OLPC Project Disappoints In Peru 274
00_NOP writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has disappointed in Peru, reports the Economist, apparently because in general teachers did not make creative use of the technology. As in other cases the computers seem to have been regarded as ends in themselves rather than tools to help change the ways kids are taught. Quite disappointing for those of us looking for Linux-Global-Domination but not really much of a surprise given the experience in richer countries either."
Ha, here's problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
OVdGGPC (Score:5, Insightful)
What if we made sure that every classroom in the world was supplied with a solar-powered, fully recyclable, free-trade produced Van De Graaff generator? We've seen how such devices can spark the interest of physics students in western classrooms over the years. Surely it will have the same effect in classrooms throughout the world! Just present one to the teacher and . . . science!
Teacher's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference in how you need to teach the students, depending on their equipment. But there's no absolute need for laptops, or technology beyond a calculator. For business concepts or for accounting, it's actually better to run things via pen and paper because the students are less tempted to copy and paste, and because it slows down the pace so they have time to think about what they're doing. There is a time and place for internet research, use of spreadsheets for complex accounting or finance calculations, and for plenty of other areas. Get them computer literate, definitely, because a lot of our students end up working in offices and they need the knowledge to use the tools available. But there's no need to get them addicted/dependent on technology to a point where they can't perform simple calculations without Excel anymore, or use their brains without prompting from Google.
The OLPC project is worthy, that's for sure. But I can't say that the results surprise me, they mirror the experiences we're making in a completely different environment. You can run lessons without laptops, and depending on the subject, it's often the more effective way of teaching.
The problem is the education level of the teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost ALL teachers from the richest of schools to the poorest of schools have a horrible education level in computer technology operation and use. I have met multiple PHD holding professors that cant operate a projector to save their life. Even ones that have been dumbed down with a control system that have an ON and OFF button that will do everything. IF the ON button did not work they freak out and never use it again.
WE need to start with all education degrees being REQUIRED to have several computer operation classes. Something a lot more than "how to type letters in word 101" and "internet for idiots 102" They whould be requlred to go through a couple of more advanced classes like "education systems troubleshooting and use 204"
Once you get the teachers comfortable with the technology, they will start using it. Did the OLPC people give the devices to the teachers a YEAR before the kids? Because the teachers should have been given them AND classes on their use in the classroom.
I will bet you the OLPC people simply dropped a shipment in the schools and said "we givith! use this wisely" and walked away.
Negroponte and IT fundamentalists are the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
If your project is led by somebody who believes that the way forward is to drop OLPC laptops out of helicopters into villages [olpcnews.com] and completely bypass locally respected educators, because of the belief that outsiders giving people technology will educate them, what hope have you got?
If the project doesn't seem to respect local teachers, then claims that the reason the project has failed is because of the teachers, well I am suspicious of the findings, or maybe at least suspect a bias.
Is the project too technology led rather than built on sound pedagogical frameworks to support children's education?
Providing teacher training to enable teachers to better employ the technology in their teaching practice (what The Economist article suggests) before dropping all the laptops into classrooms would have been less media friendly but perhaps a more successful strategy.
It does feel like the old story of rusting high tech white elephants in developing countries: well meaning, lots of money spent, not much time understanding local grassroots needs, working with the local educators on the ground. Stuff just gets dropped in with no support and surprise surprise doesn't get used well or technically maintained.
The technology is the easy bit. Engaging with local communities to understand their needs is time consuming and more difficult.
OS doesn't matter in failure (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't teach what you don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Before educating the students, they should have taught the teachers how to use the tehnology.
Re:Works 4 MS & kids too (Score:5, Insightful)
Since once they're out in the working world, they'll find what they're used to already: Windows!
By the time any of them are out in the working world, Microsoft will have gone through several generations of Ribbons and Metro and whatnot other changes. What kids need is to learn to write and structure documents, not the finer points of style and formatting. They need to be able to use their math in spreadsheets, making formulas and chaining them together, not making pretty management reports. That's not to say it won't be important in the future, but that's it's mostly pointless to learn it now to know how it'll be in Word and Excel 2022.
