Mobile and policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Africa and the Middle East: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

The number of mobile phone users in Africa and the Middle East has exploded in the past decade and a half.  Africa, the continent facing the most urgent educational challenges, is expected to have over 735 million active mobile phone subscriptions by the end of 2012.  In 1995 there were only 600,000 subscriptions.

For the first time in history, a majority of Africans have individual access to interactive information and communication technology. In the Middle East an even higher percentage of people own and use mobile technologies. And since the 2011 Arab Spring no one questions their potential to connect and empower average citizens.

According to the UNESCO published paper, Africa and the Middle East are “leapfrogging” the earlier PC revolution and enthusiastically embracing the more recent mobile revolution. Unlike countries in Latin America for example, African countries (and many in the Middle East as well) have not made substantial investments in filling schools with computers or providing laptops to students. At some level, Africa is (for lack of a better phrase) a “clean slate” when it comes to ICT use in education. Because so many Africans have mobile phones, many educators are eager to leverage these devices to improve and provide greater access to education.

One model of accomplishing this is called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The name is sufficiently descriptive: according to this model students simply use the mobile phones they already own for educative purposes, and sometimes for purposes recommended or required by schools and teachers. The approach has gained traction in many developed countries (most notably in the United States) due to its affordability and flexibility.  Other models require schools to purchase mobile devices for students which dramatically increases costs.

The obvious disadvantage of BYOD programs is that not every learner has the same device or even a device at all.  Also, managing different types and models of devices on a school network can be difficult, and incorporating mobile learning into curricular activities is much easier when the same devices are being used by all learners. Yet in Africa and the Middle East cost is paramount, as illustrated in the paper. Schools often have difficulty providing basic infrastructure for students let alone personal technology.

What do you think?

1. Could BYOD work in Africa and Middle East?
2. How would it look compared to, say, BYOD models being employed in North America?
3. How might countries maximize the cost and convenience benefits of this model while still ensuring equity?
4. Is BYOD the future of access to mobile learning in developing countries?

Mobiles and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Africa and the Middle East: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks closely at how a handful of programs have employed mobile devices to support teachers and enhance their professional development.

This paper describes several projects that use mobile technologies to support teaching and learning as well as educational administration.  The paper argues that basic mobile phones (often referred to as “feature” phones) are not especially conducive for tasks beyond rudimentary communication.  While a number of projects have assisted teachers and students by pushing educational materials to their phones via SMS, projects that attempt richer collaboration and greater interaction tend to rely on smartphones.

While most experts agree that smartphones will eventually become commonplace in Africa (and have already made serious inroads in the Middle East), today a majority of people in developing countries own basic mobile devices: the screens are small; resolution is mediocre; navigation can be cumbersome; and text and images often display only in black and white.  Therefore, in Africa as well as many places in the Middle East the immediate question is: How can basic mobile phones be used to improve teaching and learning?

The paper describes a number of innovative approaches, several of which have gained traction and benefit large numbers of students (for example, Momath and Yoza both in South Africa).  Yet despite these promising projects, there are not a huge number of models to choose from when it comes to improving or extending education with basic phones.  Although projects like SEMA! in Kenya aimed to impact teaching and learning and foster greater collaboration among educators, it has been most influential as a means of streamlining data collection about enrolment rates.

According to the paper, the project, despite lofty ambitions, seemed to revert to a sort of digital notice board and quantitative questionnaire.  This does not, of course, mean the project was a failure (if there is one area in which mobile technologies have proven themselves in education, it is as an cost and time efficient means of collecting administrative data).  Instead the SEMA! project signals the difficulty of developing mobile learning programs that rely on basic phones, as opposed to smartphones.

What do you think?

1. What are some of the ways basic mobile phones might be used to assist teachers and improve their practice?
2. How can educators in Africa and the Middle East leverage the phones that are already in their pockets (and often in the pockets of their students) to enhance learning?
3. Or, alternatively, has the educational potential of basic mobile phones been overstated?

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Mobile and policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Asia: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

The paper explains that South Korea has made concerted efforts to improve education with technology.  Computers and mobile devices are common in classrooms and teachers and students are, by and large, eager to use them.  Recently, the government announced plans to transition from paper textbooks to digital textbooks by 2015.  The government wants textbook content to display on a variety of mobile devices including smartphones and larger-screen tablet computers. Leaders of the initiative have been piloting digital textbooks that can be tailored to a student’s individual abilities, interests, and pace of learning.

Within the past several weeks however, Korean officials, responding to widespread concerns, have promised to slow down and even reconsider the plan.  Perhaps surprisingly, the strongest opposition to digital textbooks is not related to doubts about their educational effectiveness or potential.  Instead parents and others are worried that young people are overly reliant on digital technologies.  A South Korean government survey suggested, for example, that one in 12 students between ages 5 and 9 are addicted to the internet.  Many Koreans are concerned that a full shift to digital textbooks could accelerate what is, in some instances, an already unhealthy relationship to information and communication technology.  A columnist for the Washington Post recently wrote about the controversy.

In the past several years, journalists and scholars have exposed a dark side to digital technologies.  Bestselling books like The Shallows written by Nicolas Carr, who has also moderated an EduTech Debate, and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together argue that increasingly ubiquitous (and increasingly mobile) technology may not be good for our brains, our broader health, and perhaps even our productivity.

What do you think?

1. Should South Korea initiate a full transition from paper to digital textbooks by 2015?
2. Are arguments—such as the one Carr made famous in his Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making Us Stupid—compelling enough to slow down well-intentioned efforts to integrate technologies in education? 
   

Mobiles and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Asia: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks closely at how a handful of programs have employed mobile devices to support teachers and enhance their professional development.

The most significant project described in the paper is Text2Teach (T2T) in the Philippines.  This project, unlike a majority of its peers, has aged well: begun in 2003, it has been implemented in 555 schools in nine provinces, trained 1,500 teachers, and impacted over a half a million 5^th and 6^th grade students.  Currently, the project is entering a third phase and planners are hoping to integrate it into broader and more permanent national education plans.

At first glance, T2T is simple: it relies on mobile phones to bring educational videos into classrooms.  Essentially, teachers download videos aligned with science, mathematics, and English language curriculums using school-purchased mobile phones and then play these videos by attaching the phones to televisions.

While T2T owes its success to many factors—from robust partnerships and community “buy-in” to regular modification—the paper emphasizes the salience of quality that is often overlooked: ease-of-use for teachers.  Too often efforts to integrate mobile technologies in education stall because they make life more difficult for already busy (and sometimes overwhelmed) teachers.  Mobile learning projects tend to reach schools as “yet-another-thing-to-do,” rather than something that will make teachers’ jobs easier.  The approach of T2T is different.  Teachers who participate in the project say that it makes lesson planning less time consuming.  Each video is accompanied by a suggested lesson plan and this, according to the paper, ensures that T2T “gives teachers more time to spend with their families.”

