Laptops in schools

I know some readers of this blog live in the West. I would greatly appreciate it if you could share your practical experience on the following issue: How important or crucial is a laptop for a school kid in your country? If it is important, at what age does it become important? 5, 10 or 15?

It's entirely possible that a laptop may not be all that important, since the students have access to a PC with internet connection at home. I realize also that some of their homework may involve the use of online resources. But my question is about the need for a laptop that a child carries with her to school. If you have any insights, please share them with us.

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I'm sure you are able to guess that this request is really about the OLPC. Some of you may recall that our Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) produced a stinging report rejecting the laptops from the OLPC project. One of the things it said is pertinent:

It also finds it intriguing as to "why no developed country has been chosen" for MIT's OLPC experiment "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group". [bold emphasis added]

Sidebar Links:

NYTimes: Third World stirs big debate

Slashdot discussion of True cost of OLPC

OLPC News has an on-going coverage -- extensive, definitive -- of this initiative.

Negroponte: Rich nations may sponsor $100 laptops.

Via Reddit, I came across this interesting WaPo story about the use of laptops in a school in Alexandria, Virginia. The overwhelming impression I get from this story is that this laptops-for-kids business needs a lot of work to make it succeed -- the kind of work that will need a lot more money than the current price of 138 dollars per machine (in fact, there are some wild estimates for the cost of this product over its lifetime; also see this post). And, much of this effort is going to be in training the teachers:

"I think they made the realization that they may have put the cart before the horse," said G.A. Hagen, a technology resource teacher at T.C. Williams. "It was like, 'Okay, teacher, here's the laptop -- go with it,' and [teachers] were like, 'What do you mean, go with it? Is there a Web site I go to?' "

Nearly all T.C. Williams teachers have been trained on Blackboard. They will be required to make their courses available on the system by Jan. 8 and to use the program regularly by June. [...]

... [S]ome teachers say they have felt pressured to emphasize laptops, even when using them might not be the best approach.

"You absolutely have to show that you're using them in some way, shape or form," math teacher Mercedes Huffman said. Sometimes, she said, students "have benefited from certain things I can do with a computer that I couldn't do before."

But Huffman said computers can be less efficient than paper in a discipline that often requires writing out problems or drawing figures. "There've been times when a geometry class said, 'Couldn't we have just done this on paper?' "

Another teacher, who did not want to be named for fear of angering administrators, said: "There's a big drive now to get everyone to do as much as possible on the computer. There's a real divide between those who see the computers as an end in itself and those who see them as a tool."

To be fair, the WaPo story does point to some positives. My point is not just to highlight the negatives; it is to indicate that there are all these other issues that need to be addressed before computers -- not just OLPC -- are introduced into our classrooms.

My fundamental complaint against the OLPC in the Indian context remains valid. Our government spends about Rs. 4,000 to 5,000 per child per year. This expenditure is roughly equivalent to seven tenths of an OLPC laptop! In other words, the cost of a million of these little monsters is the same as educating 1.38 million kids a year. A country which has roughly 40 % of its kids out of its school system should not be wasting its resources on a fancy gadget of questionable educational value.

This complaint does not apply to richer countries, that have achieved the goal of having all its children in good schools with teachers, classrooms, blackboards, desks, toilets, and other infrastructure. You know, countries like the US, UK, Sweden or Japan. Which brings me back to the question that I started with: How important are laptops for school kids in these countries?

Many thanks in advance for sharing your insights.

Understanding != Encouragement

By striving to understand violence unleashed by the most oppressed sections of our society, one is not condoning or encouraging it. Considering that Dalit uprising or violence is something that's almost unheard of -- even under repeated and extreme provocations from all over the country -- shouldn't we try to get a grip on what drove the Maharashtra Dalits to resort to violence 'this time'? What, in other words, is different 'this time'?

Here's an Outlook report by Smruti Koppikar:

For weeks since news of the [Khairlanje] incident spread word-of-mouth, political as well as non-political Dalit activists, scattered and disparate Dalit groups in small towns and cities, discussed little else. They waited for two independent democratic institutions—the executive and the press—to join the battle on their behalf. The executive was, in fact, involved in an elaborate cover-up while the press—even the Marathi press—ignored it as yet another Dalit story from some indescribable village. In the end, they themselves joined the battle—not in some pre-meditated manner led by leaders but outbursts by mobs, some with political leaders at the helm but most without any leadership.

