Obituary of the 100 Dollar Laptop

Way back in March 2014, OLPC News, which used to track all the OLPC-related news and developments, bid farewell to this pipe dream riding on poor people's money. Earlier this month, Adi Robertson penned a formal detailed obituary in The Verge: OLPC’S $100 laptop was going to change the world — Then it all went wrong. Buried deep within Robertson's essay (actually, right at its end), we find this:

There’s surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on childhood education, though. Zamora points to some case studies for individual countries, and says OLPC wants to commission more comprehensive research in the future. But the organization has mostly focused on anecdotes and distribution numbers as markers of success. “OLPC was always very averse to measuring how well they were doing versus the traditional school system,” says Gros. “There have only been a very limited number of attempts to actually measure how well students were doing with OLPC versus not, because it was very hard to do.”

Ames thinks that OLPC’s high-profile failures helped temper the hype around ed-tech programs. “There was a lot of worry that OLPC would crash and take everything with it — that there would be no funding in [educational technology], there would be no funding in tech development,” says Ames. “I think ed-tech in particular can still really draw on some of the same tropes, and hasn’t fully learned the lessons that OLPC should have taught it. But both of those spaces did have to mature to some degree, and stop being quite so naive in their tech utopianism.” Non-OLPC student laptop programs are still contentious. Maine Governor Paul LePage trashed his state’s initiative as a “massive failure” in 2016, and while it’s still running, its results have been ambiguous and difficult to measure. Mitra’s Hole-in-the-Wall project won a $1 million TED prize in 2013, but critics say he still hasn’t published any rigorous studies of its effects. Bender isn’t convinced that Mitra’s minimalist computing project proved anything. “We already knew that kids could learn to use computers. They’ve been doing that since day one,” he says. “What the project did not demonstrate is that kids could use computers for learning.”

Ames says the real question isn’t whether laptop programs help students, but whether they’re more effective than other programs competing for the same money. “I think that given unlimited funding, absolutely ... Learning about technology is very important,” she says. “That said, there’s always a tradeoff. There’s always some project that will be defunded or de-emphasized as a result of this.”

Thirteen years ago, OLPC told the world that every child should get a laptop. It never stopped to prove that they needed one.

Aakash

Akshat Rathi has a great article: Aakash is no silver bullet (it appeared -- without hyperlinks -- as an op-ed in The Hindu). Citing the failure of the OLPC project to live up to all the hype about how it would revolutionize education, he pours a lot of cold water on the idea that Aakash, somehow, is the magic gadget Indian kids have been waiting for.

Even if the government somehow, however difficult it may seem, is able to get access to cheap tablets, they are not going to help achieve its aims. Can a laptop overcome the negative impact of a bad teacher or poor school? Can it make children smarter despite the lack of electricity, water, toilets or playgrounds? Can it overcome the limitations of stunted growth among the malnourished? Can Aakash increase productivity of the workforce to counterbalance the money invested in it?

There is no evidence that it can do any of these things. [...]

He also has a follow-up post where he responds to comments.

* * *

While I have nothing against the R&D project on Aakash (especially when it is coupled with small-scale experiments on technology-enabled learning), I do have a problem with the vast, massive social experiment that the government plans to build around it -- all in the name of education. This obsession with treating gadgets as magic wands just doesn't make sense -- especially when studies have shown that laptops for school children are not such a great idea even in rich countries (and if you want links to studies on OLPC in other countries, go to Rathi's post). Why then are Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh spending huge sums of money to give a laptop to their students?

I shared some of these and other similar thoughts with Samanth Subramanian who has a report on the turbulent ride the Aakash project has had in recent days.

* * *

Interestingly, Satish Jha, an official OLPC cheerleader in India, has an article trashing the Aakash project. It's a bit rich, isn't it, that a man working for a hi-tech huckster admonishes his fellow citizens for not learning from the masters about how to develop low cost gadget. What is he going to do next -- sell snake oil? Oh, wait!

Links

1. Chrostopher Shea in The Atlantic: The Data Vigilante. "Students aren’t the only ones cheating—some professors are, too. Uri Simonsohn is out to bust them." [Via Andrew Gelman]. Simonsohn's statistical sleuthing has already uncovered fraud by two scientists who have resigned their academic jobs. Here's a direct quote from Simonsohn in the article:

   When you have scientific evidence, ... and you put that against your intuition, and you have so little trust in the scientific evidence that you side with your gut—something is broken.

2. Hannah Seligson in NYTimes: Hatching Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens at M.I.T.. A profile of Prof. Robert Langer and his lab.

3. James Surowiecki: Warren's Way -- a conversation over lunch with Warren Buffett, whose recent op-ed argues for a minimum tax on the wealthy.

4. And, finally, the latest non-news from the OLPC world: OLPC cancels XO-3 tablet, downplays need for new hardware.

Snake Oil of the Second Decade of the 21st Century

Satish Jha makes a play for his candidate, the OLPC:

Schools require buildings, teachers, equipment and electricity. OLPC becomes a school in a box, removing all these needs. To create this infrastructure would require $2,000 per child (Rs. 1.1 lakh), OLPC costs a fraction of that. In 65 years, we haven’t been able to build a learning infrastructure in the country. [...]