The project—from its inception to its on-the-ground implementation—has sought to make teachers more effective, yes, but also to ensure that they complete less work, not more.  Teachers report liking T2T precisely because it makes an already difficult job a bit less difficult.

What do you think?

1. How can projects best leverage mobile technologies to improve teachers’ day-to-day jobs?
2. What are your ideas for mobile learning projects that might give teachers less to do, instead of more to do?

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Mobile devices and policies

The first paper, Turning On Mobile Learning in Europe: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications, describes a range of mobile learning programs in the European Union and explores how these programs address educational needs in the region. It also surveys national and local policies related to mobile learning and analyzes their impact.

As detailed in the paper, many European countries have adopted policies that restrict the use of mobile technologies in education, particularly at the lower grade levels. In this context, it is meaningful that the few countries which have lent serious government support to mobile learning saw explosions in innovation and levels of use. The paper describes a massive initiative in the United Kingdom (UK) called the Mobile Learning Network (MoLeNET) which spanned three years, involved 7,000 staff and 40,000 learners, and had a budget of 12 million British pounds.

The initiative spawned a panoply of smaller mobile learning projects and experiments, many of which were shown to improve student retention and lower drop-out rates, two goals of the overarching initiative. Although MoLeNET was shelved in 2010, its influence continues to reverberate not only in the UK but across Europe. The paper explains that the Netherlands and Denmark have also invested public money to improve education with mobile technology. Tellingly, both countries are considered to have some of the most advanced and impactful mobile learning projects in Europe.

Yet despite these examples, mobile learning projects are generally perceived as being less reliant on government funding than earlier efforts to integrate technology in education. They are commonly characterized as bottom-up, rather than top-down initiatives. As the UNESCO Working Paper Series makes clear, a large number of projects have grown up in the “peripheries” of education: many initiatives start small and aim to help learners outside the structures of formal education. 

This approach has had advantages: projects tend to be original and diverse, and they are able to respond quickly to the needs and challenges of particular contexts. However, by tracing the impact of major government-supported initiatives, the Turning on Mobile Learning in Europe paper suggests that public money may be crucial to efforts to move mobile learning from the margins of education to the mainstream.

What do you think?

• Are major government investments necessary to make mobile learning work?
• Are mobile learning projects really forged from the bottom-up?
• Can mobile learning initiatives directed from the top-down be successful?
• What are the risks of this approach? What has been your experience?
• Is government support necessary (or has it perhaps been an impediment)?

Mobile devices and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in Europe: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks closely at how a handful of programs have employed mobile devices to support teachers and enhance their professional development.

This paper describes projects that are using mobile technologies for education in productive, yet decidedly “unsexy” ways.  To cite just one example, the Molly system designed by Oxford University seems to do little more than provide students a portal to information about their classes: they can access syllabi, calendars, schedules, and podcasts of lectures from a variety of mobile devices.

Other projects described in the paper are similar.  A project underway at Yorkshire Coast College in the UK allows teachers to set up texts timed to remind students of homework due dates.  Still other projects detail programs that allow teachers and school administrators to send text messages to students’ parents to notify them about student progress and disseminate information about events and school closures.  None of this is blow-your-socks-off exciting.  Indeed many of the initiatives use mobile phones in ways that they have been used for over two decades: to communicate short, simple, and concise bits of information.  Yet (and this is the important part) the programs work. 

They may not be using the GPS feature in the newest smart phone or high-end apps, but they do a job for teachers and schools and, as explained in the paper, more often than not, they do it well.  Parent attendance at back-to-school nights increased between 60% to 80% when schools in Norway decided to send parents text messages reminding them of the event.  This is a type of mobile project that while painfully simple, has helped teachers.

What do you think?

• When we talk about mobile learning we tend to focus on the “bleeding edge” of technology.  We think about how to use the best technology in the flashiest gadgets to do new and amazing things.  This is important surely, but it is hardly a license to ignore the “ordinary-but-still-effective” uses of mobile technologies.  What then are the “un-fancy,” “make-me-yawn,” “commonplace,” and “staggeringly mundane” ways that mobile technology can be used to improve education?  If the projects described in the paper are any indication, these uses are sometimes the most effective.

Forthcoming titles in the series will also be published on the UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning site.

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Mobile devices and policies

The first of the North America papers Turning On Mobile Learning in North America: Illustrative Initiatives and Policy Implications describes a number of mobile learning initiatives in schools and universities, surveys existing policies, and explores the implication for revising or creating national, state, district and institutional policies related to mobile learning.

The paper reveals that of the policies that do exist, many are too broad or restrictive to enable mobile learning. An example is the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which addresses concerns about access to offensive content over the internet on school and library computers. Since 2001, when rules for implementing CIPA were issued, many district administrators have remained confused about its proper implementation.

Liability and concern for student safety have led to extremely restrictive policies prohibiting mobile devices in many US and Canadian districts and schools. For example, almost every school district in the USA has a filtering system, and more than 55% of district policies are more restrictive than the federally mandated CIPA regulations.

For policies at the district and institutional level the paper urges a shift of focus from behaviour that is acceptable – encoded in Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) – to that which is responsible, described in Responsible Use Policies (RUPs). The role of the school, and parents, shifts from policing mobile phone use and online behaviour, to developing responsible learners and children.

What do you think?

• Are most high-level and school policies too restrictive?
• How can we find the balance between being inclusive enough for learners to benefit from online access, and being restrictive enough to protect them?

Mobile devices and teacher development

The second paper Mobile Learning for Teachers in North America: Exploring the Potential of Mobile Technologies to Support Teachers and Improve Practice looks at the relatively nascent area of how mobiles are being used, or could be used, to support teachers and their professional development. Of particular interest is how mobile access increases opportunities for teachers to participate in online communities of practice, which is a proven way to support teachers. Mobiles also provide a way for teachers to enjoy professional development anytime and anywhere.

The paper found that many teachers are eager to engage in mobile learning for professional development because of the flexibility it provides. Without mobile technologies, participation in professional development necessitates attendance at an event or at least access to a computer; with a mobile device, teachers can access online professional development from any location that has wireless connectivity.

Mobile devices enable access to online courses and other types of professional development opportunities – such as communities of practice, social networking sites, and content repositories – at any time, so teachers can structure their professional growth according to their schedules and preferences.

What do you think?

• Professional development requires engagement, focus and usually some face-to-face instruction or discussion time with peers. Can mobiles really be used to support professional development, or do they only trivialise down to bite size chunks what should be a dedicated and time-intensive exercise?

