No surprises in our research reports

Teachers are important - they compensate for static or negative results from computer assisted learning: a reaction from John Branfield, former Principal Inspector with Essex Education Authority (UK) and senior member of staff at a Specialist College for Mathematics and Computing.

From: John Branfield, by e-mail May 2010

Nothing beats a well qualified teacher

On the subject of the research reports you identified recently, none of this surprises me. Having taught IT for over 10 years it's clear that the follow-up use of computer-based material for drill and practice or open-ended research followed up by teacher intervention is far better than using IT as some sort of teacher substitute. My experience of observing many secondary school lessons is that nothing beats a well qualified teacher (subject expert) with a clear lesson plan and the ability to engage with his or her students directly, understanding their prior learning achievements and being clear about the next steps needed. Learning through the medium of computer screen is a very poor second; high level classroom interaction beats a Google search every time.

To close the digital divide systematically, see:

• 20 yrs IT in reality
• Sound pedagogy
• Visual teaching

Investment research concludes: First Debug the Child

Computers on schools can and will 'electrify education' (as Negroponte evaluated his OLPC projects) but only when implemented in a sensible way.  When brought into the classroom too fast, they might not enrich but damage education. This happens in rich countries as well as in middle and low-income countries. Some recent reports:

Research in Romania, comparing families having computers with those families without found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals.

Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital

In Colombia: with increased numbers of computers in schools, and curriculum support provided plus training for teachers, no positive impact on student outcomes was found.

The use and misuse of computers in education

In India: using computers during school hours - essentially substituting computers for teachers - actually damaged learning.

Some annotated observations, including the research findings above, from:
Atanu Dey, a contributer of the April 2010 Delhi debate
"Most of Technology Investments in Education is Wasted" 

First Debug the Child
My interest in the use — and misuse — of technology in education is a natural extension of that basic interest in development and growth. The One Laptop Per Child comes in for special scrutiny because the implications of such a program are phenomenal for a poor country like India. I have long argued that there are simpler, more affordable and more urgently needed interventions that is needed than is provided by the OLPC program. Here’s one that I recently became aware of. Timothy Ogden writes about "the glitzy One Laptop per Child program.” It’s clearly a well-written and well-researched article and is a must read. Here’s a bit:

Despite the instinctive appeal of distributing laptops to schoolchildren, there is precious little evidence that making computers available to children improves educational outcomes. The circumstantial evidence that exists certainly doesn’t buttress the one-laptop-per-child approach.
. . .
Two other recent studies (2010 and 2009) conducted in the developing world are even more telling. Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied a program in Romania that distributed discount vouchers for the purchase of home computers to low-income families. When they compared the families that used the vouchers to acquire computers with families that were just above the income cut-off to receive the vouchers, they found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals. Leigh Linden, an economist at Columbia University, and Felipe Barrera-Osorio of The World Bank studied a program in Colombia that increased the number of computers in schools and provided curriculum support and training for teachers — and found no impact on student outcomes. “In this case, despite the curriculum support, it was clear that the teachers simply weren’t using the computers,” Linden says.

Linden also led one of the few experimental studies to show a positive impact from the use of computers — a project in India that provided computers and education software to schools and randomly assigned some schools to use the software during school hours and others to encourage computer use after hours. This study found that using computers during school hours —essentially substituting computers for teachers — actually hurt learning, while using them after hours as a supplement to traditional classroom teaching had dramatic positive effects on the weakest students. Even this outcome doesn’t really support the OLPC mission, though; the software evaluated is very much in the “drill and practice” model that Negroponte has explicitly derided.

Ogden further on in the article mentions a few more effective means of improving educational outcomes. There are a number of simple, cheap programs that have been proven successful at getting children in developing countries into school and helping them learn more while they are there.

Deworming
The simplest and least costly of these programs is deworming. Nearly 2 billion people around the world are affected by parasitic worm infections, with children disproportionately affected. While each variety of parasitic worm affects a person differently, they all take a substantial toll on growth, energy and attention, with entirely predictable impacts on school attendance and learning. Harvard economist Michael Kremer has studied the impact of mass deworming in Kenya and India. Delivering deworming medication costs 50 cents per child per year in Kenya but yielded a 25 percent increase in school attendance; a similar program in India cost $4 per student per year and yielded a 20 percent attendance gain. “This is a simple, cost-effective and yet tragically not-done program. It’s a scandal that [deworming] hasn’t been addressed,” Kremer says. There are spillover effects as well. “The most surprising thing about the study in Kenya was the widespread impact,” Kremer says. The program drove down infection rates for several kilometers around the schools, he says, and there were significant improvements in attendance for untreated students, in the treatment schools as well as in nearby schools not in the program.

