Dev/ICT

This is why localization is tough. A respected Pakistani diplomat keeps getting rejected as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Why? Because his full name translates into Arabic as "Biggest dick."

"Amidst the destruction, the people of Port-au-Prince are rebuilding. Inveneo is honored to be one small part of that effort by facilitating high-speed Internet access to NetHope members - the world's leading international humanitarian organizations - and to smaller social-service organizations as well."

Reporter fired for trying to be objective. Really.

"From a Newsweek article reporting that the FBI engages in warrantless surveillance of mobile location data from suspects' cellphones: "[Prosecutors] were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?'"

@kiwanja: "One of the most exciting things about my work is the incredibly talented people I get to meet. Up-and-coming entrepreneurs with a never-say-die, get-up-and-go attitude. I’m continually inspired and more than happy to offer my help in any way I can, particularly to those looking to implement FrontlineSMS one way or another in their work. Today, two of these projects have made it through to the next round of a major competition and are looking for your help. I hope you feel equally inspired to show your support – it’s only a few mouse clicks away and costs little."

"In brief, unlike the constantly morphing basic, inexpensive, stripped-down PC of their first promises, this latest item looks like a basic, inexpensive, stripped-down tablet computer. The media–which has breathlessly and uncritically reported nearly every OLPC pre-announcement since they stated their intention to saturate the world with these PCs–gave this latest news some attention, of course, but the iPad pre-announcement mania sucked a lot of the air from the PR room, as they say in marketing-speak."

Connectivity challenges in post-quake Haiti

Yesterday I attended a World Bank discussion on "Chinese Investment in Africa's Industrial Zones: prospects, challenges, and opportunity for Africa". Such "one-stop shop" zones have captured the interest of a variety of Chinese businesses, in addition to the World Bank, which is in talks with Beijing to collaboratively set up low-cost factories in these zones.

. Achieving the health-related MDGs requires strengthening health systems, particularly in the following areas of (a) Expanding the primary health-care workforce and enriching the skill levels; (b) Upgrading and broadening medical infrastructure and logistics; (c) Providing affordable access to drugs and medical supplies; (d) Improving health decision-making and early warning by enhancing data collection and analysis of disease trends. This brief summarizes cost-effective information and communication technology (ICT) applications to support improvements in these areas in least developed, landlocked and small island countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Fascinating forensic photoshopping

Great, now we need to start cryptographically sign tweets and invoke 5th amendment rights to not reveal key passphrases

"But it was clear that at the conference, the primary news platform was Twitter, with real-time annotation of the panels on stage and critical updates about what was happening elsewhere at a very hectic convention. At 52, I succumbed, partly out of professional necessity. And now, nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it. Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay. "

Mobile tech as a tool for social development is makling the front pages in 2009. They are hyped as panathea for global issues such as rural health in developing countries, poverty alleviation, making rural markets more efficient, and activism.
We have been working in this field since 2005 and have been leading industry analysist, with direct work in a number of areas such as elections and democratic participation. While we agree that mobile phones are revolutionizing the developing world, we think it is time to take a very honest and realistic look at the promises of mobile tech for development and social change, and where these promises are falling short -- and of, course, why, and what to do about that.

I don't think the FDIC understands the spirit of "freedom of infomation"

Organizations like the World Bank are being asked to help finance very expensive, large-scale purchases of printed educational material in many countries. (And because of the success of Education For All in many places, such purchases are bigger than ever before.)

Sector-wide the most under resourced aspect of communicating in emergencies is the communications with those affected by the emergency. All too often the onus is on getting communications materials out to the Head Office or to the international media -- overlooking those at the heart of the emergency.
Information is a right, and it is a deliverable. It bestows power -- power to take control of a situation that is by definition out of your control.

Comparative advantage or dead-end road? Innovation requires doing, not managing....

Opposable thumbs? Who needs em!

When the IDB plans to "evaluate its performance from a quantitative standpoint," it's a good sign that they mean to do just that. The XO project in Haiti, discussed here with a cost breakdown here is bearing a ton (1 pages, to be precise) fruit, with the recent IDB report (PDF).

It reveals some promise, some best practices, and also reminds us of some common problems.

From the "I toldya so" files

Finding an XO laptop spark

Somewhat unsurprisingly, there were some hassles in the basic deployment and daily use of the XOs which have been common topics of debate around OLPCNews.com for some time now, from dealing with shipping, hardware and infrastructure limitations, and the importance of teacher training.

First, classroom usage in the Haiti project started out as laptop sharing among students due to "an unforeseen shortage," later explained with slightly more detail as "logistical barriers and shipping delays"). The project team made lemonade from these lemons and studied the sharing dynamic, concluding that students more comfortable with the laptop and/or students who already had an stronger academic skills tended to dominate laptop usage; furthering the educational divide.

Green and Cute does not mean Safe
The strong branding of the laptop, ideally destroying the market for stolen XOs may or may not work as a theft deterrent, but most of the Haitian children aren't willing to gamble with theirs: "However, more than half of the fourth-grade students interviewed reported feeling afraid to take the XO laptop home because they might be robbed."

Battery life correlates with attention span:

The evaluation also found great variation in student attention span per XO Camp session, with a rising attention span from 9:00 am until approximately 10:30 am, and declining attention span thereafter. One of the explanations for this variation, as
provided by observational data, was the low battery life of the XO laptops, which led to student fights over electrical outlets at approximately 10:30 am.

