Two Billion Laptops? It May Not Be Enough

This story appeared in the NY Times on April 16, 2010. http://nyti.ms/9FGNvR
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By RANDALL STROSS

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD is a nonprofit group that thinks big. Since 2007, it has sold inexpensive but rugged laptop computers to the governments of less-developed countries. The goal is to equip each of the two billion children in the developing world with his or her own computer.

It’s been slow going. About 1.6 million of the group’s laptops have been distributed to date, said Matt Keller, vice president for global advocacy at the O.L.P.C. Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass. Today, the largest concentrations are in Uruguay, at around 400,000, and Peru, at 280,000, followed by Rwanda (110,000) and Haiti and Mongolia (15,000 each).

In 2006, the O.L.P.C. Web site pitched its laptop as a technology that “could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children.” Today, the “R” word is gone. Now the site speaks in more muted language of “developing an essential resource — educated, empowered children.”

“The biggest obstacle to our spreading the dream is cost,” Mr. Keller said.

Ninety percent of the machines have been paid for by the recipient countries’ governments, whose resources are extremely limited. I asked Mr. Keller if project leaders had reconsidered the “per child” part of the program. “One Laptop Per Classroom” certainly doesn’t have the same ring, to be sure, but it would better diffuse the benefits in the short term, helping a greater share of those almost two billion children who have not been reached.

He said that such a change was out of the question.

“One-on-one, child-to-laptop — the interactive nature of that experience is the heart of what we do,” he said.

When a child owns a laptop, he added, the school day is effectively extended from a few hours to 12 to 14 hours — however long the child is awake, and wherever he or she happens to be.

Some Microsoft researchers in India have investigated how to give those same children better use of PCs that are already in place, even though one machine is shared by many. In one project, Microsoft’s programmers developed software that added multiple cursors on the screen, each controlled by a separate mouse. Software written for the paradigm allows students to compete or collaborate on multiple-choice questions. It was well received in schools, and Microsoft turned it into a free product called MultiPoint.

“We jokingly call it ‘One Mouse Per Child,’ ” said Kentaro Toyama, who led the project while he spent five years in the Technology for Emerging Markets group at Microsoft Research India.

Mr. Toyama, who received a computer-science doctorate at Yale, left Microsoft last December and is now a research fellow at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been giving talks at American universities about the “technological utopianism” that he sees in initiatives like One Laptop Per Child, Intel’s Classmate PC, and even MultiPoint. He says such initiatives rest upon a myth that “technology is the bottleneck in developing countries.”

Lots of other things are bottlenecks, too, he says — including institutional limitations, economics, the basic service infrastructure and politics. Nor is technology synonymous with education.

“Initially, we had the idea that PCs could make up for teacher absenteeism or poor training,” he said. “But studies of PCs in schools are mixed, at best. Most show that a good school with good teachers can do positive things with PCs, but that PCs don’t fix bad schools.”

Describing technological utopianism, he said, “What it comes down to is this: Everybody is looking for a shortcut.”

Mr. Keller said of Mr. Toyama’s remarks: “There is no silver bullet, he’s right.” But Mr. Keller argued that literacy skills and access to information were prerequisites for economic and political growth and that “technology can help foster these things.”

Among the infrastructure problems that the Microsoft research team saw in rural India was unreliable electrical power. It spurred another Microsoft research project that provided farmers in one district with cellphones that supplied the same information via text messaging that the farmers had obtained from PC centers.

Many O.L.P.C. laptops are equipped with solar panels that can recharge the machine in three hours, providing four to six hours of use. Mr. Keller said a new model would be introduced early next year that would demand much less power. The new machines will have cranks and charge quickly: a minute of cranking will yield 10 minutes of use.

MR. KELLER has some moving stories to tell about his visits to villages that have received laptops — and about the natural facility with computers of children everywhere.

“I’ve been in Rwanda where the laptop was introduced into an environment where previously there had been no electronic devices,” he said, “and within three to four days you have 10-year-old girls and 8-year-old boys who are using the laptop as efficiently and effectively and creatively as I can.”

He is now lobbying to secure funding from the United States government to provide an Internet-connected laptop for every child in Afghanistan. At a cost of $250 a laptop, the project would cost about $750 million.

In Kabul, Mr. Keller said, Afghanistan’s education minister told him that the project “would allow girls to study and connect within the safety of their own homes.”

It’s an almost irresistible vision. But a skeptic would point to the lessons of history and say that technology never works in isolation.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

10 Simple Google Search Tricks - NYTimes.com

10 Simple Google Search Tricks - NYTimes.com

Traditional schools aren't working. Let's move learning online.

Traditional schools aren't working. Let's move learning online.

GoogleVoice

I've been wanting to write about GoogleVoice for some time. Imagine Lord of the Rings..One ring to rule them all.. and you get an idea of what GoogleVoice is capable of. You can call from any phone in the world, have your calls ring any phone in the world. It's truly amazing!

I have all of my contacts in my Google account, and I can access them using the Google Voice website. You can also access them from a smart phone, such as an iPhone or a Nexus One (I don't have one yet--haven't decided which is best), using a simple downloadable app from the Google site http://www.google.com/mobile/voice/. It really works well!

The icon above allows you to call me, for free. Give it a try. I'd love to say hello!

