professionals, Parents), people are reluctant to cede control, with the misplaced notion that lack of “control” implies reduced instructional impact. Allowing students to be architects of their own learning pattern seems too far-removed a concept to incorporate into current classroom activities.

Then add the reality that university teacher training programs, for the most part, continue to inadequately prepare graduating teachers to the new realities of technology in the classroom. It also explains why we have witnessed how our more experienced teachers have embraced the use of technology into the classroom rather than our younger, less experienced teachers.

In my estimation, when we allow children to be active participants in their own learning using technology, it will not result in making the earth any “flatter” or “smaller” but rather will bring the universe to the minds of children.

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However, after considering all the obstacles with some fellow volunteers and local educators, including a Ministry of Education delegate, I kept running into the same issue: So we get the laptops, and then what? We discussed the potential of OLPC endlessly, but eventually came to the conclusion that the program was a mess, especially after the departure of some of their best minds and the insistence that the hardware is the only thing to supply. But if OLPC itself won’t supply the rest of the framework, somebody must.

Ignoring all other issues – Is OLPC worth it cost-wise? What about the XO’s hardware? Does it encourage constructivism in the classroom? What countries are appropriate for this? – I’ll focus on what I know.

Connectivity & Power

One of the foundations of the XO is connectivity, and of course the infrastructure is lacking in most target countries. A knowledgeable partner needs to facilitate the development of internet access at usable speeds, whether it be wired or wireless, at a sustainable pace. The advent of numerous new undersea cables all around Africa will doubtlessly contribute here.

Power infrastructure is also needed; this is all useless without it, even with power-sipping ULV chips. Renewable and accessible sources of energy need to be there before school servers can even boot for the first time. These two issues are obviously bigger than OLPC and are major driving forces in development; I cite them because they are so fundamental and necessary for the success of any OLPC-style program.

Despite the huge scale of the problem, any initiative of this type needs to have its fingers in this pie and be connected with infrastructure development partners to get anywhere.

Software

Along with the physical infrastructure, you need a software ecosystem. Leaving Sugar out of the equation (I’m a fan, but not everyone is; plus, more choice is always better), you need content developers constantly innovating to produce high quality educational programs and knowledge portals.

This could be the MoE developing software on the government’s dime, or better yet for private sector enthusiasts, budding software companies can produce the programs, encouraging small business growth in the ICT sector and getting new programmers on their feet. Furthermore, technical and vocational students in more developed countries can undertake the programming themselves, hitting even closer to the heart of OLPC’s aims.

No matter what, this won’t happen without a coordinating entity, a role that OLPC has been unwilling and/or unable to step into.

Teacher Training & Content

Finally and most crucially, teacher training and educational materials need to be brought into the equation. No matter how simple the XO is, using it in a classroom requires a major rethinking of how education is undertaken in most schools around the world, and 99% of teachers out there just won’t be able to do it without assistance.

Like infrastructure, this is so big and so obvious that it seems outside the scope of OLPC. Train teachers? No kidding! Don’t you think thousands of people are already trying to do that?! Naturally. But any ICT4E program needs this at the center of its aims, and OLPC’s failure to incorporate this into its program has been a massive hindrance to adoption.

If Not OLPC, Who?

OLPC isn’t going to do any of this. So who will? Why not a non-profit composed of equal parts techies and educators? Small teams of dedicated professionals could ease to roll-out of educational computers to the appropriate countries over the course of a few years, on a cost-shared basis between donors and recipient governments.

They don’t even need the XO – many have pointed out that more capable netbooks have undercut OLPC in cost at this point. OLPC started it, but this is the next logical step.

I and others have found these laptop and netbooks programs to be highly successful, resulting in greater access to and use of diverse sources of information, improved quantity and quality of student writing, higher student engagement through working with multiple media, greater opportunities to explore topics in-depth for, and improved integration of technology in instruction.

How to run a successful laptop program

The successful programs I have investigated have all been built on a similar model. A balanced funding approach is used, with sufficient funding budgeted for curriculum development, professional development, wireless routers, purchase of peripherals, and repair and replacement of laptops.

A careful planning process is carried out to develop a solid educational design and win support from important stakeholders, including teachers, parents, and community leaders. A staged implementation process, based on pilot studies, formative and summative evaluation, and gradual deployment helps ensure that positive lessons are learned as the project expands.