Re:"Seize the youth/seize the future" FAIL (Score:2, Insightful)
Give up Penguins: U've tried it & failed 4 decades since "the year of Linux" is never going to happen on PC's + Servers combined @ both home user & corporate environs levels. U FAILED.
May I remind you Android is Linux?
Re:Teacher's perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all well and good, but the OLPC project was always aimed at trying to short-circuit the endemic problems of many poorer nations. The point has never been "technology enables learning" the point has always been along the lines of "what would happen if we could make sure everyone had access to wikipedia?"
You're dealing with environments where it may not even be possible to maintain a regular structured classroom environment for all sorts of reasons. But if you can get the price of the technology to the right level, then we can in fact begin to think about good software-based solutions for things - remembering that in many cases the goal is less "gets a business masters" and more "can read and write proficiently".
The result will always be the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow we have developed this absurd idea that you simply have to place a computer in front of a child and ~POOF~ they are magically educated, with no thought or work required by a teacher or anyone else. As a result, many billions of dollars have been spent putting computers in every classroom, and it has been a gigantic waste of money, because computers are completely unneccesary in education. Maybe in the last couple of years of highschool it makes sense, but in the early years, a computer serves no useful purpose in school and actually hinders important learning.
Computers are fantastic, powerful and useful tools. but so is a bulldozer, and we don't insist that young children must learn to operate a bulldozer or else they will not get a proper education.
Computers and education (Score:5, Insightful)
We should instead focus on teaching children how to solve problems by writing programs. We should have a completely different approach to computers in education, because computers are different sorts of tools than what we had previously. Let students hack, and moreover create an environment that is friendly toward programming. We live in a computerized world; programming should be considered a matter of basic literacy at this point.
Re:The problem is the education level of the teach (Score:4, Insightful)
It may depend on student age, but the amount of times I run into teenage students who blindly trust their calculators and don't pause to think whether 4% of 200 really can be 500 is startling. I'm not a fan of deprieving them of the technology, but they need to realise that they'd better do a rough mental double-check as well.
Followed by a CSB (Score:4, Insightful)
The concept of needing anything/em> for a good education is questionable. The computer is a tool which is capable of good (through assisting the teaching of subjects), evil (distracting the students or supplanting the teacher), or pointlessness.
First, the tool has to be assessed, to see if it's suitable to assist in the teaching of a subject. The computer can be mighty flexible, and beside running Excel to actually do the accounting, it can present information, quiz students on topics being learned, and even make corrections based on incorrect answers. (And yes, I include properly done Powerpoint under the heading "present information." LibreOffice's Presentation tool qualifies too.)
Second, the tool may need to be tweaked to work for a specific purpose. The last two, quizzing and correcting, ride on the assumption that somewhere behind the scenes, someone in the school's employ is using a relatively simple scripting tool (LiveCode comes to mind) to create the lessons, and to further present on correct techniques when wrong answers are given.
Third, the tool has to be accepted and understood by the teacher. A tool unused is meaningless, but a tool misapplied can do more harm than good.
And fourth, the tool has to be accepted and used correctly by the students. Same principle as above: if they don't know how to get the information out of it, they won't larn nuffin'. A sweet UI and finely honed educational software stand no chance against a blithering idiot.
My mother taught learning disabled preschoolers. I watched with some horror as she sent one student after another back for "computer time" unattended, and they kind of puttered around with it. The worst was what I dub a "click-monster"—he might as well have been blindfolded and firing a machine-gun the way he was clicking. It was like recess, but nothing was being exercised except index finger and wrist.
With a little time, expense, and staff education, the computer can be a fantastic tool for teaching and learning. I can appreciate that without that time and expense, the tool isn't nearly as useful.
