One Laptop Per Child News

One of the major innovations of OLPC consists in the idea that a computer given to a single child (also called 1:1 computing) is the best way to enhance the pupil's ability to learn effectively. It's called ONE-laptop-per-child after all.

In a recent article in ScienceDaily, strong evidence is presented that shows that 1:1 computing allows students in these programs to outperform their peers in traditional classrooms. According to findings of studies published in the Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment:

Students who have participated in 1:1 computing report higher achievement and increased engagement. This new collection of articles brings together some of the best evidence to date on the implementation and impacts of 1:1 computing.

All of the studies that examined the impact of 1:1 computing on student achievement found that students in the 1:1 settings outperformed their traditional classroom peers on English/Language Arts standardized tests by a statistically significant margin. Study authors also reported on evidence of increased student motivation and engagement, as well as changes in teachers' instructional practices.

This is great news for OLPC. So far the evidence of the effectiveness of 1:1 computing was circumstantial and anecdotal. These are the kind of studies that OLPC should have not only follow closely, but also actively sponsor, and possibly enhance with their own on-the-field experiences and surveys. Although that was never done, it is never too late for OLPC to back up such studies, and to provide additional supporting data.

Teachers matter in 1:1 success

Regardless of the OPLC involvement, the outcomes of these studies is clear. Is this a clear strong, although indirect victory or endorsement for OLPC? Not really. The article clearly states:

"One of the most salient findings was the critical role that teachers played in the success of each 1:1 program," Bebell said. Additional factors critical to student success across 1:1 technology settings included:

1. Having a strong commitment from school leadership
2. Developing consistent and supportive administrative policies
3. Creating professional development opportunities for teachers, particularly the sharing of best practices

It appears that the key for success of the 1:1 computing initiative are teacher involvement and a strong school commitment. In other words, handing out laptops to individual students and let them to learn independently, is not what is found to work effectively. Teachers' involvement, training and professional development is the real key for success. Unfortunately, on a global scale OLPC performs poorly in this regards.

Teachers' training and professional and curricula development is left to local groups and and it happens countries where the role of teachers has been recognized. It should not be a surprise to note that in these countries the OLPC initiative is known to have been the most effective. When such local involvement of teacher' training and curricula development was missing, the program has not shown any significant sign of success.

Therefore, having a global push for sharing experiences, promoting teachers' collaboration and training is the determining factor for the success of the overall OLPC effort.

It is unfortunate and heart shuttering to witness OLPC lack of recognition of the relevance of teachers involvement in the learning process. A laptop will never be able to replace a teacher. It will only be an effective tool for students to improve their learning and teacher to extend their teaching. Scientific evidence now backs this strongly. Let's hope OLPC will follow.

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Wow! Watching this video from OLE Nepal I am so happy for them and sad for One Laptop Per Child. The success of OLE and the failures of OLPC are so self-evident:

See how OLE Nepal is focused on empowering the teachers? Hear how they're working with the established educational system? That's the path to XO laptop success - using technology as an enabler of educator evolution, not a bludgeon to force change.

Better yet, did you see the shoutout to the Teachermate? Yeah, OLE is the real education project.

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Our goal here is to dramatically and quickly improve educational outcomes. Unfortunately that process doesn't happen magically by itself. There's a myriad of cultural and reality on the ground matters that need to be taken care of. We need to understand concretely the problem we are attempting to solve and how our intervention is going to lead to solving it.

So the reality on the ground in most Afghan schools here is that students and teachers really don't have enough time in class. Typically 30 mins for lessons that they would really need one hour for. Teachers often have to find additional hours to do other jobs to make ends meet.

Going back to that lack of time, sometimes capacity difficulties, they often can't provide feedback to student work, homework, etc. Without feedback, hints, etc. which parents and teachers can't provide learning results naturally suffer. Finally against this backdrop providing opportunities for group work / soft skills is tricky to say the least.

Creating a blended learning experience can effectively increase the amount of time that children have for learning. Identify which parts can be engaging self study through mini games, video, audio and quizzes. Provide self test reasonably framed not as tempting as flipping the book pages quizzes with hints and feedback on incorrect answers to provide the feedback to learning that children need. We can then use some of that freed time to construct a window for projects and further learning. But to get there we have to round off all the corners and engage all stakeholders.

This is what we're engaging now with three subjects: Science, Maths and Religious Studies. Creating complete interactive text books with the interactive tools (gathered from Java sites, scratch, Karma, what we developed) built through ExeLearning so that they can run offline anywhere anytime (we're coding some improvements to add Scratch, Iframe, and HTML 5 support).

In Afghanistan we are fortunate that there is a strong cultural emphasis placed on learning, and great respect for teachers in society, based on Islamic values and the importance the Koran places upon learning and education. On the other hand it means that we need to remember the position of the teacher cannot be undermined, and we need to deal with things like what to do when the kids ask questions that the teacher doesn't know the answer to.

Whatever pedagogical model might be applied; in most cultures, and particularly in cultures such as S. Asia where teacher prestige is vital, the most important bottom line critical success factor is teacher confidence. If the teachers are confident with the new technology, then results will flow, if not, we're asking for disaster. No - explaining binary code does not really have a practical use day to day for the XO laptop. But it did improve teacher confidence.