Finally, the district or state carefully assesses a range of hardware and software options to choose which ones best meet their educational goals in a cost effective manner.

The OLPC model is radically different.

Computers are to be provided to children, not schools, and in massive large deployments carried out as quickly as possible. Whether schools have funding for curricular or professional development, technical infrastructure, peripherals, support, or maintenance is disregarded in the rush to get computers into children’s hands immediately. Planning, pilot programs, evaluation, and staged implementation are eschewed.

One particular hardware/software combination, based on the XO computer, is seen as the solution in all contexts, rather than recommending that educational leaders consider a range of hardware and software options and select models that meet their educational needs.

The results are entirely predictable, and have started to surface. A handful of inspiring examples, based on terrific efforts by a few innovative teachers or students and backed by armies of volunteers, are touted. But, when examining the broader implementation, we learn that without professional development or curriculum development, and with little of the infrastructure that makes computer use in schools effective, teachers for the most part ignore the computers, which thus go largely unused in schools.

As for home use of the laptops, children are initially very excited, but — again, apart from a few inspiring examples — they mainly use them to play simple games that do little else but displace time spent on homework or other forms of play. Within a year or two, the machines start breaking down and most families lack the means to repair them.

Meanwhile, huge amounts of money have been wasted that, with better planning, could have improved education in a myriad of ways.

As with prior unsuccessful examples of educational technology promoted as a magic bullet, everybody will then blame school systems and their teachers for failing to take advantage of such a revolutionary piece of equipment. Then, in another few years, a new revolutionary piece of equipment will appear and the same cycle will be repeated.

Our lesson learned from OLPC

The most impoverished countries targeted by this initiative shouldn’t be investing in one laptop per child, as their children will benefit more from the hiring and training of teachers, the building of schools, and judicious use of technology appropriate to their contexts.

As for more developed countries that are considering educational laptop programs, they will do best basing their programs on thoughtful educational planning and priorities rather than, as OLPC advocates suggest, simply passing out XOs and getting out of children’s way.

In summary, what OLPC has taught us so far is how not to organize a successful educational laptop program.

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• Child Safety Online – Prevention Guidelines
• Cyber Security Tip ST05-002: Keeping Children Safe Online
• Computer Security for Children

But, is user education working? Obviously, primary school children (and older) cannot be made responsible for installing and managing security updates, AV software, and firewalls. In this view, getting millions of children in developing countries on-line on laptops they have to use unsupervised at home seems to be nothing short of a crime against humanity. Yet, is it really impossible to create a computer environment that can not only be used safely by children, but also managed safely by children?

All these security advices are very sensible given the current ICT landscape. But, these advices can also be seen as blaming the victim by the commercial software industry. This has been doubly insulting as most security problems, eg, the mere existence of computer viruses, is the result of the (very) bad coding practices and short sighted design decisions of commercial software companies. As a result, the complete AV industry catering to end-users is widely mistrusted. Its very existence has been seen as a stopgap for irresponsible coding practices

So it was a pleasant surprise to see the OLPC security model, Bitfrost.

Bitfrost was a design that started with a “the user cannot do wrong” approach to security. It showed how you could actually build a user-friendly computer that gave children full control over their laptop and, at the same time, made the laptop as secure as any security professional’s private laptop could ever be. Here is a summary of the principles and goals of the Bitfrost design from the wikipage.

Bitfrost Principles:

• Open design:The laptop’s security must not depend upon a secret design implemented in hardware or software
• No lockdown: Though in their default settings, the laptop’s security systems may impose various prohibitions on the user’s actions, there must exist a way for these security systems to be disabled
• No reading required: Security cannot depend upon the user’s ability to read a message from the computer and act in an informed and sensible manner
• Unobtrusive security: Whenever possible, the security on the machines must be behind the scenes, making its presence known only through subtle visual or audio cues, and never getting in the user’s way

Bitfrost Goals

• No user passwords: With users as young as 5 years old, the security of the laptop cannot depend on the user’s ability to remember a password.
• No unencrypted authentication: Authentication of laptops or users will not depend upon identifiers that are sent unencrypted over the network
• Out-of-the-box security: The laptop should be both usable and secure out-of-the-box, without the need to download security updates when at all possible
• Limited institutional PKI: The laptop will be supplied with public keys from OLPC and the country or regional authority (e.g. the ministry or department of education), but these keys will not be used to validate the identity of laptop users
• No permanent data loss: Information on the laptop will be replicated to some centralized storage place so that the student can recover it in the event that the laptop is lost, stolen or destroyed.

