What research departments studying the sense and non-sense of ICT in education say about OLPC

The viewpoints expressed hereunder do not necessarily reflect the opinion of OLPC.
This page was created by a member of the free volunteer community supporting OLPC.

Please list your links/summaries, etc.

1. There are methodologies to measure the impact of ICT in education.
2. To see what deployments had an evaluation, click the evaluation page category at the bottom of the page.
3. OECD PISA: The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial international survey which aims to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students. To date, students representing more than 70 economies have participated in the assessment. Discover the lastest set of results from the 2012 data collection (PISA 2012) focusing on mathematics. Around 510,000 students in 65 economies took part in PISA 2012 representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally. More than 70 economies have signed up to take part in the test in 2015 which will focus on science. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/
4. It appears these methodologies are good measuring the impact of ICT in education in developed countries, but not so much in measuring the impact of ICT in developing countries. Example: the methodologies don't measure if e.g. the implementation of the XO-XS results in more or less kids attending school, dropping out of school, teacher motivation, self-confidence, self-esteem, respect, contribution to finishing the school system, etc.
5. There is a category on evaluation. This generates a page with a list of all the pages on the topic of evaluation. Authors also have the option to add the category "Evaluation" to the page they are writing/developing so it appears on the evaluation category page.
6. MIT Media Lab - Prof. Nicholas NEGROPONTE: “We dropped off tablets with no instructions and let the children figure it out,” he says. “They were using 50 apps in five days. They were singing the alphabet songs in two weeks. And they’d hacked Android within 6 months.” as per http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/17/back-to-techs-future-nicholas-negroponte-at-ted2014/
7. The effort led Negroponte to an experiment in Ethiopia, one which resembles TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall". (see http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud ) Like Mitra, Negroponte wondered: “Can learning happen where there are no schools?”
8. Negroponte’s latest project is using a stationary satellite to connect 100 million people living in rural areas to the internet. The effort will cost $2 billion, he says, which sounds like a lot, but is actually what the United States was spending in Afghanistan in a week. More: http://ht.ly/uGxz1
9. Nicholas Negroponte: It goes back about 40 years to the early work of Seymour Papert, a young professor at MIT. He made a simple observation, that computer programming is the closest approximation to thinking about thinking. If kids could learn to write programs, they would be engaged in an activity that approximated what they were doing themselves.

Particularly in the context of debugging, because whenever you write a program and it doesn’t work, you see what it did, you change it, you try it again, and you converge on a working program. And what kids were doing, not necessarily knowingly, but they were teaching a computer. In a sense they were learning how a computer learns, and it was very similar to how they should learn. We found in the 1970s that kids who wrote computer programs were better spellers.

If you get a spelling test and you get eight out of 10 words right, the last thing you care about are the two words you got wrong because you got a B. Whereas the kids who were practiced at programming where debugging was the fun part and the bugs were the interesting things -- they all started trading words with each other that they got wrong. So suddenly these kids found joy, if you will, in the spelling mistakes, and became better spellers.

In 1980, Sheik Yamani of OPEC funded a center to help children in developing countries and Seymour Papert and I worked in Pakistan, Senegal, and Colombia. While the Media Lab was being built as an entity, physical as well as organizationally, we worked with kids in those countries. They were totally comfortable working in computers and computer programming – in this case, it was Apple IIs. They didn’t need the manuals, they didn’t need anything. So fast forward 20 years. The Media Lab had always had about 25% of its activity with children and learning. And after I directed the Media Lab for 20 years, somebody else came in as director and I said, “It’s my turn to do something.” And that’s when One Laptop per Child, or what was first called the Hundred Dollar Laptop, was born.

But what had happened over the intervening 20 years, it’s quite extraordinary: computer programming fell off the table. Kids, from very good schools, weren’t engaged in it.

Companies like Microsoft and others wrote apps for the kids to use. So you became a user, not a programmer. Everybody was writing apps for kids and kids were consumers. That drift coincided with people being more and more convinced that the way to understand if a child is getting an education is to test what they know. And the truth is, testing what they know doesn’t tell you very much except that they know what you just tested them on. With One Laptop per Child, we concurrently tried to change the conversation about education to be more about the kids making things, particularly computer programs, versus absorbing a body of information that’s being plugged into their heads.

Maney: So with OLPC, the thrust really was about getting the programming into the hands of kids, not so much get a device into the hands of kids?

Negroponte: It wasn’t the only thing. It had to be a little more surreptitious. There had to be stuff on there - books and so on. But programming was very much key. The one country that did every child first, Uruguay, passed a law that all kids have to learn to program. That’s wonderful. It’s not because they’re going to get jobs as programmers but because programming is thinking about thinking.

Maney: At the same time, you were really pushing the limits on what you could do to create inexpensive laptops.

Negroponte: We broke a little spell. There had been this escalation that every time that Intel made a faster processor, Microsoft used more of it. And so you got faster processors and bigger operating systems. And things got more and more complex but stayed roughly at approximately $1000 per laptop.

But if you could simplify it and bring one side of that equation down, you could see price go down. You could build, in theory, a $100 laptop.

Somebody had to break the spell. There was no commercial interest in doing that... Imagine building a product that costs 50% less in 18 months. That’s really a terrible business. So you had to put in features, do things to jack it back up again. That’s what the industry had been doing. More: http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature/1240339/Network-Trailblazer-A-Conversation-with-Nicholas-Negroponte-Founder-One-Laptop-per-Child?utm_medium=rss

Suggested Links:

1. Education and Corruption: http://www.transparency.org/gcr_education