Computers in schools

I find it alarming that people who use computers in their everyday life somehow think that computers in the hands of high school students are simply the "latest gee-whiz" toy to hit education. My challenge is, as it has been for some time, let those who question the value of computing in schools forgo the use of their computer, or at least match the percentage of computers in their office with the percentage of computers in their child's school. Let every school district have the same percentage of computers in their offices as they have in their schools. We will then see if computers have value.


Case in point--A story on The Philadelphia Enquirer http://bit.ly/cTilRV, written by a university professor, laments the fact that his teenage daughter was given a computer, and that she finds it more interesting than she finds him. He says, "Laptop programs reflect a long tradition of gee-whiz technological enthusiasm in American education. To fix the schools, the argument goes, find a new gadget. This notion's most famous proponent was Thomas Edison, who helped invent motion pictures and also started a company to market them in the schools." Well, in fact, movies in schools DID revolutionize the classroom experience, even more so when teachers could show VHS tapes of DVDs right in their rooms, without having to coordinate with the school's AV department.


It is ironic that this story was probably written on a computer, and that the naysayers all answered online, with a computer. Part of the reason that students do not believe adults is because they hypocritically deny them things that they themselves use. You want buy in from students, get honest and and get real with them.


Computers are used in every aspect of our lives. They are in our cars, cameras, cell phones, and televisions. Even new refrigerators have a computer in them. McDonalds uses a computer to take your order, traffic lights are controlled by computers to help regulate traffic flow, and computers are used to fly commercial aircraft.


This is a silly argument, one based on fear and a lack of understanding. As I said, let those who think that computers do not belong in the hands of students go without one themselves. Then we will see if computers are necessary.

More on Cell Phones

When I started experimenting with text messaging, I would text this student or that student, usually one or two at a time. Once I got all of my seniors' numbers, I decided to try a broadcast. During my class, second period, I talked with the seniors about a variety of topics, so I thought I would follow up on one of them in text message to all of them. 

During third period, I thought of some points that I wanted to make, so I gave them a blast. It turns out that the coordinator of our academy had all the seniors during third period. Around the midway point of her class, every students' cell phone went off, almost simultaneously! She said, "The ringing! The ringing!"

After she climbed down from the ceiling, she called my classroom and gave me a dressing down. By the end of the period, when she came over to her office, which is in my classroom, she had been thinking about the potential of being able to contact all of the students at once. To her credit, instead of chewing me out, she walked in with lots of questions about how it worked.

Now I regularly "ping" our students with updates to schedules, assignment reminders, even wake-up calls. They answer with questions of their own. They even "ping" me regularly to let me know what they are up to. My phone vibrates, though, so I never get "the ringing!"

Cell phones are so powerful, I think it's a shame to keep them away from students. Sure, there will be abuses, just like every other aspect of high school, but by leveraging their phones instead of banning them, we coop their technology into an educational tool, instead of a nuisance.

Every new tool has met with resistance. Even paper and pencil was resisted by teachers who up until that time had their students using slate and chalk. Not that long ago, teachers were resisting the use of projectors that showed images from their computers. When I first started teaching in 2000, I taught in a middle school where there were only three projectors available for teachers to use. I went to the tech coordinator (remember when we had those?) and asked for one. He sternly told me that I could use it until another teacher asked for it, then I would have to share. I was at the school for two years, nobody ever asked.

When the school I am at now opened two years ago, I told the teachers in my small learning community that I could show them how to get class notes onto their students' iPods, as a .txt file. That way they could review the notes on a tool that they carried around with them all the time. My suggestion was met with universal disdain and dismissal.

I only want to fight the battles I know, or least think, that I can win. Nobody is going to stop students from bringing their cell phones to school, so why not turn the tables on them and use their own strength to make them learn? It's very judo-like, and just like in judo, it works.

Send in the Clouds

Cloud computing is a natural step in the evolution of the digital workspace. As server space and Internet connections get cheaper, it makes sense to move work off the desktop and into the cloud. And with the proliferation of free services, most notably the Google suite of office apps, it doesn't even have to cost to go all cumulonimbus.

As recently as 2007, a story in the NY Times (http://nyti.ms/dD6ZYz) asked "Why Can’t We Compute in the Cloud?" But from another piece published later that year, Google was already explaining the cloud in terms we could all understand. "'Cloud computing' — essentially software hosted on the server instead of on the desktop — is a natural outgrowth of Google’s model and network of datacenters around the globe." (http://nyti.ms/bXaY4y). And in an NPR story from last year, "Cloud computing has also been likened to utility computing, whereby individuals and companies purchase additional network bandwidth, storage and computation capacity as on-demand services — the same way people buy more electricity to fuel their power needs. Historically, different companies have handled these elements" (http://bit.ly/cLePL7).

With the advent of the netbook, a laptop with a little memory and not much storage, the cloud makes a lot of sense. I'm posting this on a Dell netbook with 8gb of storage, It's too small to store anything, so almost all of my docs are on Google. I got 1gb of storage for free, but paid $5 to get 20gb!

"Cloud computing is a vehicle for using that technology. It enables users to work and collaborate completely online, without the need for special software, and independent of platform. Not only does distributed learning occur anywhere and at any time, but these conditions can be modified along a number of dimensions" (Oblinger, Barone, & Hawkins, 2001)

Needless to say, I'm a believer!