... Call it a warped sense of vigilante justice, or an extreme temper tantrum to seek attention, or whatever else, the fact is that if it weren't for that rage on full national display, Khairlanje would have remained that forgotten village on the map even for those men who had taken oath to protect its inhabitants. Is it easy to condemn rage that eventually woke up a slumbering government and large, insensitive sections of the media? ...

... Protests do not come in pre-determined packs that can be picked off shelves in glittering malls across urban India. The Dalit rage is yet another reminder that there's an India that remains on the pavements outside these very malls, an India that stands excluded. As Gaddar, the well-known Naxal poet, once said: "My anger is rough, my words are rough because my life is coarse and so is my language". Condemn the violence by all means but not before you ask what escalated it to such a scale. ...

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Meanwhile, in the Hindu, Ranjit Hoskote focuses his attention on the press coverage, not just of the recent violence, but also of Dalit issues in general:

While this writer would in no way condone the November violence, this climate of misinformation and non-debate once again demonstrates the extent to which Dalits remain the intractable, feared and hated `Other' for articulate, bourgeois, overwhelmingly upper-and middle-caste India. The situation is not improved by the fact that the reportage of Dalit issues is regarded as a specialist interest in large sectors of the mainstream media — somewhat like ornithology or marine biology, as though one were studying another species altogether.

Hoskote's above comment comes after he makes these observations:

If the reactions of many articulate urban Indians in the afternoon papers and on the television channels are any index, the violence that rocked Maharashtra in the last week of November was no more than an intolerable disruption of the public peace by a `minority' community.

No matter that the Dalits who came out on the streets in large numbers represent a significant majority of India's oppressed masses; and that they were protesting, not only the desecration of a statue of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar in Kanpur, but also the official apathy towards the public humiliation and murder of a Dalit family in the village of Khairlanji in eastern Maharashtra, followed by the brutal police repression of the protests that met this apathy.

The same voice of public opinion that maintains a tactful silence when the right-wing Shiv Sena burns buses, wrecks cars and snarls the traffic in Maharashtra was shrill with indignation at the manner in which the Dalits had burned compartments of the Deccan Queen. The same TV anchors, who have never dared to ask Bal Thackeray why his goon squads have held Mumbai to ransom for decades until their recent eclipse, rebuked Dalit spokespersons with leading questions on the impropriety and intransigence of their outrage. Some media commentators have invoked the spectre of `Dalit violence' in print and on screen, citing the urban warfare of the Dalit Panthers in the 1970s and the conflicts surrounding the renaming of Marathwada University after Dr. Ambedkar in the 1980s. As though, in each decade, the Dalits had manifested their `natural' propensity for violence in some imaginative way.

Curiously, these wise observers glossed the stridently anti-Dalit mobilisations of the Shiv Sena, which had, in each case, provoked these Dalit responses; few wish to recall the absolute refusal of upper-and middle-caste forces in Maharashtra, between the 1970s and the 1990s, to allow Dalits any share in the region's symbolic capital.

1984!

I went to the US for my graduate studies in 1985; for the next several years, during the SuperBowl Championship games, people would look at me -- and others like me -- with a lot of pity. The reason? We had the not so singular misfortune of having never seen the Macintosh ad that was aired just once during the 1984 SuperBowl. And never again.

I have always felt a little void in my soul because of this ... this gap in my cultural development. Not any more.

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All right. I should have realized a long time ago that it was available on YouTube. Anyways, I'm glad I found it now; even at low res, it's awesome. More importantly, I feel liberated!

BTW, if you are a fan of the 80s' American pop culture, you can get nostalgic all over again at these two compilations of ads from that era.

Nalanda

This is news to me:

AT a summit meeting of leaders next week in the Philippines, senior officials from India, Singapore, Japan and perhaps other countries are scheduled to discuss the revival of an ancient university in India called Nalanda.

While the author, Yale's Jeffrey Garten, does go on to say a lot of stuff about this proposed initiative, the column is more about how Asian leaders aren't thinking big:

But the bigger issue is imagination and willpower. It is not clear that the Asian nations are prepared to unite behind anything concrete except trade agreements, either for their benefit or the world’s. It appears doubtful that with all their economic prowess, and their large armies, they understand that real power also comes from great ideas and from people who generate them, and that truly great universities are some of their strongest potential assets. I would like to be proved wrong in these judgments. How Asia approaches the resurrection of Nalanda will be a good test.

