NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010
Laptops Work
This article is part of Can Technology End Poverty?, a forum on the role of information and communication technology in global development.
It is a great shame that such an important debate concerning technology and development follows so obfuscating a lead article.
When I started One Laptop per Child (OLPC) in 2004, I said that owning a connected laptop would help eliminate poverty through education, especially for the 70 million children who have no access whatsoever to schools. I still believe this. But what I have learned since—with two million laptops in 40 countries—is that reducing isolation is an even bigger issue, and that goal will be achieved with technology and only with technology. And not just Microsoft’s: the technology I have in mind is free and open software; no-cost, ubiquitous communications; and laptops or tablets that use so little power that you can charge them with a shake. (By the way, all of our two million laptops in the field today can run Windows, but fewer than a thousand do; the buyers or users have chosen Linux instead.)
Kentaro Toyama is coming from the wrong place, literally and metaphorically. Whenever you see the acronym ICT (information and communication technologies), you can be sure that it reflects an old mindset, from an era when computers were merely the tools of productivity, and primarily used by corporations and government. Ever referred to Facebook as “ICT”? Telecenters are ICT galore, dropped into villages in a patronizing manner for development—4D. Of course they don’t work. Cell phones do work, and there are almost five billion of them.
To lump computers with guns and television, calling them all technology, is naïve at best. Computers are different. They are innately a constructionist medium; you can program them to have behaviors, multiple behaviors. You don’t simply consume or use them for a special purpose. Furthermore, development of any sort—for anybody, rich or poor—is so dependent on the Internet that connectivity is indeed becoming a human right. It is recognized as such by Greece, France, Finland, Spain, and Estonia, and Costa Rica’s supreme court recently affirmed the same.
I was traveling to India five to six times per year when telecenters were being built. Their proponents’ arguments at the time revolved around electronic government: e.g., getting your driver’s license without a five-hour bus ride and another five-hour wait. But driver’s licenses are renewed infrequently. E-government was the last thing on the minds of rural Indians. Alternatively, OLPC triggers communitywide capacity building. Laptops arrive, and generators-for-hire appear, or suddenly, as in Rwanda, the school is electrified. In Peru and Paraguay, local, independent software developers and repair shops start popping up. Laptops get children, their families, their teachers, and governments thinking on new trajectories—every day.
Think of computers differently. Think of them as a medium for learning, as opposed to a medium for teaching. I literally mean that the computer is learning and you (or a child) are teaching it. The best way to learn something is to teach it. Writing a computer program is the most direct way to teach a computer. Since a computer program never works the first time, the user—in this case, a child—has to debug it, to try again, to look at the program’s behavior, iterate, and finally succeed. That process is the closest a child will ever come to understanding how to learn, to learn learning.
At the OLPC launch in Tunis in 2005, Kofi Annan put it this way: “With these tools in hand, children can become more active in their own learning. They can learn by doing, not just through instruction or rote memorization. Moreover, they can open a new front in their education: peer-to-peer learning.”
In OLPC’s view, children are not just objects of teaching, but agents of change. Many of our kids teach their parents how to read and write. I have no better story to tell. The self-esteem of those kids, their passion for learning, their playfulness with ideas: all are transformed by being in control of and deeply engaged in their own learning.
How do you eliminate poverty? The answer is simple: education. How do you provide education? The answer is less simple. It requires more than school, especially in countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan, where 50 percent of the kids do not attend. OLPC leverages the children themselves, bringing the learning medium into their lives 24x7, at a total cost of a dollar per week (that includes buying, maintaining, and connecting the laptop).
OLPC, I admit, was at first quixotic in the extreme. I used to say to people, “Trust me, this works.” Two million laptops and an entire netbook industry later, you do not have to take my word for it. Every pupil in Uruguay has a connected laptop. Peru and Rwanda are soon to follow. Peru has almost a million laptops, nearly all of them in the most remote villages. Our next country, we hope, is Afghanistan, where the United States spends two billion dollars per week on war and two million on education. Huh? Were President Obama to move 0.5 percent from column A to column B, every child could have a connected laptop in less than eighteen months.
Toyama summarizes his argument: “Technology—no matter how well-designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute” (emphasis original). What is he thinking, “a substitute”? And “magnify” is a funny word. It means the enlargement of something that already exists. Imagine I take a five-year-old from the most rural part of India and drop her in Paris for a year. She will speak French by the end of that year. Did Paris magnify her knowledge of French? No. It created it from her potential to learn language. Likewise the computer. It can enable learning from the potential to learn.
