Blind? Deaf? Impaired? Then in most of the developing world, this means you’re also dumb. You’re excluded from formal educational opportunities at an early age and possibly even shunned by your family and community. But this doesn’t have to be the fate of physically or mentally challenged children anywhere.

Assistive information and communication technologies can allow those with disabilities to learn and grow, indistinguishable from any other child. But we have to ask three questions about them in our context: 1. Which assistive technologies are appropriate for the developing world? 2. How might they be implemented in resource constrained environments? 3. And what would their impact be on the children that use them?

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The list is an aggregation of projections from leading forecasters such as the Horizon Report, personal observations and a good dose of guesswork. The Top 10 Global Trends in ICT and Education are:

1. Mobile Learning: New advances in hardware and software are making mobile “smart phones” indispensable tools. Just as cell phones have leapfrogged fixed line technology in the telecommunications industry, it is likely that mobile devices with internet access and computing capabilities will soon overtake personal computers as the information appliance of choice in the classroom.

Read more in the post….

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The year started with the Mother of All Disruptions as the world teetered toward economic and financial collapse. The technology industry withered in general due to lack of demand. Intel, for example, reported its first loss in 21 years in the second quarter. As we head in to 2010, things seem to be on the mend, albeit slowly.

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).

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For the January Educational Technology Debate, we’ll take a fresh look at the low-cost information and communication technology trends emerging in 2010 and discuss what they mean for educational systems in the developing world.

Will there be a continued focus on flashy but educationally suspect hardware? Could this the year Linux, lead by Ubuntu, breaks out? Can Windows 7 bring back the luster to Microsoft? Or will multi-platform Android make both moot? Enough about technology – where is the educational breakthroughs? Will Constructionism flourish in 1:1 computer deployments? Can Open Content gain traction in curriculum development? Might teacher training actually get more than lip-service?

Finally, will we really stop wasting children on ICT4E assessments?

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Ever since Dr. Negroponte presented his vision of providing children with a laptop computer, there has been no shortage of praise and criticism. I will not comment on the validity of the praise or the criticisms that have been brought forth, but when asked to present my insights on what I believed to be an important impact that the OLPC approach has had on education, I welcomed the invitation.

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.

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I was in the Peace Corps in Cape Verde as an ICT volunteer from 2006 to 2008, and while I was there, the One Laptop Per Child project came on my radar and I became pretty enamored of the prospect of bringing some XOs to the country, or at least raising awareness of the idea within the government.

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.

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For the last six years, I have been investigating laptop programs throughout the U.S., including, most recently, programs using low-cost netbook computers and open source software.

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.

The OLPC model is radically different and 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.

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Computer malware is a big problem to society. When this is discussed in relation to children and the Internet (or politicians or parents), the advice has always been: updates, AV software, and firewalls for the computer and rules, restrictions, and filters for the children. With a special emphasis on installing more software and more updating.

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.

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Wayan Vota started an Educational Technology Debate on what the OLPC has achieved thus far with the assertion that the OLPC is “changing education, technology, even culture in ways beyond any one person’s understanding.”

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.

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I think there is a great deal being learned from the story of the OLPC Foundation itself, and even more still from the myriad OLPC deployments around the world. Lessons from OLPC projects will be coming out for years to come, to help better match the tools to the desired pedagogical approach.

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?

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