"It is worth trying to understand why"

P. Sainath on how the Mumbai media handled "an event that speaks to the hearts of people":

... There was no effort to look at why it is the poor and the dispossessed who come here. No mention that this was a man with a Ph.D from Columbia University who returned to lead what is today the greatest battle for human dignity on planet earth.

There was little journalistic curiosity over what brings 85-year-olds with just two rotis in their hands all the way from Mhow in Madhya Pradesh to Dadar in Mumbai. People for whom the journey means both hardship and hunger. Musicians and poets who perform through the day for nothing. Hard-up authors who print books and pamphlets at their own cost for their fellows. And yet make the trip — driven by their hearts and drawn by the hope of a noble vision as yet unfulfilled. A casteless world.

Which other national leader commands this respect 50 years after his death? Let alone when alive? Why are there more statues of Ambedkar in India's villages than those of any other leader the country has ever seen? His statues are not government installed — unlike those of many others. The poor put them up at their own expense. Whether in Tamil Nadu or Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra or Orissa, see whose portraits can be found in the humblest of huts. It's worth trying to understand why.

See Harini's post to get a better idea about the biased way in which the press covered this massive congregation in Mumbai.

QOTD

The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin.

This is sort of like the quote we saw in this post, no?

Unreasonable persistence of mothers' influence on their sons

Did you know that, for men, the ratio of the length of the second digit (aka the index finger) to that of the fourth (the ring finger) is correlated inversely with level of testosterone they were exposed to in the womb? I didn't either.

Now, get this: "the dancing men with the lower 2D:4D ratio [i.e., those with a greater testosterone exposure] were rated by the women as significantly more attractive, dominant and masculine."

Our Prime Minister on globalization

In a speech at a conference organized by the LSE-Asia Forum, Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh pays his tributes to the late Prof. I.G. Patel, reminisces about the exciting academia-government interactions during the early post-Independence days, talks about Asia's rise, and finally, challenges academics to solve important problems in the political economy of globalization. All in all, a great speech. While I urge you to read all of it, let me just give an extract, where Dr. Singh talks about those exciting days immediately after Independence:

The 1950s and the Sixties were a unique period in our developmental history. There was great interaction between officials in government and scholars in academia, both scholars from India and abroad.

We had several distinguished economists like Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, I M D Little, W B Reddaway and Daniel Thorner who spent time at the Planning Commission. There was always a two way flow of talent between institutions like the Delhi School of Economics and the Indian Statistical Institute and the various ministries of our government.

This interaction enriched the quality of academic research, making it more policy-oriented, and also contributed to creative thinking within government. It has become fashionable of late to deride everything that was done in the realm of economic policy in those days. There are critics both on the Left and the Right. However, to be fair and honest, one must recognize that the early years after India's Independence were exciting times. Under the inspiring leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, a new generation of our countrymen tried to write on a blank slate and create a new State. The Indian economists were active participants in the national debate to build a new India free from the fear of want and exploitation.

There was much experimentation, since there were no known methodologies available for the construction of a new post-colonial nation. The political and intellectual atmosphere was charged with intense debate and discussion. Bold visions of a brave new world were being created on paper. IG was one of the many idealistic young economists who chose to participate in that great adventure of nation building.

Note the way Dr. Singh manages to get both Milton Friedman and the Planning Commission in the same sentence!

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Okay, I can't resist quoting another section of the speech:

Economics began, after all, as political economy. Economic policy making has always involved political choices since it has political consequences. IG belonged to a generation that recognized this ground reality. He knew that the choices our economists were recommending for adoption by the country had to be marketed in the political marketplace of democracy. It was not enough that these choices were rational, or that their costs and benefits could be measured. It was not enough that the arguments were intellectually consistent or were mathematically tested. In a democracy such choices had to be also politically defendable and acceptable.

Economics of blogging

A breezy take by Michael Blowhard. He has a snappy conclusion:

Economically speaking, what do you make of the blogosphere? My own contribution: There's a lot more to life than economics knows how to account for.

Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.

AT&T reached out ...

... and touched the future. In 1993.

Thanks to Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber for the pointer.

What is Bayes's theorem?

Scientific American explains what the theorem is all about (and does it well), and explores what it can say about the existence of god. This is how it begins:

A patient goes to see a doctor. The doctor performs a test with 99 percent reliability--that is, 99 percent of people who are sick test positive and 99 percent of the healthy people test negative. The doctor knows that only 1 percent of the people in the country are sick. Now the question is: if the patient tests positive, what are the chances the patient is sick?

