OLPC is inappropriate for India<\/a>, and I have to agree. Often, when talking about ICT for education in the developing world, there is the assumption that whatever ICT tool we’re talking about, from radio to laptops, will not only be a magical educational bullet, but it will also somehow magically appear, unaltered and equally distributed across a country’s classrooms.<\/p>\nI would like to shatter that fantasy with reality. <\/p>\n
First let us consider the purchasing process. In many countries, funds are dispersed to the regional or local level before supplies are bought for the schools. This negates the ability to create a homogenous deployment of anything – from chalk to textbooks. Then, in many countries, there is a serious lack of knowledge around the number and even location of all the schools, much less the students. So even if you could get a concerted national push for each school to have a basic set of ICT tools, there is no way a Ministry of Education could verify national achievement, and waste and fraud would be rife. <\/p>\n
Last but not least, in this management vacuum, how could a Ministry understand if there is a positive impact from a national ICT investment in education? If it cannot keep an accurate list of its schools and teachers, or students and their progress, the Ministry will have to rely on hope and faith. While these two feelings are central to religion, I would expect a more factual basis for education.<\/p>\n
So before educational priorities are distorted by the shiny, flashy technology of the moment, let us focus energies on the admittedly slow, boring, yet more impacting increase in the capacity of school systems to administer the resources they currently have. ICT, if its introduced, should be done slowly, starting small, and recognizing that its success is predicated on an overall improvement in educational management systems as much or more than advances in technology or funding levels. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In many educational systems, there is a shameful lack of capacity to administer the resources currently allocated to teach students. Waste and fraud combine to drain away funds before they get near to the classroom, or to the classroom teacher – historically one of the most underpaid positions in the world. How would adding expensive, desirable, and complicated technology into this system achieve anything but lost opportunity on a massive scale? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[40,42,44,41,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2533,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/2533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}