Toyama continues, “Few of us would choose PC-based education for our own children.” True, but all of us who can afford a laptop buy one for our kids. Why not do so for poor kids? What about places where there are no teachers or schools? Sure, build schools and train teachers. That will take a long time. For now, spend the dollar a week to buy connected laptops for children who can then teach each other.
People look at bad interventions and judge technology (in general) to be bad. That is gibberish. Forty-four years ago, Robert Kennedy told an audience of thousands of students in South Africa:
Everywhere new technology and communications bring men and nations closer together, the concerns of one inevitably becoming the concerns of all. And our new closeness is stripping away the false masks, the illusion of difference which is at the root of injustice and hate and war.
The new technologies that Kennedy talked and dreamed of can now connect every child on the planet to each other and to the world’s knowledge. Those technologies hold both the promise of education and an end to isolation. And they hold the promise of a world in which the excuses of ignorance and misunderstanding are no longer acceptable, of a future generation that is more tolerant, more just, and more peaceful than our own.
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About the Author
Nicholas Negroponte is founder and Chairman of the OLPC Foundation and Professor at the MIT Media Lab, of which he is cofounder.
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Can Technology End Poverty?, a forum on the potential of ICT for global development.
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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32390/32390-h/32390-h.htm
What does technology have to do with PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE? When do our scientists talk about that?
In other words, we can't divorce soft human factors from the equation. Take television, for example. It DOES have tremendous educational potential, but look at how it has been exploited by programmers and how it has become more of an enabler for passive absorption of Western values. Indeed, it's so bad we won't allow one in our house. Internet access isn't so different, I'm afraid.
And, you argue that students in developing countries will bide their computer time actually programming? That is laughable. I'd like to see stats showing how computer time is really used.
Negroponte also has a really valid point that technology also enables the rise of new conditions and possibilities that did not exist before. The separation that Toyama makes between intent/capability and its magnification is, in some cases, forced and unrealistic.
In regards to Alan's statement about not having a television, of course television and internet access can have undesirable impacts, although you probably should not deprive your kids of neither of them as they will miss out on great chunks of our culture... I am sure you won't disagree that there are good movies and documentaries.
A huge problem however in Toyama's argument (although I truly believe that there is a lot of truth in what he writes about, although it needs to be better defined and expressed) is this idea that we can tell a priori what the conditions are that are going to be magnified by technology. In our Western economic powerhouses (quoting Toyama) we did not make those considerations as technology was arising, and a lot of our economic strength came from the original ways in which those emerging technologies were appropriated beyond their intended functionality.
Another point where I believe Toyama is not completely honest is when he says that technology amplifies differences between rich and poor, for instance with the example of public libraries having computer access, because poor people do not have sufficient time to profit from these. True, but wealthier people might have the technology anyways, beyond the public library and so the real question is... although technology in general might be an amplifier for differences, ICT4D projects might help to slow down the widening of that gap. Because ICT4D can do little or nothing regarding technology access and usage by the wealthier segments of our population.
And you actually help provide me the opportunity to clarify my original point - which I'm afraid was lost in my admittedly flip (and hence cringeworthy) initial response: Simply providing the tools and an open conduit isn't sufficient because chances are they'll miss the culturally-valuable programming anyway.
It is just as likely - or more likely in fact - that providing them a laptop and internet connection (or the endlessly-exercised mobile phone) that they will fill their time watching huge quantities of junk being broadcast (incidentally, they have access to all of the above devices, so I'm writing from experience).
I'm just saying such access is a two-edged sword and requires thoughtfulness if we are to obtain the potential benefits.
Can a parallel be drawn to development? My understanding of what Toyama is saying is that technology is a tool that can be used for good or bad depending on the context.
What I was trying to get at with my previous post's title is that technology isn't what is scarce these days...it is wisdom...the wisdom to use the technology to enhance our individual and global well-being.
Unless we focus on that intention as the pre-condition/contextualizer for deployment schemes, then we're (dangerously) compromising the possible outcomes by simply exposing people to a highly ambivalent tool.
Medicine can heal, but it can also poison if taken improperly. We owe it to the beneficiaries to provide both tools and technique to fit their specific contexts (like a doctor/patient relationship), and that requires nuanced understanding and investment far beyond relying upon assumptions that technology will liberate and empower simply through exposure.
"Laptops arrive, and generators-for-hire appear, or suddenly, as in Rwanda, the school is electrified" Magic the school is electrified, and at no cost of course. But wait why would you need electricity in the first place ? As it's said :"and laptops or tablets that use so little power that you can charge them with a shake"
Because in reality you have to plug your laptops in an electrical plug. That's a bit of reality Mr Negroponte do not want to grasp.
