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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.

Let's talk Total Costs of Ownership of One Laptop Per Child. Taking our set of different OLPC implementation cost calculators, as well as actual numbers that have bubbled up over the years, like IADB's Project HA-T1093 with 13,200 students plus 500 teachers (with a budget of USD $5.1M), we can try to settle on some generalities so we can compare apples to apples.

How much does this cost RITA?

Common Basic Assumptions

Let's start with how long the project will run, and what number of laptops we'll need to replace (due to age, damage, loss, hardware failure, and so on) during that time frame. That should be easy, right?

Five seems to be the magic number when talking TCOs, which is convenient when projected OLPC lifespans are also five years. Reality may disagree with that (and certainly GeSCI and Vital Wave wisely do).

So let's plan for five years, and drop re-purchasing of the whole batch within that period (see below for why this becomes relevant). We'll instead presume some per-year replacements (damage, theft, environmental problems, and "normal" wear-and-tear), but even this gets harrowing.

Different Lifespan Calculations

The OLPC Deployment Guide handily provides numbers for expected monthly repair frequencies, which they project at .083% risk of bricking per laptop per month - 1% failure over the course of a year.

Update: Hello readers from Alanna's post on the OLPC at UNDispatch - You should check my original article on the OLPC TCO - written back in 2006 - over at OLPCNews.com.

If you poke around enough on the Laptop.org wiki, you find a few interesting corners. Linked from their work in creating a training and reference document for OLPCCorps, a link to an Excel spreadsheet to calculate OLPC-specific costs for a deployment, which has been created and maintained by OLPC's John Watlington

I've long been an advocate for selling the XO commercially or at least following a Grameen Village Phone style approach to create OLPC XO-centric small business models. Or simply just enable smaller pilot projects to spread the XO technology. I still believe any or all of these offer amazing benefits to expanding the scale of the OLPC XO, re-establishing the XO as the dominant player in the low-cost, rugged, low-infrastructure-requirements laptop, ideal for education projects around the world.

This doesn't seem to be getting much traction, despite apparent interest. Let me propose a different path forward, closer to the original "we sell laptops in batches of 1 million or more to governments" idea: Drop education.

I'll believe it when I see it, but the Times of India is reporting that the promised $10 laptop is closer to a reality, but right now it's as real as the crank on the original XO design.

Who knew cardboard was so exciting?

I'm growing weary of promises for new / better / cheaper technologies for ICT4D - whether it's the pure-touch-screen tomfoolery of the XO-2 or new designs from India (remember that they've been promising this since at least late 2006, and the XO-2 has been a diversionary tactic starting in 2007 and formally announced May of last year.

We're missing the point here, as usual. ICT4D is not about the ICT, it's about the "D" - Development. Use whatever technology is best suited for the problem at hand, don't wait on the next big thing or spend money to develop it, at least starting out. This is why mobile phones are such an attractive tool - amazing install base, even in the developing world, low cost, low-power, but provides limited connectivity and 2-way (limited) data flow.

For the past year or so, I've repeatedly been trying to bring up what I see as a huge, gaping hole in any project which uses Microsoft products for an ICT4Development rollout - computer viruses. Windows XP, when connected to the Internet sans protection, lasts as few as four minutes before becoming infected, and rarely more than a day. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of OLPC XOs running Windows (with no mention of anti-virus software to date), and you have a nightmare scenario pretty rapidly.

The much-debated VitalWave TCO paper we discussed at the World Bank, which argued that the higher cost of Linux administrators balanced out licensing costs for discounted Microsoft and anti-virus software, even admitted the significant costs of purchasing and maintaining a subscription to anti-virus tools

If Microsoft wants to continue to capture the developing world market, this is going to be a barrier. They can drop their own licensing costs for the XP Starter Edition (which at this point is zero cost to them) down, and hand out older Office software; but the initial and subscription costs for anti-virus software are not (directly) under MS's control. Regardless, having anti-virus protection directly impacts the functionality of the device - if installed, A-V can slow a less powerful computer down to a crawl during a scan and at startup, but the consequences of not having it can render the system absolutely useless.

So it comes as little surprise that Microsoft has announced a free anti-virus software for XP and Vista that targets lower-powered systems (cough, like the OLPC?) to address both these problems and lower the cost barrier for adopting MS: