Category Archives: Policy

Bank of South Pacific donates 1000 laptops to Pacific children

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The Bank of the South Pacific (BSP) this week became OLPC Oceania’s lead private sector partner in the region.

OLPC Oceana and BSP are announcing a strategic partnership to advance South Pacific education. As its first act in its role of Lead Private Sector Partner for OLPC Oceania, BSP is donating 1000 XOs to children in three OLPC project schools in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. In coming months, BSP plans to provide more support for children in Papua New Guinea as it spearheads private sector support for OLPC.

Surfing the Net in the Solomons

OLPC’s Regional Director for Oceania, Mr. Michael Hutak, thanked BSP for its generosity and welcomed the partnership as a breakthrough for Pacific education. “With BSP’s strong corporate leadership in the Pacific, its regional branch network and its strong commitment to community participation, we look forward to a long and effective partnership, not just to our mutual benefit but to the advancement of Pacific education.”

BSP Group Chief Executive Officer Mr. Ian B. Clyne said the new partnership was a perfect fit with the Bank’s corporate social responsibility goals and would broaden the reach and impact of the BSP Children’s Foundation, complementing programs such as BSP’s widely-praised BSP School Kriket program. The partnership continues BSP’s commitment to Pacific development and follows a recent Fiji$100,000 donation to emergency relief efforts following the devastating floods in Fiji.

As Lead Private Sector Partner, BSP will join the regional initiative OLPC Oceania, which is a coalition of national governments, educators, donor agencies, academia, the private sector, civil society and community organizers, all working to assist Pacific Island countries to establish the OLPC concept in schools. Mr Hutak said BSP will bring much-needed private sector expertise and know-how to the Pacific initiative.

Currently there are OLPC projects running in 10 Pacific countries, with approximately 10,000 laptops being used by children in 50 schools. Across the globe, OLPC has distributed over 2.4 million laptops to poor children in 40 countries.

Some 200 laptops donated by BSP’s Children’s Foundation will be deployed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in the Solomon Islands in remote Marovo Lagoon, the site of the first Pacific OLPC project in 2008. The remaining 800 laptops with be distributed in two demonstration schools in Suva, Fiji, in partnership with Government of Fiji and the University of the South Pacific. The schools will be where Fiji’s teacher and technical training will occur. BSP plans to promote the establishment of similar demonstration schools in Port Moresby and will work with the PNG Govt, the World Bank and other partners to scale up OLPC in PNG.

BSP has also agreed to facilitate the collection of public donations to OLPC Oceania projects, both online and through its branch network.

Nicholas on Peru

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Giving a poor child in a remote Peruvian village
a laptop to own and take home, is giving that
child hope, self-esteem, and an opportunity to
learn outside, as well as inside school. The
Economist did not read the full Inter-American
Development Bank report, that noted: “Students
also demonstrated increased cognitive abilities
from the OLPC program.”

The purpose of OLPC was not to improve classroom
learning only, but learning in the child’s whole
life. Ironically, Peru is the country where we most
encounter 6-to-10-year olds teaching their parents
how to read and write… I do not have a better story.
Furthermore, reading comprehension, parent involvement,
and a passion for playing with ideas improved. Check
out Uruguay, if you want to find more rigorous
statistics of success from a better organized
rollout.

Lastly, think of the logic behind applying traditional
19th Century testing to modern learning, especially at
early ages. High test scores come from rote learning,
and do not evaluate critical and creative thinking,
initiative and discovery, let alone peer to peer
teaching. It is like using a pedometer to measure
the speed of a car. Error.

OLPC has nearly 3 million laptops in 40 countries
and 25 languages, after six years and almost $1
billion spent. Noone reading this would not give
their child a connected laptop if he or she could
afford one. Why is it so hard to understand that
poor children should get the same?

Is traditional testing failing?

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The Economist recently published a brief and pessimistic summary of the IDB Peru study. Their writer looked only at standardized math and reading tests as measures of success, ignoring large improvements in cognitive skills. Or maybe, as Richard Jennings suggests, they didn’t read to the sixth sentence of the study:

picked up on a 40-day-old report from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and interpreted it as saying the program was failing in Peru. The anonymous Economist writer summarizes IDB’s findings thus:

GIVING a child a computer [does not] accomplish anything in particular… Peruvians’ test scores remain dismal. Only 13% of seven-year-olds were at the required level in maths and only 30% in reading… the children receiving the computers did not show improvement in maths… reading… motivation, or time devoted to homework or reading.

That’s depressing… I suppose there might be some intangible benefit, but it rather looks like there’s no quantitative gain.

But hang on a minute. It appears that The Economist has missed a key point from the report. IDB’s working paper, entitled Technology and Child Development: Evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program, also says:

The results indicate that the program… translated into substantial increases in use both at school and at home… Some positive effects are found… in general cognitive skills as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a verbal fluency test and a Coding test.