Forthcoming titles in the series will also be published on the UNESCO Working Paper Series on Mobile Learning site.

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(Caveat: Because this article was written for an audience most interested in government-funded primary and secondary education in developing countries, words like “wealthy,” “average,” and “typical” should be read with that context in mind. But, the conclusions are relevant for a broad class of primary and secondary schools in developed countries, as well.)

To back these assertions, I’ll draw on four different lines of evidence.

1. The history of electronic technologies in schools is fraught with failures.
2. Computers are no exception, and rigorous studies show that it is incredibly difficult to have positive educational impact with computers. Technology at best only amplifies the pedagogical capacity of educational systems; it can make good schools better, but it makes bad schools worse.
3. Technology has a huge opportunity cost in the form of more effective non-technology interventions.
4. Many good school systems excel without much technology.

The inescapable conclusion is that significant investments in computers, mobile phones, and other electronic gadgets in education are neither necessary nor warranted for most school systems. In particular, the attempt to use technology to fix underperforming classrooms (or to replace non-existent ones) is futile. And, for all but wealthy, well-run schools, one-to-one computer programs cannot be recommended in good conscience.

All of the evidence stands on its own, but I will tie them together with a single theory that explains why technology is unable to substitute for good teaching: Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years.

While computers appear to engage students (which is exactly their appeal), the engagement swings between uselessly fleeting at best and addictively distractive at worst. No technology today or in the foreseeable future can provide the tailored attention, encouragement, inspiration, or even the occasional scolding for students that dedicated adults can, and thus, attempts to use technology as a stand-in for capable instruction are bound to fail.

With respect to sustaining directed motivation, even the much-maligned rote-focused drill-sergeant disciplinarian is superior to any electronic multimedia carnival. (In an October 2009 ETD article, James BonTempo also highlighted the importance of motivation. But, while BonTempo suggested that we should seek technologies that motivate both teachers and students, I believe today’s technology is not up to the task. [Note: The author retracts this statement and agrees with BonTempo, as his articles actually suggest that even this is not possible if neither teachers nor students are motivated to begin with.])

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The Repetitive Cycle of Technology

For anyone concerned with high-tech in schools, two books are required reading as histories of technology and education. The first is Larry Cuban’s Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920, which overviews the history of films, radio, television, and computers in American education up to the early 1980s. The second is Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. Oppenheimer also focuses primarily on US education, but updates and expands on Cuban’s findings for computers in schools through the early 2000s. Both authors consider the record of technology in schools and find it wanting. They reveal that while technologies can have positive educational impact in restricted instances, successes pale in comparison to failures overall. By not knowing this past history, we seem condemned to repeat it over and over and over.

One point that both authors make is that there is a repetitive cycle of technology in education that goes through hype, investment, poor integration, and lack of educational outcomes. The cycle keeps spinning only because each new technology reinitiates the cycle. In 1922, Thomas Edison claimed that movies would “revolutionize our educational system.” In 1945, William Levenson, a Cleveland radio station director, suggested that portable radios in classrooms should be “integrated into school life” alongside blackboards. In the 1960s, governments under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson invested in classroom TV. In an irrational leap of reasoning that is symptomatic of technology in education, Johnson went from a valid lament, “Unhappily, the world has only a fraction of the teachers it needs,” to a non-solution… to meet the challenge “through educational television.”

The hubris and failures of technology projects are detailed by Cuban and Oppenheimer, but with hindsight available to all of us, we know that none of these technologies has delivered on their promises. If anything, we have become wary of their educational power. For example, on the one hand, television excels as a medium for delivering information. Seduced by this capacity in 1964, Wilbur Schramm, the father of communications studies, asked “What if the full power and vividness of television teaching were to be used to help the schools develop a country’s new educational pattern?” He was thinking, in particular, of mass media’s potential to transform education for developing countries.

The transformation never occurred, probably because as motivational as television can be, it still falls far short of generating the motivation required for education. For every person who falls prey to Madison Avenue’s latest advertisement, hundreds of others just ignore it or turn the channel – if that’s true of the most persuasive television commercials, why should we expect television to be able to regularly sustain the motivation (and not just the attention) of easily distracted children to do the cognitive push-ups that education demands?

In the meanwhile, many of us have come to sense television’s shortcomings. Educated parents restrict their children’s time in front of the TV, and many households ban television altogether – at its best, television is considered a cheap babysitter to hold a child’s attention when adult attention is scarce; at its worst, television caters to our weakest impulses, glamorizes materialism, desensitizes us to violence, and lulls us into a zombie-like trance. As a result, most people today would laugh at a school system based on watching broadcast television programs, however educational. Yet, that was exactly the idea behind an experiment in American Samoa in the mid-1960s, where the “education” of 80% of students was based on watching educational telecasts. The program was dismantled several years later as teachers, administrators, parents, and even students expressed dissatisfaction with the students’ academic performance.

Computers: The Latest Technology Cycle

Today, computers and mobile phones are the shiny new technologies, and they offer an even more seductive promise. One argument goes that it was the passiveness of older technologies that was the problem, so today’s interactive digital technologies are the perfect solution.

Patrick Suppes, a pioneer in computer-aided learning suggested in 1966 that computers can “adapt mechanical teaching routines to the needs and the past performance of the individual student.” But, neither interactivity nor adaptive capacity are sufficient – the key challenge in education remains the long-term, directed motivation of the student – something which no technology today can deliver on its own, but which good teachers deliver regularly.

Of course, computers are different from radio or television, so if they are able to prove themselves in education, we should use them. Alas, the research on computers in education consistently arrives at a single conclusion, which at its most optimistic could be stated as follows:

Computers can help good schools do some things better, but they do nothing positive for underperforming schools. This means, very specifically, that efforts to fix broken schools with technology or to substitute for missing teachers with technology invariably fail.

Mark Warschauer, the foremost authority on technology in American classrooms, has spent countless hours studying computer projects. He writes of underperforming US schools, “placing computers and Internet connections in low-[income] schools, in and of itself, does little to address the serious educational challenges faced by these schools. To the extent that an emphasis on provision of equipment draws attention away from other important resources and interventions, such an emphasis can in fact be counterproductive.”

And, as for technology’s capacity to even the playing field of education, he says, “the introduction of information and communication technologies in [...] schools serves to amplify existing forms of inequality.” This is a specific instance of a broader thesis I argued recently, of technology’s role as an amplifier of existing institutional forces.

In the international arena, and using experimental methodology, economists confirm these findings. In rigorous large-scale studies in both India and Colombia, Leigh Linden at Columbia University found that while PCs can supplement good instruction, PCs are a poor substitute for time with teachers. Furthermore, large-scale computer roll-outs in these countries showed no significant educational outcomes compared against students who didn’t receive computers. He suggests that one problem is that teachers don’t successfully incorporate computers into their curricula. (Nor are teachers to blame – technology programs routinely fail to account for teachers’ needs.)

Ana Santiago and her colleagues at the Inter-American Development Bank find a similar story for a Peruvian One Laptop Per Child program. Three months after a large-scale roll-out, and despite teacher, parent, and student excitement around the technology, students gained nothing in academic achievement. Santiago also notes that even during the initial three months, the novelty factor of the laptops appears to wane, with each week seeing less use of the devices.

None of these results run counter to the few research studies that show how computers can benefit education in limited ways. But, all positive instances of computers in schools are built on strong institutional foundations that are exactly what is deficient where technology is expected to save the day. Without the institutional base, technology’s impact is zero or negative. This should immediately cause anyone hoping to fix an underperforming classroom to cross off technology as any part of the “solution.”

As Wayan Vota notes in a May 2009 ETD article, unless the institutional foundation of teachers and administrators is built and funded properly, technology is pointless. With the lens of motivation, it’s easy to understand why. Bad schools are unable to direct student motivation towards educational goals. Since technology itself requires proper motivation for its benefits to accrue, any school that can’t direct student motivation capably will fail to do so with technology, as well (or worse, allow technology to distract students).

The Cost Implications of Technology Investments

Educators often parrot that “technology is not a panacea,” by which they mean either:

1. that technology doesn’t cure all educational ills or
2. that technology alone is insufficient as a solution.

Though these acknowledgments are far better than a blind faith in technology, they still belie hidden, unjustified expectations of technology. The first interpretation suggests that technology cures some maladies in education. But, this is exactly what doesn’t happen – the prevailing evidence shows that technology does not cure unhealthy educational systems; at best, it only augments healthy ones. The second belief is more dangerous because it is factually correct but misleading for policy. It implies that technology can be a good solution as long as other investments are also made; what it leaves out is that if alternate investments of the same magnitude were made to support education directly (and not indirectly to support technology), the educational results could be far greater.

The issues here are cost-effectiveness and opportunity cost. Of course, if the net impact of a technology solution is zero or negative, it’s pointless to implement it however low the cost. But because many educators are tempted by technology’s supposed ability to lower costs, it’s worthwhile to consider actual costs of well-implemented technology.

The most common error in computing costs is to assume that hardware and software are the dominant costs of technology. In reality, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for information technology is comfortably several times the cost of hardware, with a range of 5-10x being a good rule of thumb. Beyond hardware, necessary costs include costs of distribution, maintenance, power infrastructure, teacher training, repair and replacement, and curriculum integration. (In a May 2010 ETD article, Sam Carlson, who unlike me believes in technology for education, nevertheless highlights just how much of an investment teacher training requires.) Additional costs often include connectivity, software development, content production, and end-of-life costs. One analysis by Vital Wave Consulting shows the TCO of an ultra-low-cost PC to be in the $2000-3000 range for developing country schools. A similar analysis by OLPCnews suggests $972 over five years for OLPC (the very optimistic advertised lifespan of an OLPC laptop), and $753 for an OLPC implementation in Nepal (cf., OLPC’s current cost of $188). These figures are per unit, so a one-to-one laptop program would incur these costs per-student.

Though figures like the ones above show otherwise, technology providers eagerly feed technology-cost misconceptions. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC, has been recently touting a $1-per-week total cost for his laptops. But, a dollar a week doesn’t even pay for the device over three years, which many observers agree is a reasonable estimate of its lifetime. It appears his accounting skills are not on par with his salesmanship. Even at $1 a week, though, the price is out of proportion for many developing-country budgets. The government of India, for example, spends no more than $200 per student per year for primary and secondary school, and most of that expense goes to teacher salaries. And, while literacy rates in India are rising, they remain around 60%. Many other developing countries spend even less, with worse results. Does it make sense to take a quarter or more of a struggling school system’s budget and allocate it to technologies that haven’t even proven themselves?

With respect to costs, it’s worth keeping in mind the opportunity cost of technology. For example, research by economists Ted Miguel, Michael Kremer, and others has conclusively shown the value of 50-cent deworming pills for education. The pills free children of parasites and eliminate one of the dominant reasons for student absenteeism in many developing countries. At a cost of only $3.50 per student (over several years), countries with high incidences of parasites can effectively add the equivalent of an extra year of schooling. Similar results can be had from provision of midday meals, iron supplements, and teaching assistants, and all at a much lower cost than that of computing technology.

As for better teaching, educator Doug Lemov enumerates a series of instructional techniques in his book Teach Like a Champion. The techniques were compiled by Lemov after studying hours upon hours of video of teachers who systematically outperform their peers. Most of the techniques are conceptually simple, but have a dramatic impact on the teacher’s effect in the classroom. For example, when asking a question, Lemov’s recommendation to teachers is to pose the question to the class at large, allow some time to think, and then to randomly call on a student. The technique motivates all of the students to think, since any of them could be put on the spot. In contrast, calling only on students who raise their hand or calling on a student before asking the question allows other students to ignore the question entirely. Such techniques require no additional technology and could easily be incorporated into existing teacher training programs with marginal additional cost.

Speaking of teachers, it should be emphasized over and over that they are the primary agents of good formal education. Without good teachers, education fails; with good teachers, education succeeds. Technology is largely irrelevant to this equation. As evidence, we only need to consider world-class school systems that consistently churn out high-performing students. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the OECD’s latest instrument to measure student performance across countries. 15-year olds are assessed on their reading, math, and science abilities, and the test attempts to measure not just rote learning but some degree of deeper comprehension and critical thinking ability.

Finland is among the countries that routinely perform at the top on PISA, and it is renowned for its low-tech, high-touch approach that emphasizes educational basics and relatively few hours of school or homework. There are also school systems like that of South Korea that use a lot of technology and also do well, but analysis of PISA results fails to show any meaningful correlation between technology use and student performance. (Tim Kelly attempts to use Korea as an argument for technology in schools in a May 2009 ETD article, but that seems an unfortunate confusion of correlation with cause.) Rather, PISA summary documents highlight that the best-performing nations have a political commitment to universal education, high standards for achievement, and quality teachers and principals. Notably absent is any mention of technology as a critical element of a good school system, even though the PISA survey includes data on computers and other educational resources.

None of this should be a surprise. The world had amply demonstrated well before the invention of the personal computer that good education is possible without information technology. Most people born in the 1975 or earlier had no computing in their classrooms, and it would be hard to argue that they suffered as a result; many now lead the world in their respective spheres. Are we to believe that today’s Nobel Laureates, heads of state, and business elite received an inferior education because they were without information technology when growing up?

