Concerns and criticism

Find other problems discussed in Teaching, Social and Religious Barriers.

Despite what certain commercial critics of OLPC may say for self-interested reasons, the OLPC machine is a powerful, general-purpose computer with many marvelous integrated input-output devices and expansion possibilities. Even in the most developed countries, such a machine would have been met with jaw-dropping awe even a decade ago, particularly for how cheaply it can be manufactured now.

But can digital technology make the existing system work better in some way? McKinsey Inc. did a well-known study of the growth of USA business productivity in the late 1990s, which said in part:

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the widespread adoption of information and communications technology was not the most important cause of the acceleration in productivity after 1995. Our... case studies clearly show that the relationship between IT and labor productivity is extremely variable... In rare cases, IT can deliver truly extraordinary productivity improvements, expanding labor capacity by an order of magnitude... [but] the bulk of the acceleration in productivity after 1995 can be traced to managerial and technological innovations that improved the basic operations of companies. These innovations were structural...

In other words, you have to re-engineer the institution to exploit technology - the latter is not a "magic bullet."

The OLPC team does include people who see it as a platform for a greatly improved methods of learning. However effective their methods may be, it seems to me they are utopian university types who have had limited actual influence on the educational bureaucracies of their native land. e.g. Did they have any influence on Maine? But they are not alone!

I think the harsh reality of most K-12 education in the world is that it is tradition-bound, and that the economic fact for most teachers is that they had better "tow the line" and not "rock the boat" if they want to stay employed. "After all, don't all children deserve the best education (as if we knew what that was and will be!) - who would be so callous as to do experiments on a child!" Can we hope that when such teachers rise in the educational bureaucracy they change long-held habits and become reformers and revolutionaries? Not likely.

Consider the lecture. Originally a means for students to make their own hand-written copies of textbooks before movable type made mass production of books cheap, the lecture has hung on as a venerable institution a half-millenium after it became largely obsolete. No wonder thinkers like Alvin Toffler have called schools medieval.

Stipulating such a culture, one wonders who the agents of change will be when the OLPC gear enters the picture. It would be a terrible shame if this vital part of the equation did not get enough attention and the OLPC program "failed" - a tragedy all the worse because of the opprobium with which it would smear digital technology if an attempt to try something similar was made later.

I live in the United States and have seen what happens when a hopeful but clueless political leader raises the money for a large federal-state-wide rollout of high tech without any idea how the various independent school districts will work to exploit same. (This example involved a satellite dish at every school.) The result? Equipment rusting for want of use, whose potential was never realized, even for a short while. Don't think that national political leaders of developing nations are incapable of similar folly.

While re-engineering may be vital, experience also teaches that technology may not integrate with existing institutions in the way which technologists hope.

Mass-production and large-lot-selling will make the OLPC gear cheap. And a bundled default GUI and app suite can enable a large user community to share the experience of using it, to discover its strengths and weaknesses. But what if teachers do not embrace the model of the default system - perhaps because doing so incurs no benefit to them if successful and grave risks if not? And what if the nation in which this sad result transpires is unwilling or unable to adapt the default software to make it commpatible with actual clinical practice? If you think this is not a possible scenario, you have never lived within a system where fear and conformity reign, being the only way to stay out of trouble.

A recent The New York Times article on non-elite colleges in India paints a bleak picture, writing in part:

[Students] said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions... A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20’s. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate... Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons — to read books, found clubs or stage plays.

India has decided against participaing in OLPC. But if the text above describes how college students there are treated, how much more rigid and traditional the education of children must be! Would schools there embrace the modes of exploration and collaboration the OLPC anticipates?

I don't especially want to beat up on India. Here in the United States, it is rather appalling how ineffective ordinary K-12 teachers are proving in leveraging all the wonderful technology which has been poured into the schools (admittedly - at far below a rate of one laptop per child, with rare exceptions). Just four years ago a Pew Internet & American Life Report was titled: The widening gap between Internet-savvy students and their schools which wrote in part:

Internet-savvy students are far ahead of their teachers and principals in taking advantage of online educational resources...

My personal unscientifically sampled observations seem to support such a view of the world. Many teachers are still remarkably intimidated, if not ignorant, about computer and communication technology. The kids take to it like fish to water, but tend to squander time playing exciting massive multiplayer online games which do not much expand either their knowledge or reasoning power.

I hope the OLPC people will never forget they come from a peer group with an average 140+ IQ and that the vast majority have an IQ between 85 and 115, and some lower yet, too. They might be surprised at how the smallest "gotcha" leads teachers and others to give up trying if anything goes wrong.

Some people tried to insult the OLPC machine by calling it a "gadget". But there are worse things than being a fixed-function appliance that works reliably - like being an infinitely malleable playpen for hackers if attached to a global network. The Redmond people weren't smart enough to avoid this horror show - will the OLPC folks be?

Reasons like those above are why I would like the overall OLPC effort to concentrate on developing quality e-books for the kids. Once you have paid for the e-book reader, it's lots cheaper to fabricate book copies via digital technology than by printing on paper (about US$2 per paperback). How wonderful it would be to give each child a whole library, rather than just a few books a year!

Books are something even the biggest lunkhead teacher and ed bureaucrat understand - they are not seen as distractions requiring enormous amounts of teacher training and pedagogical reform. They are even the Trojan horse which can put the laptops into the hands of the kids, some of whom will hopefully find some inspiring and mind-expanding interactive things to do with them, too.

I hope readers will not feel I am trying to crush the hopes of the people who have great dreams for OLPC. It's just that the real world may be a lot more ugly than they imagine.

Docdtv 05:50, 4 December 2006 (EST)