SURPRISE SURPRISE SURPRISE!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Another STUPID project perpetuated by the Bono types of the world. Another COMPLETE waste of time. Give these kids textbooks and be done with it. You don't need to CRANK a textbook to read it. You aren't going to crack a textbook when you drop it. Textbooks are cheap to replace. Textbooks aren't distracting. A shipment of textbooks isn't going to be stolen, reprogrammed, and sold as something else on the black market.
Re:"Seize the youth/seize the future" FAIL (Score:2, Insightful)
It's as much Linux as an Xbox is a Windows platform.
Re:Love the idea; poor execution (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the surface layer - but the real problem lies deeper. The real problem is that it was designed to be a [computer|education tool|portal to information|flavor of the week] (I.E. somewhat confused goals) that adhered to the (idiosyncratic) design theories of people with little to no actual experience in developing such tools*, and to support the political agenda and social theories of Nicolas Negroponte. And it's last item that's the real killer, because everything else was subordinated to that agenda and those theories.
Not helping much was the decision to set the price to a politically attractive level long before they had sufficient experience with the software and hardware to know whether or not that price was a reasonable goal for their laundry list of features. When it turned out not to be, they slashed performance to target those political goals.
And that's not even touching on the myriad of other things they fouled up on...
* to be fair, nobody really has such experience - everything in the developed world to date has been somewhat ad hoc.
Re:Teacher's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
And right there, is why this project is failing. The kids of the world need education, and you (like the project's leaders) are more interested in subjecting them to political indoctrination.
Re:SURPRISE SURPRISE SURPRISE!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
But you can't just drop it out of an airplane and expect it to be used even close to its intended purposes. "The Gods Must Be Crazy" comes to mind.
LoB
The Real Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I was born in 1986, and at that time personal computers were on the rise. Yes, personal computers existed long before that, but back then many people still did not have them. At the time computers were more expensive and not as interesting to intellectually challenged people. It wasn't for several years that every member of society absolutely had to have a computer and an e-mail address. I know people who held out for a decade after it became ubiquitous.
Ever since I was in kindergarten, the prevailing [ignorant] viewpoint in society was that computers just magically made people smarter and improved your child's education a billion percent. Every school that I attended had to have computers, and they always bragged about how many computers they had. Idiots in the administration talked about how technology was revolutionizing education and how the students were being prepared for the future by being taught computer skills. By the time I was in high school, they made sure that every single classroom had at least one computer in them, sometimes two or three or five. Nothing relevant about computers was actually taught.
Ultimately, it was pointless. We didn't use the computers in effective or creative ways; both teachers and students ignored the computers and studied our textbooks. All we used the computers for was to browse the web in our free time and play Counterstrike. Some kids utilized the school's network infrastructure to upload porn and warez. I went to college with a bunch of computer illiterate people who grew up with computers, and now I work with a bunch of computer illiterate people. My mom went adult education classes to become "computer literate," and they taught her that computer expertise meant knowing how to use Google search and Microsoft Office.
As someone who is very into computer technology and software, it has been a hobby that I pursued since a young age, and it ended up becoming my trade. I think I'm qualified to speak a little bit about computing technology, and I've said this many times in the past: computers don't improve education. They just don't. The money that schools waste on computer equipment could be put to use in so many much better ways. Throwing computers at education is just a mutated form of our cultural tendency to throw money at problems--it's stupid and doesn't work.
Can computers be used in education? Sure, they can, but if and only if it makes sense. Right now in my studies I have to use a computer constantly to look up reference material--it's a huge time saver and makes my field of study dramatically easier than it once was. The reason why computing helps is because the computer is a tool that provides a function necessary for the completion of my work. It's not because I learn better with computers than without them, or that computers solve all of my problems in school; rather, sometimes you have a particular need for them, and in many cases you don't.
I support OLPC because it connects people to the Internet who weren't connected before, which basically gives them access to limitless reading material should they choose to utilize it. 99% of people do not take advantage of the knowledge that can be read on the Internet. That's fine. If even a small group of intelligent children can find a way to benefit from having access to a computer, then those people might learn something that they can use to improve their own lives and the lives of people around them.