But some times even in the most remote dream a bit of reality slip in : "OLPC leverages the children themselves, bringing the learning medium into their lives 24x7, at a total cost of a dollar per week"
Let's assume 40 children in a class it's 40*4*1=$160 more than the salary of the teacher. One laptop per child or another teacher ?
No need for a teacher: "For now, spend the dollar a week to buy connected laptops for children who can then teach each other." Magic again, put 500 children with laptops on a remote island and soon you have the most advanced civilization.
"so dependent on the Internet that connectivity is indeed becoming a human right. It is recognized as such by Greece, France, Finland, Spain, and Estonia,..." I dunno for other countries but internet is such a human right in France that a new law just passed to allow disconnection for people who would be caught downloading copyrighted movies. Who needs facts anyway when you can have magic...
Reality is that often all the technology is imposed to local communities and that it exhausts their local resources : gasoline for generator, and VSAT connectivity fees. These experiments are vacuum cleaner of local resources and they fail when people realize they do not want to pay for a stack of computer and what they need is a reliable teacher who earn enough money to not have to have a secondary work to meet month ends.
I propose Mr Negroponte goes to dreamland where the magic is and leave this filthy world which is clearly against his wonderful visions. Since early 80's he has constantly dreamed of technology as a solution for everything, and he has constantly being proved wrong by the actual facts. I guess his main quality is perseverance.
However, some arguments are interesting like the "learn learning" through a computer (though I would issue the computers to 16-18 years old to get that, not to childs).
Now, knowing that "Every pupil in Uruguay has a connected laptop", I would love to read scientific studies on the actual impact. I'd anticipate a wide majority end up "recycled" but still there are probably some things to learn there.
IMHO he'd need to spend 99% of the money on training and concrete actions instead of laptops... otherwise it will probably turn out a big waste.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Education_Team/Evaluation_Studies
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_research
Many more such studies are under way, and will be reported when completed.
"In Peru and Paraguay, local, independent software developers and repair shops start popping up." -- Huh? Where in Paraguay are these? I've spent five months there studying their OLPC deployment, and the only repair shop I know of is run by Paraguay Educa, which also deployed the laptops. And the software has been developed by them or through their outreach, as well. Don't ignore the hard work that deployments are putting in to create this capacity. It doesn't just spring fully-formed from the forehead of a community.
"Imagine I take a five-year-old from the most rural part of India and drop her in Paris for a year. She will speak French by the end of that year. Did Paris magnify her knowledge of French? No. It created it from her potential to learn language." -- No. It WOULD be created from the concerted kindness of French people in teaching her, as WELL as her ability to learn (definitely helped by her age). But if nobody talked to her for a year, or if she stayed in a community that spoke only her language within Paris, there is NO guarantee that she would learn French.
"... all of us who can afford a laptop buy one for our kids." -- My research on middle-class parents in Silicon Valley, including many who themselves work in the tech industry, indicates otherwise (forthcoming in CSCW 2011; advance copy available at http://research.morganya.org/ames-cscw11-class.pdf). Many middle-class parents have been massively restricting their children's access to technology -- including computers -- to the very ages that OLPC is targeting. (It's working-class parents who give their children more freedom with technology.)
maybe yes, probably not, and of course above all i encourage people to keep doing what they think is right in the world.
but as far as advocating/proselytizing, the conflict of interest is so blatant that people in certain situations have surely given up the right to speak authoritatively about the ethical implications of their actions. their failure to notice or recognize this only further raises a warning flag about their susceptibility to their own ambitions/interests. that's all very human, normal and understandable, but it may have implications about the clarity of their thinking in certain domains.
it's tricky, because the ones who have a conflict of interest are also often also the ones who are in a reputedly knowledgable position of one sort or another. and there are also always numerous exceptions, so perhaps many these articles fall in that category, i don't know.
but people actually doing their best guess at what is right is more important than the philosophizing about it, such as in this comment.
I should clarify that I don't believe technology can't be used in a positive way. It clearly can. My contention is that in exactly those situations that most need a boost -- where the social context works against meaningful development -- those are exactly the places where technology is unable to turn things around.
Since Mr. Negroponte is speaking primarily about technology in education, some of you may be interested in my post on technology and education here: http://edutechdebate.org/ict-in-schools/are-ict-investments-in-schools-an-education-revolution-or-fools-errand/