These are all rather common sense starting points for any security system. And anyone who has experienced the trials and tribulations of securing an off-the-shelve computer system will immediately ask why this is not implemented in all computer systems sold? This is not the placed to go down that road. Suffice it to say that the Bitfrost principles and goals are all feasible with todays technology.

The implementation details might seem rather arcane, but they follow logically from the above lists. The Bitfrost document is a good read for anyone who wants to get a feeling how computer security should be done. Below there are some other links for further reading on this subject.

Further Reading:

• The Next 50 Years of Computer Security: An Interview with Alan Cox
• Aligning Security and Usability
• Reusability of Functionality-Based Application Confinement Policy Abstractions
• Bitfrost: The One Laptop per Child Security Model
• Understanding Android Security

Ivan Krstić must be recommended for creating a design that includes most of the state-of-the-art security knowledge but is still feasible on a small device. The security models for Apple’s iPod and Google’s Android and Chrome OS follow a similar design (Ivan Krstić currently works for Apple), but Bitfrost is even less forgiving to security breaches.

I think that Bitfrost will be one of the lasting legacies of the OLPC. As evidence that you can design a computer platform from the ground up that is both secure out of the box, and can be used and managed with ease, even by a child. There is no excuse anymore not to produce usable and secure software stacks.

Going by some of the comments that follow one could be excused for thinking that the OLPC is the best thing to happen to the world since sliced bread for the XO laptop will magically transform students into self-learners (“peers working collaboratively in teams”). A more balanced followup by Scott Kipp still proposes that thanks to the OLPC, “evaluations, discussions and policy assessments about whether or not to have computers in the classroom will very soon be entirely obsolete, if not already.”

Such overwhelming enthusiasm is surely out of place and perhaps a bit of perspective is important.

OLPC is not “revolutionalizing” education

For one lets be realistic that the OLPC is not “revolutionalizing” education. Yes, OLPC will soon have 1 million XO laptops in circulation. But compare that with 121 million children not in school, 668 million children that started primary school in 2007, or the 774 million illiterate adults and the OLPC does not seem that revolutionary. No doubt, computers will be important in the future to deliver education, but a lot of schools still struggle with having a blackboard or even a building. So lets not overstate either the scale or the impact of the OLPC.

OLPC did not spawn the netbook

Second, it is a stretch to say, as Wayan does, that the XO spawned the netbook. What the XO did do was spawn the Classmate PC. But the next step is a bit of a stretch.
And even if the XO did spawn the netbook, the lesson from this is two-fold.

First, that non-profit initiatives such as the OLPC are particularly well-suited to creating new innovations, particularly for under-served populations.

Conversely, and this is the second lesson, the dissemination of commercially viable innovations is best left to the private sector. The XO laptop still costs upward of the original USD 100 target price.

Meanwhile, the Amazon Kindle costs USD 259, the cheapest netbook now costs USD 98, and in developed countries netbooks are available for free with Internet/data plans. So another lesson is that if you want cheap computers, don’t let a single institution – particularly a non-profit – build it as a monopoly.

OLPC depreciates teachers

A third lesson, to paraphrase Scott, is that teachers are part of the solution – not the problem. This is not wording that OLPC proponents would like because constructionism sees teachers as a corrupting influence. Too much of the broader debate around the quality of education in developing countries also lays blame on teachers – without exploring the context in which they operate.

Yet, is there an OLPC project that has substituted teachers with laptops? So, the third lesson is that if you want to achieve education for all, spend more on teachers and on computers. And if you must choose between the two, spend on the former.

OLPC distorts funding choices

Finally, it has also taught us that policymakers don’t always make the most judicious use of taxpayer money. The approximately USD 150 million spent on XO laptops, for instance, is the same annual amount needed to achieve 100% literacy in Brazil.

Yes, the OLPC has certain other benefits, such as evaluating the impact, benefits and drawbacks of computers in the classroom. But at a potential price-tag of USD 66.8 billion for all the world’s primary school children, it would be a very expensive experiment indeed.