The actual problem then is not some mysterious mid-morning-onset Attention Deficit Disorder, but the real-world impacts of the reality of the XO battery life. It's great in black-and-white screen mode with wifi off and being used mainly for reading, but in real-life classroom situations; "the fully charged batteries were depleted within 3–5 hours, depending on usage. It is unclear whether this significant difference is attributable solely to a technical default or if the XO laptops were distributed without first being properly charged."

Even when working in a constructivist paradigm, teacher involvement and training helps:

School and MENFP staff also commented on the limits of constructivist pedagogy within the framework of the OLPC pre-pilot project... 42 percent believed that teachers and students were simply not used to a constructivist model of education and needed additional guidance to ensure its success. However, 100 percent of school and MENFP staff interviewees believed that the constructivist model was a good one to follow.

Clearly, however, the path from rote memorization to a more exploratory framework still had some ground to cover, based on not only the above sentiments, but some choice student quotes like "When I use it, I’ll understand what I’m working on much better, which will make it easier to memorize."

Haiti also reveals a valuable role for constructivist style, student-led learning in low-resource environments:

Particularly in settings of extreme poverty, where
educational materials and resources are scant and teacher quality is lacking, the implementation of child-centered learning can increase students’ ability to think independently and to develop problem-solving skills more rapidly. Technology that is explicitly child-centered and designed for individual use has the potential of accelerating educational development in the short term.

The question remains, though, where (if ever?) does that change? With unlimited funds, few would argue that better trained teachers and high-quality teaching materials would not be the best path to improve education, but in the vast middle ground, at what level is do you throw in the towel, and stop focusing on teachers and start finding other tools to improve education?

Training and Localization

Project recommendations focused on training - both technical and pedagogical training for the teachers, including more training on constructivism, with other recommendations towards safety, methodology, and ideas to deal with the power problems.

Some insightful recommendations from the teachers themselves include some of the hardware hassles OLPCNews.com readers will be familiar with (*cough*touchpad*cough*), some clear UI improvements that more recent software updates have begun to address, and (mainly) localization challenges:

Include a map of Haiti.
Include a game in which sentences appear out of order, thus requiring students to arrange the words in proper order.
Include the Cut, Copy, and Paste features typically available on computers.
Improve the touchpad, which quickly loses sensitivity and proved difficult for students and staff to use effectively.
Include a longer-lasting battery, since the current battery lasts only about 2 hours.
Include activities specific to Haitian culture. For example, when teaching about science, it would be useful to have an XO laptop activity that compared the traditional or natural medicines of several countries, including Haiti.

Some Good News

Haitian kids ♥ XO laptops

The software was not a problem - core Sugar Activities like Record, Write, Browse and Paint were well woven into curricula and represented the vast majority of classroom usage. Students would explore the other programs, but this exploration declined when activities were used in class. Also, introduction to the Internet "drastically reduced usage of the Paint and Record programs after being formally introduced to the Internet and receiving an essay-writing assignment." If you think that's a steep drop off, just wait till you show them Facebook, Twitter, and LOLCATS.

The decline in exploration is unfortunate, but could indicate student comfort and expertise levels increasing in programs they use more often. I certainly am a bigger fan of Excel than Access, and Photoshop more than MSPaint:

"when a clear activity was presented to the students and the students were given projects to work on using specific software programs, use of those programs increased steadily, while exploratory usage declined."

Actual skill and teaching improvements
The role of technology - and how to evaluate it - is the topic of lively debate. The Haiti OLPC project team did an impressive job gathering a mixture of hard numbers, survey responses and basic observations. Even so, educational progress with the laptop remains hard to measure. Some high points were clear improvement in spelling (possibly thanks in part to spellcheck) and improved writing (perhaps simply a better tool to write with?).

Regardless, there were clear process improvements for teachers:

Students wrote daily journal entries on the XO laptop. Like their written assignments, these were edited by the teachers. During interviews, most teachers said it was easier to edit students’ work done on the XO laptop. Thus they were able to spend more time working one-on-one with students and less time lecturing. Increased individual attention may have thus been a significant factor in the perceived improvement of student’s reading and writing skills.

Still, the potential value was best stated by the students themselves:

Students believed the XO laptop could be used to facilitate the learning process through the use of tools such as the Internet and a calculator because, as student #40 stated, "Everything you need is on the laptop."

Well, almost everything.

Today's IADB event, Reinventing the Classroom, brought together thought-leaders, practitioners and government officials to discuss the role of technology in education in Latin America. In sum, it was a lot of preaching to the choir. This particular choir, however, hailed from many different churches, temples, cathedrals, and bazaars.

Everyone present believed in the importance of technology in education, but there was enough differences in opinion and methodologies to keep it interesting. It ranged from presentations on real-world experiences of projects in Portugal using a variation of the Intel Classmate to projects in Brazil and Argentina to the amazing Plan CEIBAL of Uruguay, using the OLPC XO. Presenters extolled the virtues of free and open source software as well as the familiar Windows XP.

By the end of the day-long seminar, I felt an odd mix of hope and despair.

Next Thursday at the IADB is a huge event delving into the role of ICTs in the classroom, with heavy-hitters including Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC, Tabaré Vázquez, the Uruguayan President (no doubt discussing CEIBAL), and Mike Trucano of InfoDev, who has been spearheading a cool-headed data-driven look at ICTs -- See the full schedule and RSVP at http://events.iadb.org/calendar/eventDetail.aspx?lang=En&id=1444

CEIBAL (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea) is a laptop program for public schools in Uruguay, and one of the largest and most active OLPC deployments.

I'll be there asking annoying questions about total costs for ICTs versus teacher salaries, problems with software licensing costs, and the importance of enabling technology, and taking notes on my cute little OLPC XO laptop.

And no, I don't see that being incongruous.