When Technology in Education is Justified

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should clarify that some uses of computers in education can be justified, although with the ever-applicable caution that while technology can augment good schools, it hurts poor schools.

• First, in those cases where directed student motivation is assured, technology may lessen the burden of teaching. Some cases of tertiary or adult education may fall into this category.
• Second, targeted use of computers in schools, for example, as an aid to teach computer literacy, computer programming, or video editing, etc., are important as long as those uses are incorporated only as a small part of a well-rounded curriculum.
• Third, technology can help with the administration of schools – record keeping, monitoring, evaluation, etc. – as long as the school system is able to fully support the technology.
• Fourth, in richer environments, where the cost of educated labor is relatively high, careful use of well-designed software may have value in fundamental education, particularly for remedial or drilling purposes. Solutions offered by, for example, Carnegie Learning fall into this category, although it should be noted again that effective use of these kinds of technologies must occur in the context of an otherwise well-run school system.
• Fifth, again in rich environments, where the basics of education are assured, where teachers are facile with technology, and where budgets are unconstrained, widespread use of technology, even in a one-to-one format, might benefit students. Warschauer does find that certain uses of computers enhance computer literacy and writing skills, but these outcomes are limited to well-run, well-funded schools; they are notably absent in underperforming schools, even in the United States.

I underscore that the last two cases are specific to very wealthy, well-run school systems (as a benchmark, the value is unlikely to emerge for school systems spending less than US$8,000 per student per year), and that none of the positive instances above pertain to underperforming schools or to broad dissemination of technology to students.

9 Myths of Technology in Education

I’ve so far argued that technology in education has a poor historical record; that computers in schools typically fail to have positive impact (with the rare exceptions occurring only in the context of competent, well-funded schools); that information technology is almost never worth its opportunity cost; and that quality education doesn’t require information technology.

Though I’ve only presented a smattering of the evidence above, the conclusions are clear. Put together, the strong recommendation is that underperforming school systems should keep their focus on improving teaching and administration, and that even good schools may want to consider more cost-effective alternatives to technology when making supplementary educational investments.

Unfortunately, all of this evidence doesn’t provide the gut intuition required to reject seductive rhetoric. So, I end with a point-by-point refutation of frequently heard sound bites extolling technology in schools.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 1: 21st-century skills require 21st-century technologies. The modern world uses e-mail, PowerPoint, and filing systems. Computers teach you those skills.

Reality: This is bad reasoning of the kind that, hopefully, genuine 21st-century skills wouldn’t allow. What exactly are the “21st-century skills” that successful citizens need? Some people define them as the 3 Rs and the 4 Cs (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity). But, aren’t these the same as 20th-century skills? The skills haven’t changed; only the proportion of people requiring them.

Of course, the tools that people use at work and at home have changed, but the use of these tools is easy to learn compared with the deep ability to think and work effectively. As far as I know, not in the 500+ years since Gutenberg invented the printing press did anyone suggest that every school, to say nothing of every student, needed a mini-printing press to learn printing skills. (From the 1960s through the 1990s, schools incorporated typing half-heartedly into their curricula, but even that was relegated to a one-year elective.)

Today, any idiot can learn to use Twitter. But, forming and articulating a cogent argument in any medium – SMS text messages, PowerPoint, e-mails, or otherwise – requires good thinking, writing, and communication skills. Those skills might be channeled through technology, but they hardly require technology to acquire. Similarly, any fool can learn to “use” a computer. But, the underlying math required to do financial accounting or engineering requires solid mathematical preparation that requires working through problem sets – Einstein didn’t grow up with computers, but modern physics would be delighted to have more Einsteins.

We need to distinguish between the need to learn the tools of modern life (easy to pick up, and getting easier by the day, thanks to better technology!) and learning the critical thinking skills that make a person productive in an information economy (hard to learn, and not really any easier with information technology). Based on my own experience trying to teach undereducated English-speaking adults how to use Google, I’m quite certain that what limited their ability to capitalize on the Internet was reading comprehension and critical thinking skills, not computer literacy skills.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 2: Technology X allows interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, [insert educational flavor of the month (EFotM) here] learning.

Reality: All of that may be true, but without directed motivation of the student, no sustained learning actually happens, with or without technology. Good teachers are interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, and capable of EFotM, but on top of all of that, they are also capable of something that no technology for the foreseeable future can do: generate ongoing motivation in students. If education only required an interactive, adaptive, constructivist, student-centered, EFotM medium, then the combination of an Erector Set and an encyclopedia ought to be sufficient for education.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 3: But, wait, it’s still easier for teachers to arouse interest with technology X than with textbooks.

Reality: Maybe a little bit at first. But, the novelty factor of most technologies quickly wears off, and those which don’t tend to turn viewers into zombies rather than engaged learners.
In addition, this comment is a real insult to good teachers everywhere. Good teachers are exactly those who can engage students creatively, regardless of the aids available to them. Technology might amplify the impact of good teachers, but it won’t fix bad teaching.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 4: Teachers are expensive. It’s exactly because teachers are absent or poorly trained that low-cost technology is a good alternative.

Reality: Low-cost technologies are not so low cost when total cost of ownership is taken into account and put in the economic context of low-income schools. Furthermore, technology cannot fix broken educational systems. If teachers are absent or poorly trained, the only proper solution is to invest in better teachers, better training, and better administration… even if it’s expensive. As they say in KIPP schools, there are no shortcuts!

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 5: Textbooks are expensive. For the price of a couple of textbooks, you might as well get a low-cost PC.

Reality: Anyone who says this is using American predatory pricing of textbooks as a guide. In India, a typical text book costs 7.5-25 rupees, or 15-50 cents. For $1-3, you could buy all the textbooks a child will need for the year. It can be more expensive in other countries where printing costs are not as low as in India, but there is no reason why a textbook needs to cost more than a few dollars. Please, let’s stop propagating this myth.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 6: We have been trying to improve education for many years without results. Thus, it’s time for something new: Technology X!

Reality: Technology has never fixed a broken educational system, so if anything is getting old, it’s the attempt to patch bad education with technology. If other efforts aren’t working, maybe the school system needs to be thrown out and rebuilt from the ground up, as Qatar recently did with its education ministry. There are plenty of new things to try that don’t require new technology. (Though, novelty for its own sake doesn’t make sense, either. There are plenty of old examples of good education, too.) It should be cautioned though, that efforts to improve teachers and administrators is itself a multi-year, if not multi-decade effort. Again, there are no shortcuts!