Go read it all here

To close the digital divide systematically,
see:  Beyond chalk and talk
see:  20 yrs IT in reality
see:  Sound pedagogy

OLPC: a "Computer Error"?

"There appear to be cheaper, more effective ways to improve education 

in developing nations than the glitzy One Laptop per Child program…"

From

By Timothy Ogden (editor-in-chief of Philanthropy Action), August 20, 2009

Computer Error?
... In the last year, though, the news on OLPC has sharply soured. Technical difficulties slowed the development of the second generation of the laptop. The second year of the “Give One, Get One” promotion — which offered the people a chance to pay $399 for two laptops, one that they would keep, with the other sent to a developing nation — dramatically underperformed. Then in early January, the nonprofit OLPC announced that 50 percent of staff were being laid off and a major restructuring was under way. To even its most ardent supporters, the project seems nearly dead in the water.

And that may be great news for children in the developing world.

Read full story here

To close the digital divide systematically, see:

• 20 yrs IT reality check
  
• Beyond chalk and talk
• ICT-IT harmonised

Does IT Improve Academic Achievement?

A point made by these researchers: recent large-scale efforts to increase computer access for disadvantaged children around the world happens without paying sufficient attention to how parental oversight affects a child's computer use.

Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital
By: O. Malamud, Univ. of Chicago / C. Pop-Eleches, Colombia Univ.

Key findings from the 2009 report include the following:
Computer use was mostly focused on games displacing the time for home work and reading:
- significantly lower schoolgrades in `Maths, English and Romanian
- significantly higher scores in computer skills and fluency

Find a downloadable pdf here
And a review in Slate web magazine here

Alex Tabarrok posted on the website Marginal Revolution, September 11, 2009, on the issue First debug the child, then the computer. We quote from the comments:

High schools in South Dakota have had access to a state-aided program to provide kids with laptops for school use (they don't get to keep them). The school here tried to put as much of the curriculum as possible on them. They've found out that (surprise) kids may not take proper care of them or use them approriately; in fact the first year of the program at our school saw a huge increase in kids failing classes because they were using the computers for everything but homework. Maintenance costs have also proven to be a budget buster; replacing a broken computer is a lot more expensive than replacing a damaged book, and some parents have said "you're making them use it; you pay for it".

Posted by: mikesdak at Sep 11, 2009 3:16:51 PM

Read it here

To close the digital divide systematically, see:

• 20 yrs IT in reality
  
• Sound pedagogy
• Visual teaching

Impression: Are ICT Investments in Schools Wasted?

The debate left Yama Ploskonka duly confused - an appropriate state of mind for anyone considering honest investment in ICT for education... since FOR was “against” investment, seeing it as a waste, and vice versa, sometimes adding multiple negatives…

Live Debate Impression New Dehli, 21 April, 2010
Allen brings the negative together as follows:

What struck me about the affirmative was the lack of any reference to history. It's not as if computers in education are a new idea although the advent of the Internet seems to have resulted in a case of amnesia regarding that historical fact. The first computer system explicitly designed for use in education was the Plato system designed by the University of Illinois in...wait for it...1960.

Since then there have been an endless parade of projects to use computers in education and to be blunt, they've all failed. Some have failed spectacularly, others have simply not lived up to the promises made and implied at their start and in a few cases the measure of success has been sufficiently vague as to defy attempts to apply the success or failure label. But in terms of demonstrating lower costs or greater educational attainment I don't believe there's any reason to equivocate. Failure from start to finish.

It would seem to me that this historical reality would be a well-nigh insurmountable obstacle to those advancing projects which propose to improve education via the use of computers and yet it does not seem to be so. Despite a uniform, and very expensive, history of failure new projects are continuously launched as if each is the first to attempt to improve education via the use of computers. Were I on the affirmative I would simply have reprised that history and challenged the opposition to offer some reason to believe that the new projects, indistinguishable except in detail from any that preceded, will succeed where all its predecessors have failed.