The intuitive answer is 99 percent, but the correct answer is 50 percent, and Bayes's theorem gives us the relationship between what we know and what we want to know in this problem. ...

Economics and physics

I have already written about the not so happy consequences of physicists' forays into the economic realm ('econophysics'). The last several weeks has brought us several interesting run-ins between these fields. The latest episode started with Robin Hanson's grouse:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

He has already received several responses, including one from a physicist: Sean Carroll. If you have some free minutes, start from there and work through the links.

Remember I linked to Chris Hayes' article on what else one learns in an economics course? This led to several interesting discussions, one of which made this analogy:

... While [chemistry and physics are] historically separate disciplines, there's a sense in which chemistry can be thought of as a subset of physics -- we understand chemical reactions on a deep level because we understand the physics of how subatomic particles interact. There is knowledge that's a part of chemistry that wouldn't conventionally be thought of as part of physics, but it can be thought of as studying aggregated interactions that are themselves part of physics. To the extent that chemistry is supported by valid theory, the theory rests on our understanding of physics. [...]

... [I]t appears obvious to me that a solid theoretical underpinning for economics would have to come from psychology; the relationship between economics and psychology is precisely analogous to the relationship between chemistry and physics, in that the first is the study of aggregated behavior (in a particular context) of elements whose behavior is described by the second. And this is a problem for those claiming that important new knowlege is likely to come out of manipulation of mathematical models in economics, because psychology isn't currently in a state where it can provide the sort of solid predictions about human behavior that would be necessary to support those models. In factual situation X, if you ask an academic psychologist "What will person Y do?" the honest answer will be "Beats me, could do Z, could do something else, depends." But economic theory depends on claims that "In situation X (prices go down) people generally will do Z (buy more)," even though those claims aren't dependent on any solid theory of human behavior.

Finally, Mark Thoma has been grappling with wild claims emanating from the econophysics zone: here and here. This kind of 'attacks' from outside has made Mark defend his turf, examine what economists can learn from evolutionary theorists, and re-examine the methodological foundations. As you can guess, Mark is one of my favourite econ bloggers.

Finance Minister on higher education in India

In an Economic Times op-ed (excerpted from his Convocation Address at Symbiosis International University), P. Chidambaram says:

... [T]he number of universities and deemed universities has increased from a mere 30 in 1950-51 to 177 in 1990-91 and to nearly 300 now. The rapid expansion, to a large extent, is owing to the entry of the private sector in the field of education. At one end are colleges established and funded by trusts, charities and philanthropists; at the other are self-financing institutions where the motive is profit. Both have a place in society and both should be welcomed. In fact, the endeavour should be to create space for new models and novel efforts so that many more millions of students get the opportunity to pursue higher education. ...

After making a strong case for doubling the number of students in the 'tertiary sector' (er, in our colleges and universities) from the current 11 million, Chidambaram goes on to highlight some of the "bold" initiatives by the present UPA government:

Firstly, it has decided that all central and aided educational institutions will be required to increase their capacity by 54% over a period of three years. Government also intends to allow foreign educational institutions to offer courses in India independently or in collaboration with Indian institutions. The Knowledge Commission has been set up to look into the issue of building quality human capital.

Has the government really done enough?

Advantages of being discoverable

When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.

Cory Doctorow on the economics of free online publishing.

The Hindu editorial on the recent violence in Maharashtra

... While the arson and damage caused to public property cannot be condoned and sit oddly with the principles of non-violence Dr.B.R. Ambedkar enjoined on his followers, the real reasons that made Dalit men, women, and even children come out and protest need to be understood. The protests were not just a reaction to one incident — the desecration of Dr. Ambedkar's statue in Kanpur or even the Maharashtra government's inexcusably slow response to the bestial killing in Khairlanji of four members of the Bhotmange family. The outburst of fury is a consequence of years of frustration over the indifference of the government, the ineffectiveness of the Dalit political leadership, and exclusion from the benefits of the new, globalised economy successive governments have been promoting.

The editorial goes on to suggest that the State of Maharashtra set up a commission (similar to the Rajinder Sachar Commission) to "assess how far benefits and entitlements have actually helped the most oppressed segment of the Indian population", and follow it up with "a package of meaningful and progressive measures, combined with a determined effort to deal with the perpetrators of atrocities against Dalits."