[dundee] Taylug Weekly Articles 8 - POMS

[Gary Short]

-------- Original Message --------
> From: Rick <rick.moynihan at gmail.com>
> Sent: 06 February 2008 12:03
> To: gary at garyshort.org, "Tayside Linux User Group" <dundee at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: [dundee] Taylug Weekly Articles 8 - POMS
> 

> As Andrew and others have said, the laptop is designed to be used in
> conjunction with a more formal education.  Simply giving a laptop to a
> child who's had no education in reading/writing is likely to fail, or
> at best only result in negligible improvements.

Agreed. However, the problem of how to enhance education where a teacher can't be present all the time, has already been solved; the Australians have a tried, tested and proven system, as do we (in a limited form). If money is limited for help in this area, why spend it on developing a new solution, why not used the proven one? If you think a new solution is needed and may be an improvement, then by all means experiement and see if you are right, but why not experiment in the west where we have the money to fix any educational "damage" done if the experiment fails? Let's not experiment in a place where if we feck it up totally and walk away they'll be screwed for generations to come.

> > 3. In short the problem that OLPC tackles has been solved, there are tried, tested and proven methods and techonologies in this area already; why throw that away and spend millions developing a solution to a problem that has been solved? Why not invest in the current (proven) solutions? It does smack a little of NIH.
> 
> Here you seem to be arguing that education has been 'solved' via the
> 'classroom model', yet I don't think we're arguing about this.  The
> argument here is (or rather SHOULD BE) about the merits of the
> classroom vs 'exploratory learning'.  So I'm not convinced that the
> laptop smacks of NIH, or represents a new model.  Computers have long
> been proven as a means of education and learning.  

Agreed, but they've never been used in this way before. I submit that a poverty stricken, developing country is not the place to try out a new way of using computers (or anything else for that matter) in education. Education in these countries is very fragile, that being the case let's use the limited investment to make the best use of proven techniques and leave the experimentation to educationalists in the west where we can afford to fix any problems it might cause.

> The laptop is not just a laptop.  It's a portal to a world of
> knowledge and information.  The schools with laptops will be able to
> easily distribute ebooks and even high quality web resources to their
> children.  Nobody would argue that the printing press changed the
> world.
> 
> Here the question is:  Would Providing developing nations and schools
> with a 'turbo-charged printing press' for distributing educational
> materials efficiently at next to no cost (beyond the initial
> investment).  Do more than providing more teachers/textbooks etc?

Damn right it would! But why go to the expence of designing a new computer if all you really need is a PDF reader? Again, are we using the limited investment in the best way?

> I'd argue that computers provide the most efficient form of
> information exchange and knowledge creation that we know of.  Shipping
> physical books around is incredibly costly in terms of teacher/student
> resources etc...  A book can only be in one place at a time.  With N
> laptops it can be at N places at once, with far less distribution
> cost.

Yeah I kind of agree but not totally. The textbook (whether paper or electronic) in and of itself is not much use. On my desk right now there is a book on financial quantative mathematics, I can understand most of it, and certainly the bits I need to for the application I'm writing, but there are certain parts of it where, if I need to understand it, I need to speak to one of the mathematicians in the team. Same for the OLPC, the textbook itself might not be a lot of good, you need a teacher to lead you through it. Western countries with rural populations have already solved this problem, so spend your limited money on something you know works, don't gamble it on something new.

> The strength of the laptop is that it can concurrently support many
> different styles of learning.  Nobody knows yet HOW it will be best
> used to deliver its vision, 

Well they bloody well better work it out, and fast, 'cos if the money runs out before they have a successful educational process formed around it, who do you think will suffer?

> These questions all need answered, and there's a lot of learning yet
> to be done on managing this.  Who knows maybe it's best deployed as
> one-laptop-per-teacher... we don't know, but ultimately the money on
> R&D has been spent, and regardless of it's educational merit will be
> recouped through reuse of it's innovations in other hardware anyway.
> The challenge now is to find ways to realistically deploy it to the
> maximal benefit of developing nations.

It still sounds like tinkering with their fragile education system to me. Hey, maybe it'll work - if so, fantastic, what a great success story; if it doesn't will there be money to fix the problems? I hope so. Maybe I've become risk adverse through working on risk analytics software for too long, but to me, the sensible idea is to invest the limited resources we have on tried and tested schemes to educate to poor of the developing world, and experiment in the west were any damage can be fixed before it becomes catastrophic.

Like I say, the technology is very exciting and I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying don't do it where it can cause the most damage if it fails. If you want to experiment with matches, don't do it in the kitchen with the gas turned on. :-)

-- 
Cheers,
Gary
http://www.garyshort.org