You post a false choice Yama
The false dilemma results from assuming that there's no down side to funding the use of computers in education so might as well. It's a choice between funding the use of computers and *not* building some bridge or road or some other project.

Exactly! This blog presents arguments and reports experiences and research to point out the danger of e-learning in poorly prepared settings. Computer technology has to be introduced, which goes without saying, but only through use of tested procedures, proven to work. Like this, money can be saved to build roads to the future, removing critical barriers at the start. 
-----------------------------

To close the digital divide systematically, see:

• ICT-IT harmonised
  
• 20 yrs IT in reality
• Sound pedagogy

Key constraints & waste in educational technology

Please check the Key constraints on pages 10 to 18, see below some key constraints. Will they be prominent in the debate and final policy advice, or just be ignored? Should these constraints be targeted first in every systematic strategy to bridge the digital divide?

from:
Survey of ICT in Education in India and South Asia
Price Waterhouse Coopers India - commissioned by InfoDev, 2010

Launched in New Dehli with the debate: 'Most investment in technology in schools is wasted.' A live debate web-casted around the world 20-21 April. A InfoDef - UNESCO event
Curriculum & Content Development

e.g. page 10
Key constraints in developing relevant content:
• lack of IT professionals in the country
• lack of funding, infrastructure and resources
• lack of local content development initiatives
• no clear defined standards for digital educational contentno focus on digital content • in traditional curriculum areas

e.g. page 12
Key constraints in effective use of ICT for professional development:
• teacher attitudes towards ICT
• lack of relevant content
• lack of access to computers and the Internet after school
• lack of adequate funding and resources
• lack of training focusing on pedagogical innovation and learner-centered strategies

Here preliminary results Survey ICTs for Education
in India and South Asia

To close the digital divide systematically, see:

• ICT-IT harmonised
  
• 20 yrs IT in reality
• Sound pedagogy

Bleak impact of IT on learning

infoDev is a global development financing programme co-ordinated and serviced by the Global ICT Department (GICT) of the World Bank. InfovDev rarely consider low-tech ICT applications such as school radio, TV or the overhead projector as serious options, even when the implementation of new technologies are likely, or better: doomed to fail. In a Briefing Paper five years ago infoDev summed up what is debatable about much classroom use of ICT to support learning and is soon to host a debate in Delhi on the theme of 'Most investment in technology in schools is wasted.'

Briefing Paper
Impact of ICT on Learning and Achievement

A Knowledge Map of Information & Communication Technologies in Education

It is generally believed that ICT can empower teachers and learners, promote change and foster the development of ‘21st century skills' but data to support these beliefs is still limited.

Download the full text here

Read also 20 years of IT in education and Silver bullets

A white elephant in Uganda

Get your country, schools and teachers ready before introducing computer assisted teaching and learning in the classroom - see our 'IT and ICT harmonised'. Too many things can go wrong!
From:

Uganda lays wrong ICT cable
By Vision Reporter, Sunday, 4th April, 2010

UGANDA is laying the wrong fibre optic cable for the national backbone infrastructure - local and international experts have said. 


Uganda is using the G652 type whereas it should be using G655 for the kind of data Uganda will need to transmit. 


But despite instructions from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Parliament to halt the second phase until the technical issues have been resolved, the Chinese company, Huawei Technologies, has refused to stop. 


Every day the works continue, the company is using up more of the $106m (sh212b) for what experts say will prove to be a 'white elephant'. 



Read the full story here

Read more on policy advices to introduce IT and ICT harmonised, at manageble cost

Educational Technology Debate - India

About the need for a fundamental rethink
organised by InfoDev (World Bank) and UNESCO.

From: InfoDev April 2010

'Most investment in technology in schools is wasted.' Discuss.
On 21 April, 2010 Infodev launched its Survey of Information and Communication Technology for Education in India & South Asia. The launch in Delhi (India) was marked with a Oxford Union style debate on the motion: 'Most investment in technology in schools is wasted.'

The goal of the contributors will be to persuade the audience to reach one of two conclusions:
1. Most current investment is being wasted and needs a fundamental rethink (FOR the motion)
2. Existing schemes are already bearing fruit and need only ongoing support (AGAINST the motion).

More information here