What should we do...

Technology could really help with improving one of the most important cognitive skills of the human brain, which is how to process the written word quickly and effectively. What I mean is, how could we enable children to more quickly and effectively learn to read well. Well means both understanding the correct sense of the word they are reading, and also the sense of the entire passage they are reading.

This is especially challenging in a text-scarce environment like an African village. There are few signs, no newspapers lying around, the packages in little boutiques are "behind the counter", there are no Sears catalogues, no Boy's Life, etc.

So, should we choose One Laptop per Child, or a printed book, at this juncture, 2009?

The continuing saga of the One Laptop per Child....

Just send a $250 donation to FAVL, please... we'll get it into libraries straightaway...

Courtesy of Michele ODI blogger, in Ghana:

Five 1.5 squared meters boxes containing 600 OLPC computers each, for a total of 3000 OLPC computers, were delivered yesterday at the ministry unbeknown to most.

OLPCs are supposed to cost $100 each, but according to my ICT technician their cost is more like $250 - $270. Summing up to the handsome expenditure of $750.000 - $810.000, excluding shipment. And their impact on educational outcomes has never been evaluated.

Great posting on the One Laptop per Child

Of course the same could be said of many a library project. Human personnel and incentives are critical.

At the end of the day I am still asking myself if the computers are worth the money spent on them. The cost of the laptops was about $2300, enough to pay the tuition for 23 students for a year. Jes and I plan on using them occasionally, but I suspect that after we leave they will be relegated back to the stockroom. The computer teacher may use them to illustrate networking, but without commercial software, he can’t use them regularly in his classes. I am afraid that in the case of MCV the tech project has failed. In many ways the OPLC laptops at MCV illustrate why high-tech projects are so risky. The computer required charging, a difficult proposition with intermittent power, no converters, few plugs, and no power strips. The laptop design also failed to accommodate the population to which they were given. These inconveniences, combined with a lack of prerequisite computer knowledge, doomed the project and wasted thousands of dollars. This example would seem to demonstrate why appropriate technology should be embraced and high-tech projects dismissed. However, living in Malawi I have been exposed to a perspective which also should be given credence.

Read more...

HT: Kim Dionne... great blog!

Computers in school... wish they had done a "book treatment" too...

From tukopamoja:

In The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia, by Felipe Barrera-Osorio and Leigh L. Linden, the authors examine a program that

aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have had little effect on students’ test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum.

Two thoughts on this:

1. This reminds us - and I’d say “as if we needed reminding” except that we do - that you cannot just dump inputs into schools and expect changes. If inputs don’t get used well, they don’t matter. Even though this seems like a no-brainer, many development programs are very narrow: build a school or give some books or …. Same problem, I’m afraid.
2. That said, a quick look at the tables suggests to me that the authors may be confusing a noisy result with a narrowly bound zero result. In other words, there seem to be differences in outcomes between kids who got computers and those who didn’t, but there is so much variation in both groups that we cannot be sure. What this really means is that we don’t know if there is an effect, that there might be a heterogeneous effect, or there might not. (Either way, clearly this program wasn’t a raging success.)

Reading with books or on computer screens?

Clearly the technology is converging (e.g. Kindle) and it will only be a decade before there is digital paper. But for right now, the issue is relevant.

Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen, According to Expert
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008)

"Swedish researchers believe we understand more and better when reading on paper than when we read the same text on a screen. We avoid navigating and the small things we don't think about, but which subconsciously takes attention away from the reading. Also texts on a screen are often not adapted to the screen format. The most important difference is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."

Mangen has mainly been looking at hypertext stories. These stories exploit the multimedia possibilities of a computer and use both hypertext, video, sound, pictures and text. They are constructed in such a way that clicking one's way around them comes close to a literary computer game.

As a researcher, Mangen is interested in the physical aspect of reading and applies theories from psychology and phenomenology linked to the relationships between motor functions and attention in order to highlight the difference between reading a novel and a hypertext story.

"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else," Mangen says.

Read more...

The wonders of technology never cease...

I am way too cynical for my own good... but whenever I see articles like these, I keep thinking of my own son, whom I can't get to listen to an audiobook on the Ipod... he'd rather read it. There's a place for everything. And I'd love to have these tried out in the libraries in Ghana. But the premise really is a little strange... I mean, radios already do this... and they've been working well for like 100 years... and Christian groups are giving away little MP3 players with bibles on them all over the world... and Fry's sells a little MP3 player for like $9.95... well, this one so does have a cool design...

From International Reading Association blog...

Literacy Bridge begins testing Talking Books in Ghana

February 12, 2009

Think Kindle is exciting? Take a look at this book that talks, was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10. Seattle-based non-profit Literacy Bridge launched its pilot program Wednesday, February 11, 2009, to test dozens of its Talking Books in Ghana. The digital audio player and recorder is designed as a tool to teach literacy when used with textbooks, and help rural people who can't read get access to information.

The man behind the project is Cliff Schmidt, a former Microsoft program manager who studied artificial intelligence and thought a lot about how literacy can play a role in moving people out of poverty. He left Microsoft to form Literacy Bridge.

In a place like Ghana, Schmidt thinks having spoken information at hand will help people avoid lengthy trips to visit clinics or other offices. Next he hopes to use the Talking Books to reach women in Afghanistan (90% of whom are illiterate), but ideally the device could be used anywhere in the world. Read more in The Seattle Times online.

It ain't easy...

In my continuing series of efforts to reorient tech-happy tercermondialistas to "give books a chance..."

Why not make an solar-powered LED projector powered that can project microfilm literacy lessons on the wall and then literacy instructors can teach at night in villages without electricity? Why not! Seems doable, with enough MIT brainpower etc. So Design that Matters is doing it, (project name: Kinkajou). They have a $500,000 grant from USAID to field test the apparatus in 45 literacy centers in Mali. Looks cool and great. The one comment from their field visit that caught my eye was that several of the literacy instructors had apparently never bothered to take the solar panels out of the box... Hey, it's schadenfreude all the way down, baby.

Another aside... when I spent an enjoyable week in the Sudan Archives at Durham, I came across an archived box of glass "lantern slides" in beautiful color. So what's deeply curious and slightly delicious about kinkajou is that

(1) the instructors and students in Mali are all using kerosene lanterns to read their adult literacy books and notebooks (Aside. A guess: each person in the adult literacy class probably has one book? And just one book?)
(2) a technology (the so-called magic lantern and see here for how to build) has been around for 400 years to use a kerosene lamp to project images on a wall
(3) and nobody in the village has ever used that
(4) but they're jumping straight to LEDs and solar panels.

I wonder whether USAID would fund a project that proposed to create a set of 100 glass slides of literacy lessons and 45 kerosene-burning magic lanterns, with a project cost of maybe $1,000. They'd say it was too dangerous. PS: A lantern that you can make at home.