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 7: Study Z shows that technology is helpful.

Reality: Technology can be beneficial. But, it’s always worth looking at two things more carefully: First, how good was the educational environment in Study Z without the technology? Invariably, it will have been good; often, very good. This means it was secret-sauce + technology that caused the benefit, not technology by itself. Second, what was the total cost of the technology (including training, maintenance, curriculum, etc.)? Inevitably, it will be a factor of 5-10 more than the cost of hardware. Both issues suggest that for ailing schools, technology is not the answer.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 8: Computer games, simulations, and other state-of-the-art technologies are really changing things.

Reality: This article was written with current and near-term technologies in mind. It’s possible that future technologies will not fit the theses. Certainly, a humanoid robot indistinguishable from a good teacher could work wonders! More realistically, it’s likely that sophisticated software could become richer in the range of things they can teach and the degree to which they sustain motivation. But, any such advances should pass lab trials, pilot runs, controlled experiments, and cost-effectiveness analyses before anyone starts advocating them for widespread use. So far, no technology has met this bar – computers running existing software certainly haven’t.

Pro-Technology Rhetoric 9: Technology is transformative, revolutionary, and otherwise stupendous! Therefore, it must be good for education.

Reality: This myth is pervasive because it is so easy to believe and because we want to believe it so badly. After all, with computers, we can publish our own newsletters, buy gifts in our pajamas, and find the best Italian restaurant in town. And, it would be nice if all we had to do was to sit every child in front of a computer for 6 hours a day to turn them into educated, upright citizens.

But, why do we believe this? It makes no sense. We don’t expect that playing football video games makes a child a great athlete. We don’t believe that watching YouTube will turn our kids into Steven Spielbergs. We don’t think that socializing on Facebook will turn people into electable government officials. And, if none of those things work, then why do we expect it of writing, history, science, or mathematics?

A good education is second only to parenting in the importance it has in raising capable, upright members of society. We would never think to replace parenting with technology (and when we do at times, we do it with shame, and only because we’re too damn tired to parent, not because gadgets are superior to us). Why do we keep trying to replace teachers?

Honesty in Technology Failure

As if to underscore these points, last month, the Azim Premji Foundation, a well-funded non-profit in India and arguably the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to working with computers in education, made a startling – and courageous – confession. They had worked for over half a decade with tens of thousands of schools, providing computers, training teachers, designing whole software libraries in 18 languages, and integrating material with state curricula. Aspects of their programs and their software could be criticized, but their methods were as thoughtful and as heartfelt as any technology-for-education effort I have witnessed, with frequent research and evaluations to confirm outcomes. Their conclusion?

“[W]hen we took stock at a fundamental level, we realized that [our whole effort in computer-aided learning] was at best a qualified failure… there was practically no impact in a sustained, systemic manner on learning.”

Anurag Behar, co-CEO of the foundation cited a number of issues (the full article is worth reading), but chief among the problems were that any deficiencies in administration and teaching were not overcome by technology. He notes: “At its best, the fascination with ICT as a solution distracts from the real issues. At its worst, ICT is suggested as substitute to solving the real problems, for example, ‘why bother about teachers, when ICT can be the teacher’. This perspective is lethal.” He concludes with a paraphrasing of what he learned from education leaders in Finland and Canada (two countries who consistently do well on PISA): “not a dollar will we invest in ICT, every dollar that we have will go to teacher and school leader capacity building.”

In short, there are no technology shortcuts to good education.

For further reading along these lines, see 10 Worst Practices in ICT for Education, by Michael Trucano, as well as education-focused posts by the ICT4D Jester.

References

Barrera-Osorio, Felipe and Linden, Leigh L. (2009) The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education : Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1344721, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Behar, Anurag. (2010) Limits of ICT in Education. LiveMint.com. Dec. 16, 2010. http://www.livemint.com/2010/12/15201000/Limits-of-ICT-in-education.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Camfield, Jon. (2006) What is the real cost of OLPC? http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/price/the_real_cost_of_the.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Camfield, Jon. (2010) Total cost of XO ownership for OLE Nepal. http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/price/total_cost_of_xo_ownership_for.html, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Cuban, Larry. (1986) Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. Teachers College Press.

Lemov, Doug. (2010) Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. Jossey-Bass.

Linden, Leigh L. (2008) Complement or Substitute? The Effect of Technology on Student Achievement in India. Jameel Poverty Action Lab Working Paper. http://www.columbia.edu/~ll2240/Gyan_Shala_CAL_2008-05-22.pdf, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

OECD (2010), PISA 2009 Results: What Makes a School Successful? — Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV). http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264091559-en, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Oppenheimer, Todd. (2003) The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology. Random House.

Santiago, A., Severin, E., Cristia, J., Ibarrarán, P., Thompson, J., & Cueto, S. (2010). Evaluacíon experimental del programa “Una Laptop por Niño” en Perú. Washington, DC: Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. http://www.iadb.org/document.cfm?id=35370099

Suppes, Patrick. (1966) The Uses of Computers in Education. Scientific American, 215(3):207-220.

Toyama, Kentaro. (2010) Can Technology End Poverty? Boston Review, 35(6):12-18,28-29. http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/ndf_technology.php, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

Vital Wave Consulting. (2008) Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials. http://www.vitalwaveconsulting.com/insights/articles/affordable-computing.htm, retrieved Dec. 28, 2010.

Warschauer, Mark, Michele Knobel, and LeeAnn Stone. (2004) Technology and equity in schooling: Deconstructing the digital divide. Educational Policy, 18(4):562-588. http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/warschauer_m/docs/tes.pdf, retrieved Jan. 4, 2011.

Warschauer, Mark. (2006) Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom. Teachers College Press.

This is the opening remarks and initial response of Atanu Dey, a noted speaker on ICT in education and an economist at Netcore Solutions in Mumbai, India to the question: Are most investments in technology for schools wasted?

Atanu Day at ETD Live Debate

Atanu Dey: (Listen to the podcast)

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, great to have you here. Let me start off by quoting Shakespeare, about my favorite quotes from Henry the IV in which Glendower is trying to impress the prince by making the statement “I can call the spirits from the vastly deeps” to which Hotspur says “ why so can I and so can any man but will they come when you do call them”.

So in that same spirit I would like to say that yes you can make a lot of investment in technology. The question would be, but will it be of any use? My argument today with my colleagues over here on the right side that most investments in technology for education are wasted and the reason is fairly straight forward.

So I will start off by arguing that what is technology and what is it supposed to do and what does investment in technology translates into and what are the problems that education has in specifically in a country like India. Let’s start off by saying how do we understand technology to be. So technology has always been present in education. Since the printing press, the printed book is a technology. It is a communication technology. When we say ICT I suppose we mean high technology, which is computers and Internet and all the new fangled worldwide web. So there is some space for technology.