35 Dollar Tablet PC from India

If you count yourself among the skeptics, you might want to watch this video of an NDTV show [thanks to Animesh for the tweet-link].

This thing is real!

And it does demonstrate the kind of design and development talent that exists in India. Disappointingly, though, the great folks behind this gadget have been conspicuous by their complete invisibility -- HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has been the only public face behind this tablet.

[I work in the IISc -- one of the institutions behind this gadget -- and I have asked around; and yet, I have no clue about who at IISc worked on this wonderful project!]

I'm not very happy with framing this gadget as something that will revolutionize education in India -- note Sibal's reference to "my children" in Indian universities! When this cute little gadget was unveiled, Toronto Star's Rick Westhead asked me for an opinion about its potential in education. You can read what I said here. [If you are interested in to know why, see this post]

Can we all agree to bury our fond, pathetic hopes about how home computers are good for poor children?

Randall Stross reviews recent research on "home computer's educational impact on school children in low income households":

... [T]here is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealized form, as the Great Equalizer. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which was examined in this space in April. The same is true of computers that go to poor households in the United States.

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Here are the summaries of a couple of studies:

Professor [Ofer] Malamud [economist at the University of Chicago] and his collaborator, Cristian Pop-Eleches, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, did their field work in Romania in 2009, where the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros (then about $300) that could be used for buying a home computer.

The program provided a control group: the families who applied but did not receive a voucher. They showed the same desire to own a machine, and their income was often only slightly above the cut-off point for the government program.

In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian.” The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.

At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the Internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

In the United States, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.

More links ...

1. SciDev.net: Study criticizes laptops for children scheme [Summarizes a recent study of the OLPC program in Ethiopia].

2. Jon Dron: What exams have taught me (Example: "the most important things in life generally take around three hours to complete"). And a (limited) defence of the timed exams by John Cook. [Link to Dron's post comes via Sri].

3. Sri himself has been thinking about the damage done by exams -- particularly the entrance exams.]

100 dollar laptop: "Learning was never part of the mission"

Wow. Just. Wucking. Fow.

Commenting on these new, absolutely damning revelations, Rahul (from whom I got the link) asks:

... How did the world media, and several governments, get suckered into this giant con-job? Is everyone so much in awe of MIT that their critical faculties take a vacation?

Is the 100 Dollar laptop dead?

May be not dead, but close. Here's Fake Steve Jobs [via Wayan Vota's OLPC News] pouring scorn and ridicule on media outlets for hyping the product:

Remember all those big, splashy, gushing, goofy, stupid, incredibly naive stories in all the major publications about the Hundred Dollar Laptop? Remember the cover story in the NY Times Magazine about how this was going to save the world? Remember the insanely stupid 60 Minutes piece? Ever wonder why nobody, and I mean nobody, ever stopped to think about whether the whole thing could actually work? Or even to question how it was going to work? Did you notice that nobody looked at the business realities? Did anyone even consider looking at Negroponte's disastrous track record and his utter lack of experience? Did anyone point out what a ridiculous waste of space the entire MIT Media Lab has been? Of course not. Partly it's because no reporter wanted to pee on Negroponte's shoes and get branded as a meany and a kid-hater and a racist by the noisy freetards who backed this silly project.

If you have been following the decline and fall (and probably the impending demise) of Negroponte's dream project on the excellent OLPC News blog, you are probably aware that the OLPC project has attracted some of the best minds, and led to the development of some nifty technologies. Even if the 100 dollar laptop dies, many of these technologies will find a home in other (hopefully low-cost) products and gadgets. Thus, there is no reason to feel sad about the failure of OLPC.

As someone who opposed the very idea of a 'Third World laptop' pretty much from the time I heard about it (and I had my 15 nanoseconds of fame, too), I'm just glad that India didn't fall for the hype, and boldly said 'no' to this costly mistake.

From whatever I have seen, (here, here and here), laptops don't seem to have any serious educational value for school kids.

OLPC News celebrates its first anniversary

Congratulations to Wayan Vota on this fantastic achievement!

Can you believe that your favorite independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child "$100 laptop" is one year old this week?

Was it really just a year ago that we jumped onto the OLPC stage with the news of The Children's Machine 1 name change? Could we have grown from a handful of itinerant readers and three writers to over 1,500 decided daily viewers and a whole crew of contributors?

I am still in shock that OLPC News has propelled me into the blogging big leagues with this humble effort. Did I actually get on Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon or 60 Minutes with Leslie Stall?

While we are on single-theme blogs, let me point you to another great one: Peter Suber's Open Access News.

Over 90,000 schools in India don't have blackboards!

The news report is here. Some highlights:

Nearly 90,000 elementary schools [about 8 percent] across the country do not have a blackboard, says a new government survey.

[...]

Of the schools without blackboards, 21,699 also did not have teachers, the study revealed. [...]

Besides blackboards, thousands of the schools also did not have buildings, drinking water facilities, toilets, boundary walls and playgrounds. [...]