We did that in a number of ways. In addition to the normal teacher training (5-6 days) we also identified champion teachers who were more enthusiastic (Roughly 3 out of 10 teachers). We then did another 5-6 days with them. They then become the go to people in the school. Then find a local computer science student or such and have them visit. Even if computer science possibly is not the most relevant subject in the process, it is the part that addresses insecurities more often than not, and it creates a social web of go to people, which is the same way that other challenges are typically solved here.

We need to remember that connectivity ain't cheap. Not at all - satellite bandwidth is extremely expensive. Typically satellite based dedicated bandwidth runs at about $3,000/month for 1 Mbps. Which is why we base pretty much everything on using the local school server and we run our own digital library (built using our own Simple Digital Library Index). We copy those websites (like wikipedia snapshots, language websites, health contents, etc) that we want for reference onto the school network using mirroring tools. Also avoids any cultural sensitivity problems.

Finally we need to consider that we're still learning. So we need to rigorously assess what we're doing, we need to engage stakeholders, we need to get their feedback, run ideas by them, engage teachers, children and parents in the whole process. We find a very positive reception from children (of course), teachers, and just a few percent of parents complaining that their children were a bit too interested in their XO. We found around a 22% increase in standardized testing results over 2.5 months after introducing the laptops. We have indications. Soon it will be time to find more definitive answers.

The XO thus can be the key to unlocking amazing possibilities and improving education, but to realize the potential of the investment and achieve our objective of massively improving learning outcomes we have to work with the culture, with stakeholders, and deliver without the need for massive recurring bandwidth costs the educational content that children and teachers need.

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When Beth Santos presented at OLPC Learning Club DC about her OLPC Sao Tome experience, her description of the OLPCorps deployment had me asking one very intense question: Was OLPCorps 2009 an OLPC failure?

When Beth first went to Sao Tome to volunteer with Step Up, she didn't expect to work with XO laptops. She just wanted to help the São João school. On arrival, she found XO laptops stored in a closet, unused since the OLPCorps volunteers left.

This should not come as a surprise. We predicted that abandoned XO laptops would be one legacy of OLPCorps. Technology adoption, in any culture, requires enthusiastic supporters with a long-term commitment to change. By parachuting in volunteers for a few weeks on summer, OLPC was setting up OLPCorps to have a temporary impact at best.

One Laptop Per Child has announced they're starting to distribute C2 Test Model XO-1.5 laptops through their Contributors Program. This is great news for hardware and software developers who are looking to code and test for OLPC. But it pretty much sucks for everyone else.

There is not a week that goes by without someone asking me how they can get XO laptops for their community-based project. XO-1, XO-1.5, and to my amusement, XO-2 and even XO-3 laptops - any XO laptop! They are shocked that OLPC will not sell XO's to them and confused when told about the Contributors Program.

Why? Because the Contributors Program is still a mysterious process where some groups get XO's and others don't, based on... Whim? Chicken bones? Negroponte's fancy that day?

They seek a clear, transparent process. Some way, any way to get XO laptops with certainty.

Today was the third and last day of the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010". Since the conference ended at 1PM only the keynote, a single session and a closing panel took place. However it turned out to be a really strong finish which made for a perfect ending for what was truly a great conference. After yesterday's constant crashes and issues I was very happy to see that ustream.tv worked like a charm today. The only thing that was slightly annoying is that my conference WiFi account ran out 10min before the actual end of the conference, hence the last few minutes of the last session are missing from the recordings.

It's safe to say that day 2 of the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" was at least as interesting as yesterday, if not even more so. The day started with an excellent keynote by Peter Baumgartner (German Web site) from the Donau-Universität Krems, Austria. He generally spoke about learning and education and focused on 1:1 netbook projects that are currently taking place in Austria. One very memorable quotes from his presentation was:

If you have been following my tweets today you will know that day 1 of the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" taking place here in Vienna at the moment was really interesting. The opening session led by people from the Austrian Ministry of Education introduced some of the projects that the Ministry has been working on in Austria. Our small Austrian OLPC project in Graz was also mentioned but unfortunately due to time constraints the information on all the projects remained relatively superficial.

The first presentations focused on "Opportunities and risks of 1-to-1 in education: international perspectives" with the speakers being Carla Jiménez (IDB), Michael Trucano (The World Bank) and Francesc Pedró (OECD). All speakers gave interesting overviews on what their respective views of the current state of 1:1 computing in education were. What I particularly liked was Michael Trucano ending with leaving the last of the 10 points he structured his talk around open to emphasize that there are still many unknowns and questions to be discussed when it comes to these kinds of initiatives.

Katha is an organization that connects grassroots work in education in India, and it has driven its education model on a single powerful idea: Children can bring change that is sustainable and real, which is in strong alignment with the goal of OLPC.

Katha runs 71 schools in slum communities with more than 200,000 children. XO laptops were deployed at Katha Khazana, one of the school setup by Katha in a slum community at New Delhi.
The school is marked by its distinctive atmosphere creating a rich learning experience for students ranging from pre-nursery grade to 12th grade, which was further enriched when OLPC India distributed XOs to the school children on 21st January.