So, instead of a “disappointing return,” or “not accomplish[ing] anything in particular,” IDB did actually find a measurable benefit.

Could it be that the disparity between test scores and actual measured achievement means that it’s the tests that are lacking, rather than the laptops? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that academic testing was shown to be seriously wanting.

And is it too much to ask for The Economist’s journalists and fact-checkers to actually get as far as the sixth sentence in the report’s abstract, before writing the story? I know that many of today’s workers exhibit short attention-spans, but really!

Too right. Unlike traditional standardized tests, cognitive studies tests are more likely to demonstrate the sort of growth envisioned by constructionist approaches to learning: exploration, empowered learning, and creativity.

There were three separate cognitive skills tests measured by the IDB. All four showed large improvements – equivalent to 5-6 months of cognitive development. As the report notes, “these are sizable effects under this metric considering that the treatment group had an average exposure of 15 months” — that’s like getting an extra 3 years of cognitive development by the start of highschool; something worth further study.

IADB studies OLPC in Peru

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The Inter American Development Bank recently published the results of a study of the Peruvian schools that received OLPCs in rural primary schools in Peru, over the first 15 months of the program.

The methodology of the study was quite good, with a randomized study of over 300 schools.  But the measurements and focus were not aligned with the goals of Peru’s program, and there is no clear way to compare these results with the other detailed results available from Plan Ceibal’s program in Uruguay.  The after-analysis of their work has tended to focus on short-term math and reading results, whereas the goals of the program were access to knowledge, improvements in pedagogy, and access to computing – which might be expected to show up in the short term only in the abstract cognitive results.

The measured improvement in abstract thinking – roughly 5 additional months of cognitive development, over a 15-month period – is tremendous. It is interesting to note how this result is downplayed in parts of the world where schools live by less abstract standardized testing.

Some recent comments from OLPC staff and implementers, paraphrased for brevity:

Claudia Urrea:

‘The OLPC program in Peru, or any other place, has to be evaluated according to its initial goal. “math, language, and cognitive test results” showed outputs, but have no clear connection to Peru’s 2007 stated objectives, which targeted pedagogical training and application.’

Oscar Becerra, who oversaw OLPC in Peru’s government:

‘We succeeded in giving access to technology to 100% (220,000) of children and teachers at one-teacher schools, who otherwise would have had no opportunity to use ICT.  Most had the option to take laptops home with them.’

Oscar has published other comments that are a good representation of the OLPC perspective.

 

Nagorno-Karabakh deployes 3,300 OLPCs to connected schools

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Nagorno-Karabakh is a landlocked region which seceded from Azerbaijan in 1991, and has been engaged in a  low-grade military conflict involving Azerbaijan and Armenia ever since.  Recently they have launched a New Education Project to improve primary education across the region.

Many of the children in the region have schools, and some have internet access.  This week, they launched a small OLPC project, deploying laptops to 3,300 students in 16 connected primary schools in the cities of Stepanakert (the region’s capital), Shushi, and Karin Tak.

Vladik Khachatryan, Minister of Education and Science of Nagorno-Karabakh, was present at the launch.  He announced,

This program will improve the quality of education of elementary school students in the NKR, and what is more important, will make more information available to them and their families… within a short period of time we will be able to establish equal educational opportunities in all NKR.

Rodrigo added,

Education is a key factor to breaking the vicious cycle of ethnic hatred and violence for children who live in conflict zones.

I look forward to seeing the project develop, and hope that the recent focus on children and education brings stability and peace to the region.

The Islamic Development Bank will support a 50-school deployment for OLPC Cameroon

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Cameroon is about to become an OLPC hub for francophone West Africa! The Islamic Development Bank and OLPC today are announcing a pilot project to connect 51 schools in six regions, deploying 5,000 XOs to primary school children and teachers. The team will also design a program that could extend this deployment across the country in the future. The idea for the program was started back in 2008, and has developed steadily since then, with help from a strong national team.

The Islamic Development Bank is a multilateral financing institution: it pools resources and supports economic development and social progress among its 56 member countries, including Cameroon. The Cameroon project represents the first time that the Islamic Development has financed an OLPC deployment, and may serve as a model for other francophone countries in the region. A team from Cameroon’s Ministry of Education has already provided training assistance to an ongoing OLPC project in Mali. Other countries in the region are expected to launch XO deployments in 2012.

Rodrigo Arboleda, announcing the program, said: “We are delighted to be working with the Islamic Development Bank on the financing of projects that support our mutual objective of fostering economic development and social progress. We are seeing tremendous interest in OLPC throughout Africa and look forward to working with both public and private sector partners in a number of countries to launch, expand and support other initiatives in the months ahead.”

Cameroon will be the first country in Africa to receive the ARM-based XO-1.75, which enters mass production this month. These XO laptops have the same sunlight-readable screen and other design features of the previous models, but draw only half the power.