Laptops in schools are a failure ...

NYTimes' Winnie Hu reports:

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

[...]

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

It is always interesting when ...

... one of your posts is up for discussion -- in someone else's blog!

Two days ago, Wayan Vota's OLPC News blog (which has excellent -- exhaustive and definitive -- coverage of OLPC-related news and opinion) featured my post.

In the comments section, Lee Felsenstein makes some excellent points about the nature of the OLPC project:

[...] If this were indeed an education project then it would proceed from the basis of an analysis as to what is wrong with education in the developing world and how it could be fixed. There would be copious and detailed references to research results, there would be pilot studies under way and a coherent argument would be advanced as to how the laptop or some other system - not just a device - would function to attain the desired results. There would even be discussion and argument as to what the desired results are and how they would be measured.

All this would be required if it were in fact "an education project". But what is happening? The whole argument rests upon a few anecdotal observations by Nick, some parables by Papert, and the boundless zeal of many computer geeks who know - just know - that if only laptops with cute user interfaces could "pop out of the box" into the hands of kids everywhere the world would be a "Much, Much Better Place". [...]

Oh, by the way, Wayan's post also informs us that the price of each OLPC '100 dollar' laptop is actually more like 208 dollars!

Some primary schools in a Delhi slum

Check out Naveen Mandava's photographs and essay. Link via an e-mail alert from Dr. Bruno who asks, "How about giving laptops [to] all the students in these schools?"

Last night at 9:45 p.m. ...

The 9:00 p.m. show India This Week on NDTV featured the story on the 100 dollar laptop. Sorry, no links (yet)! Here's the link; but the video requires a subscription!

A member of the design team behind Children's Machine XO said some good things about the machine; then Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-M talked about some of the home grown efforts to address the issue of technology for the masses -- particularly for the rural masses. The story ended with (almost) the last word from me. I'm just grateful that Amulya Gopalakrishnan, the reporter on this story, chose some of my my best lines!

There you have it: twenty seconds in a two-minute story embedded in a 60 minute show. All in all, an interesting experience.

15 nanoseconds of fame

Update: The NDTV story on the 100 dollar laptop is likely to be broadcast in the India This Week tomorrow (7 January 2007) at 9:00 p.m..

Sometime ago, this Tehelka story quoted me on the 100 dollar laptops (aka OLPC or the Children's Machine XO). Yesterday, I was asked to give my comments on the same topic for an NDTV show, and my soundbites were captured on camera. I have no idea if -- and how much of -- what I said will make it to the show.

So, on NDTV one of these days (and probably on a Sunday), you may see a grumpy man looking sternly into the camera and uttering some serious (but somewhat incoherent) stuff about the 100 dollar laptops.

You have been warned. You don't want to scare your children, do you?

In any event, here's something that I wanted to say, and I have no idea how well I said it (heck, I don't even know if I said all of it!):

There is a technology appropriate for educating young children. It's called school. Not just any old school, but a school with other supporting technologies such as a classroom, a teacher, a blackboard, and yes, a toilet. An unbelievably large fraction of our children don't have access to these basic and essential technologies. We must concentrate on reaching these essential technologies to our children. This should be our priority.

We must not forget that these basic things are like bread. And we are absolutely right to say 'no' when someone comes along and says, "let them eat cake", ... and proceeds to set up a cake shop!

Computer labs in developing countries

In the earlier post on laptops in schools, I should have linked to Charles Kenny's post from almost four months ago. In one section of his linky post, we find this:

Take education programs. Computer labs in developing countries carry annual costs of around $78-$104 per student at the level of one computer per twenty students. Compare that to annual discretionary budgets (what is left over after paying for salaries, needed to cover items such as chalk, books and buildings) of $5 per student per year for primary schools in low income countries. Beyond expense, returns don't appear to be dramatic enough to justify diverting resources from alternate, more suitable interventions.

Do read Kenny's post. Among the many things he covers, you will find something interesting about the now famous 'hole in the wall' experiment.

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.

* * *

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.

This post is not about the 100 dollar laptop

WSJ reports:

A few years ago, such programs, which aim to better engage and train students by giving them round-the-clock computer access, were introduced in schools across the country -- often with encouragement from the large computer makers, such as Apple and Dell Inc., that win the contracts. But now, some parents and educators are having second thoughts over higher-than-anticipated costs and the potential for inappropriate use by kids. At the same time, there is a sense that the vaunted benefits of constant computer access remain unproven. ...

[...]

Few comprehensive studies exist on whether these programs live up to their claims to boost achievement, in part because the initiatives are so new. A preliminary study on the impact of laptops in Texas middle schools released by the Texas Center for Educational Research this spring reported that technology immersion improved student attitudes and behaviors but had a neutral impact on student achievement.

Bold emphasis, of course, is mine.

* * *

Link to the WSJ story via Slashdot.

Good bye, OLPC. Hello, CM1!

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), aka the 100 dollar laptop (actually, the current price is about $140), has a new name: Children's Machine (CM1) [via OLPC News]. Ars Technica has an update (with quite a few links) on the status of the project.