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ICT is coming to education

The first thing that comes to my mind is that the initiative solidified in the world’s mind what most ICT4ED-ers may have accepted since Logo or even before: that ICT in Education will be a permanent fixture, only varying in scale and technique. That is, the evaluations, discussions and policy assessments about whether or not to have computers in the classroom will very soon be entirely obsolete, if not already.

It is a matter of resource allocation determining how many computers, which kind of deployment, etc, but the details on scale and approach of deployment are more a function of resource allocation capacity than a matter of: should we have computers in the classroom?

But Construnctionism is not

I’ve worked with and observed OLPC initiatives in Harlem, Haiti, Peru and Mozambique, each having their own merits, challenges and approaches. I’ve seen very scant evidence of constructionism in practice. It has been my experience that only in exceptional outlier cases does the use of the XO begin to approach the constructionist ideals.

I think Negroponte’s (and Papper’s and Kay’s) vision of what could happen with a tool like the XO is admirable, but in most places the projects are very far from those scenarios of the “radical reorientation” of the classroom the constructionists envisioned. Mark Warschauer’s studies of OLPC pilots in the US points to a similar finding and reinforces one of his most resounding ideas: the digital divide has little to do with the student:computer ratio.

ICT4E needs local buy-in and support

Each deployment needs the human capacity to create, innovate and develop the use of the technology itself. What we are seeing in OLPC projects around the world is enforcing this: successful deployments are the ones lead by dedicated teachers, administrators and support staff that have the will to make the project work. If unsupported, the project either grinds to a halt or the students end up using the XO for little other taking pictures and copying what the teacher writes on the board. This, unfortunately, is the norm. For now.

Most importantly, teacher training and acceptance

Negroponte originally posited that the OLPC project needed absolutely no teacher training or evaluation to succeed. He quickly changed his stance, but the reality is that the introduction of the XOs into classrooms in the developing world is a radical and in some cases very alienating concept.

Here in Mozambique, as in many places, teachers hold absolute power in the classroom. Giving the children a laptop is sometimes threatening to the teachers, and the kids often dominate the technology much faster than the teachers, but we have also seen that few use the XO to its potential. Sugar Labs is helping to change this, albeit slowly.

Finally, the OLPC approach is reminding us that, unless you have the teachers on board with the program and motivated for its success, the use of the XO and its subsequent benefit for the students will be minimal, if not negative. This reinforces what many ICT4E studies in the past had shown. What was new about OLPC is really the scale of it.

Dozens of countries with the same tools, all at once. It has been truly amazing to see what different places do with the same tools and observe the effects of context. I think many countries are learning a lot about their own goals for education and its development, and that none of the participating countries so far will be taking a step backwards in this sector in the foreseeable future.

First, by the end of 2009 OLPC should pass a stunning milestone – 1 million XO laptops deployed in over 40 countries around the world, almost all in 1:1 computer to child ratios. From full saturation in Uruguay and Peru, potentially high saturation in Rwanda, and multiple smaller deployments in almost every developing country, OLPC’s one computer per child educational model is having a tremendous impact on educators and students.

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Next, the humble XO laptop which was once ridiculed by the titans of technology, spawned the netbook. And the netbook is eating the computer market at a stunning growth rate. From essentially $0 sales in 2nd Quarter 2007 to $3 billion in sales – 20% of the entire portable computer market – in 2nd Quarter of 2009, netbook sales show no signs of slowing.

But OLPC has impact deeper and farther than just XO’s passed out or netbooks snapped up. Its changing education, technology, even culture in ways beyond any one person’s understanding. So this month’s Educational Technology Debate will take a different form than previous conversations.

To capture what we have learned from OLPC in a holistic fashion, I’m soliciting commentary from each of you. What do YOU think we’re learning from Negroponte’s wild idea of Constructionism via XO laptops?

Feel free to summit your thoughts and ideas in the comments below. At the same time, if you find yourself with too much to say in a comment box – stop! Email it to me instead and I’ll publish it as one of this month’s posts.

Related Links

• What Do We Know About OLPC Pilots Worldwide? – OLPC News
• What have we learned from OLPC pilots to date? – EduTech Blog
• OLPC Academic papers – OLPC Wiki

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