The problem is how it is being used – that is the fundamental problem.

About technology there are two very salient facts that we need to remember. Technology is something that enters what we call the production function, economists call it a production function or whatever we are trying to do, multiplicatively. It doesn’t enter any function additively. So you had nothing to begin with if you impose technology on it. If your production was not very good to begin with technology just amplifies that not very good part. So technology amplifies things.

The other part of technology is especially high technology requires a deep back end. It requires an ecosystem to support the use of that technology. If you don’t have that ecosystem support then the investment in that technology is wasted. So I would argue that in the case of India specifically that ecosystem doesn’t exist and because of which the investment made into technology is wasted.

So you can tell just so many stories and anecdotes. So let me just take your time and give one anecdote that I am personally acquainted with. There was this school in rural India where the government had spent several million rupees in bringing computers or PCs to the school. Two months into the thing they had not even unwrapped. They were still in the boxes. A year later they were taken out of the boxes but nobody was there to be able to fix it up so that it could have been worked and finally it was fixed up so that it could now work and the power was not available most of the time. Therefore after two or three years, the PCs were just boxes that had never been used and all that investments was wasted.

The problem with investment in technology for schools or education in India is that this investment is probably made with public money and as Friedman would have reminded us there are three ways in which money could be spent. You can spend your own money on yourself and in that case you are very careful about wasting or you could spend somebody else’s money on yourself and in that case you are not that concerned about the expenditure part of it but you are very concerned about what benefits you are going to get of it but in the case of the government, the government takes from Peter to pay Paul so the government is not interested in seeing the expenditure side of it nor what the benefits are. It is just interested in entering a lot of money to very sticky fingers.

In this case I find that much of the investment that is made by government in the education sector in technology gets wasted because the people who are in charge of making the decisions how to use it and so on, they are not really concerned. It is not their money. It is somebody else’s money and there is very little accountability.

Then finally we have to ask ourselves what exactly is wrong with our education system? Is it something that requires a technical solution? In many cases, you do require technology but it is by no means a given that every problem that we have in education admits to have technological solution. In many case what happens is that it is a lazy person’s way of doing things. They just say let’s bring in computers because in those places they use computers so maybe if we use computers we will get the same results.

They sometimes bring in a solution and then they start looking for a problem to solve it with. The old adage about somebody with a hammer finds every problem has a name holds very true in this case. People who have been brought up with technology they think that every problem could be solved through technology.

So with those remarks I think I am going to conclude my time. Thank you very much and I am feeling sorry for my opponents on the other side because they have a very hard road to follow. Thank you.

Tim Kelly:

Atanu, I think I will begin with you. You gave us a just story about computers that were in boxes. They weren’t unwrapped and a year later there was no power. It was a story of failed investment. Now actually that is about just stories and not a basis for your evaluation. How do you think we should be doing evaluation of ICT investment and how can we do it that we actually get to the other side of this debate that the investment is worthwhile?

Atanu Dey:

Yeah Tim that is a very good point that you raised and it was a just told story because I wanted to point that this is an example of what happens when ecosystem is not available for the use of a technology, which is not appropriate at a specific call.

I think to most of the other side where we say that yes the investment being made in technology in education is not being wasted is well your money that is on the table. It is not somebody else’s money. It is because the government is spending the money that is creating a problem. If you go to a private sector school or a school where the people ask questions about what were the returns on investment in this. That is how you are going to get on the other side.

I think what Ashish had started out by saying that ICT is great for this and ICT is great for that but no one questions that at all. It is completely given and as Sam said on our side, the proposition is in again in that again ICT can be useful but problem is it now being wasted.

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I thought I’d jump on the new near “top trends” bandwagon and provide some observations of my own for information technology for development (ICT4D).

Netbook fever and 1:1 computing in education begin to fade into the background

Ever since Nicholas Negroponte launched the One Laptop per Child project and Intel followed with the Classmate PC, the buzz has been about netbooks for classrooms, or 1:1 computing (one computer for each student).

The reality is that the majority of netbooks sold are not sold to schools, but to middle class consumers who are looking for a smaller notebook form-factor. In my 2009 travels, ministries of education in Latin America seemed to be the most notebook centric. Peru had purchased 150,000 XO laptops. Chile wouldn’t even consider anything that wasn’t mobile. As governments’ emerge from budget lockdown, I predict that they will look for more affordable and realistic options, such as PC labs and desktop computing.

Alternative computing models “cross the chasm.”

A desktop PC or notebook computer has typically been the primary way people in the developing world get exposed to computers and the Internet. That is changing rapidly with the introduction of solutions that significantly lower acquisition and maintenance costs and provide increased energy efficiency over a standard PC or notebook. For example, the company I currently work for, NComputing, sells a product that allows up to 30 users to share one, inexpensive desktop PC by hooking up additional monitors, keyboards, and mice to small access devices and costs about 75% less than a PC and uses 90% less energy. In 2009, NComputing reached 15% of the US market desktop computers in K-12 education.

Microsoft has also embraced “shared computing” for education, announcing a new product called Windows Multipoint Server that will be available later this year. Many developing countries, such as India, Brazil, Pakistan and others, now allow these type of solutions to be bid in addition to standard PCs and notebooks. Just as shared access will prevail over 1:1 computing, virtual desktops will become an increasingly popular option given the tremendous cost savings over traditional desktops.

Mobile phones and Computers

The final trend to watch is whether one form factor – the mobile phone or the computer – will win out over the other in ICT4D. With smart phones providing most of the capabilities of a computer, some argue this will be the ICT device that prevails. But is it really a zero-sum game? My opinion is that the computer and the mobile phone will coexist for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes you just need a full-size keyboard and monitor for an application. And sometimes you just have to be truly mobile (and by mobile I mean being able to transact on the move vs. sitting somewhere with a laptop). At Intel we often talked about “three screens” … the small screen (handheld), the bigger screen (computer), and the biggest screen (TV).

But all of these trends should lead to increased development through access to innovative ICT solutions and services that could be created and driven by social enterprises. I’d love to see a special report from BusinessWeek and The Economist on the convergence of these trends and its impact, but if not, we can always blog about it.

It seems that it does not matter so much in what you excel, only that you excel. Not coincidentally, this was also the main driving force behind the Chinese imperial examinations in the previous post.

In academic circles, there is a lot more interest in really measuring performance. But in these studies, very specific questions are asked in relation to bounded problems. Nothing like, “Are computers useful?”, because such a question is unanswerable in principle. There are well researched evaluation methods, see the companion post by Mary Hooker. A lot has been learned how children respond to formal education, and how they will learn (better). So the question is, why are these methods not used?

To get a glimpse of an answer, it is illuminating to listen (literally) to David Hestenes who has done ground braking research on the understanding of basic physics in students. His talk “Naïve beliefs about physics and education” is available on-line as a presentation and audio talk.

Simplified to the bare basics, almost everyone seems to believe that education is about the transmission of a substance, called knowledge, to the memories of the students. The schools function as a retail outlet of knowledge. Evaluation of education centres around determining how much of this substance ends up inside the heads of the students. Research has shown that students can indeed reproduce a lot of the factoids sprinkled in the teaching and textbooks when tested. However, when tested in ways that require real understanding of the basic concepts, a majority of students fail completely (see examples in the slides).

His research brought David Hestenes to the conclusion that all teaching methods that are based on “transmitting knowledge” instead of “recreating knowledge” (aka Constructivism) fail to change the naive preconceptions of students.

Summarizing the above in combination with the previous post, there is little hope that ICT4E assessment as it is organized today will uncover anything that will actually influence educational practices. History is plainly against us. A full blown assessment about “Is [fill in ICT4E solution] a cost-effective improvement” will take years to complete, cost serious amounts of money, and will be irrelevant when published. The worst effect will be the delay which will deprive yet again several cohorts of school children in poor countries of adequate education.

I think we must take a common sense approach instead. While waiting for the dissemination of the results of scientific research into the general population we should start with trying to find common ground with teachers, politicians, and parents. That is, seek for approaches that will allow all involved to reach a consensus on that will benefit children now.

Computers alone have benefits

Computers are useful in disseminating information, eg, electronic books, libraries, wikipedia, and as communication devices, eg, email, IM, video. They are great for writing and calculations and can greatly improve collaborative efforts. They are also great at stimulating children to read and write, eg, email, stories, their own blog, to explore their society and the world, and to get exposed and experienced in new languages. And they require and exercise skills that will be valuable in the workplace later.

There might be problems in languages with very little digital content for children. However, experience taught us that the existence of a large “market” of on-line computers is quickly followed by content. Even if the content has to be free (as on the Internet).

Computers in education have more benefits

One really unique benefit of computers is that it is possible to set up applications that allow students to practice skills that could before only be practiced in the presence of a teacher. Teachers can then spend more time on children who need personal attention.

This has been used in language learning for decades. Speaking practice, and reading and writing assignments, have been automated before. Students listen to recordings and record their own speech. Just listening to recordings of your own voice helps you correcting mistakes. There are currently even (limited) applications where a computer application can actually help students correct their writing and pronunciation.

As an example, I will plug here a Free Software (GPL) project to learn Mandarin tone distinction in which I participated: SpeakGoodChinese.

Enough with Assessments – Implement Already

I conclude that schools that lack resources like books and libraries, and over all, the required number of qualified teachers, will greatly benefit from implementing sensible ICT solutions that substitute for these shortages and improve teachers’ effectiveness.

All parties involved seem to agree that ICT solutions could ameliorate a least some of the problems in resource poor schools. But this approach also implies that ICT solutions should not be restricted to the classroom. Practice, studying, and reading should be done at home, collaboration and communication is done everywhere. What use is it to have school books and email on a computer when the student has no access to the computer?

There is obviously one caveat: ICT can only be useful if the (real) total cost of ownership can be made bearable.

Also, having done volunteer work in rural villages in Eastern Africa, I believe that the most basic technologies can play a particularly important role in reducing poverty, given the lack of resources and under-developed infrastructure in most of the Southern Hemisphere. Indeed, I’ve seen how a technology as simple as a bicycle can make a significant difference in communication among rural villages, so the increased use of mobile phones is a major advance. Also, there have been times when

I’ve argued against the extensive use of computers in developing countries, at least if not accompanied by other reforms. But for the purpose of argument, I will take the position here that computers have a unique and very powerful role to play in supporting education and development, relative to simpler technologies, such as mobile phones.

To start, I will admit that mobile phones are a very attractive technology in developing countries. They are very inexpensive, relative to other technologies. Handsets can be purchased not much more than $10. This cost can be further ameliorated by distributing a single handset over a number of people through phone sharing or renting. It has an added advantage that communication is in verbal form, an important consideration in countries with a high rate of illiteracy, and in the local language, again another important consideration given that there is very little content on the internet in the numerous tribal languages that are the mother tongue in many developing countries.

However, the mobile phones that the ITU is talking about are not iPhones or other smart phones that provide the user with access to the internet or sophisticate software applications. The features available on the large majority of mobile phones in the developing world are extremely limited. I think it would be fair to say that the capability for the most-sophisticated phones commonly available provide capabilities no more powerful than point-to-point messaging and SMS broadcasting. But the impact of information provided in this form is constrained by low literacy rates. This makes community radio an attractive low-end alternative, one that I’ve argued for on other occasions.

This brings me to my main point. Computers have a powerful set of capabilities, relative to mobile phones, at least those less than smart phones. They have a multimedia capabilities that allow not only for the presentation of verbal information but information in a variety of visual forms, such as charts, graphs, dynamic graphics and animations, video, and 3D virtual spaces. With the appropriate programming, they provide for interactivity that allows students to respond to questions, an important consideration when it comes to learning.

With the application of artificial intelligence and speech recognition students can even respond in aural form and have those responses evaluated, accommodating issues of illiteracy. Software tools can be used by students to create oral, graphic and written products. And access to the internet connects students to a variety of digital and human resources that can facilitate teaching and learning.

With these capabilities, students can:

• work on complex projects in science, math, and social studies
• engage in solving real world problems
• access libraries and museums across the world
• collaborate with teachers and students in other countries
• collect and analyze data
• create multimedia productions
• develop community websites
• connect with remote experts
• visualize abstract concepts in science and math

These learning applications are not adequately supported by mobile phones. Granted not all computers, particularly the low-end computers most likely available in developing countries, have access to all of the power described above. But most computers, even low-end ones, have much of this power and if Moore’s Law holds, more and more of them will in the future. Of course, Moore’s Law applies to other digital technologies, as well; so even cheap mobile phones will come to have these capabilities and it will be hard to differentiate among these technologies.

But however powerful and inexpensive these technologies become, it is important to keep in mind that education will not improve merely by injecting computers or mobile phones into classrooms. Significant change will occur only if the use of these technologies is accompanied by reforms in pedagogy, curriculum, teacher training, assessment, and the policies that govern them.

With the appropriate changes, the power of computers can be applied to help students move from the rote learning that characterizes much of education in the developing world to complex problem solving and the creation of innovative products and artifacts that prepares them for life in the 21st century.