Why OLPC Struggles Against Educators, Big Business 261
afabbro writes "The current issue of BusinessWeek has an expansive article of the history of OLPC and why it has, to date, been a flop. Among the reasons: no preparation for the educational systems expected to use it, uncertain pedagogical theories, poor business management, competition from Microsoft/Intel, and no input from education professionals in designing the software. As BusinessWeek quotes one educational expert, 'The hackers took over,' and the applications are too complex for children to use. To date, 370,000 laptops have been shipped — a far cry from the original 150 million planned to be shipped by end of 2008."
Re:do you really think this is important? (Score:0, Insightful)
Oh, and the best part, I'm sure a news reporter would be one of the most disgusted if we stopped news reporting to focus on his passing.
Don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a better way to build a mousetrap, build it and see if people will buy it. Trying to tell them they need it before you build one is
distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Hackers like to think they can do everyone's job better even if it way out of their scope. I guess that's the difference between hackers and engineers, engineers understand that it takes managers, PHB's, marketing, sales, and production staff to make it work. Hackers think it just takes code.
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the OLPC is useless as a computer for a geek. Fair enough, it wasn't designed to be a computer for a geek. It was designed to be a learning (not teaching, learning) tool for a child. That's a completely different thing. And oddly, I notice that all the reports of actual children being handed an OLPC without any instruction or guidance seem to end with the child being entirely comfortable with it, having no problem figuring it out, and generally out-running the adults when it comes to using the thing. They even pick up the networking parts of it naturally. Yes, children are in fact smarter than most adults like to believe.
Because it is a stupid idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
Who says it's a failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
This article seems short of facts and long on assumptions.
'The hackers took over' (Score:5, Insightful)
I was at a Microsoft presentation once where the speaker said Microsoft were not interested in hiring 'hackers', they wanted serious programmers. The concept didn't impress me then, and it doesn't now.
Doing away with hackers will have the effect of homogenising the industry. Guess what tho, not every country thinks this way, some developing nations will look at the stagnant 'hacker free' computing industry and destroy it in a matter of years by producing more innovative products.
I mean innovative in the real sense, not in the bland 'keynote speech soundbite' sense.
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you in observing that all the published commentary so far has indicated strongly that children seem very happy with and comfortable with the OLPCs, so the claim that they're too complex for children to use is highly questionable. I have a feeling that "they don't work because the team didn't take input from education professionals" actually translates to "education professionals are rejecting the OLPCs whether or not the computers and software are good because they didn't get to push the development team around."
Remember, contemporary education processes are all about complying with some ideology of how teaching should be done, not about actually successfully teaching kids.
MOD PARENT DOWN! (Score:5, Insightful)
How can people, especially on slashdot (where this has been thrashed out countless times before), keep remaining so wilfully ignorant of the goals of this project?
All criticism comes from non-users (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No different from business (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
With charitable motives rather than financial, OLPC created the next generation machine for the next 2 billion users. The Aus EEE PC and competitors all copied the low BOM of the OLPC, and now target the billions of people world wide who can't afford a Wintel machine from Dell. It's the next big wave in computing, and OLPC led the way.
A poor understanding of end user needs (Score:5, Insightful)
It didn't start out as someone going to schools and asking the people what they needed. It seems like the most reasonable course of action for a project like this is:
1. Go to the schools and listen.
2. If you still think that computers are the solution, bring some expensive ones into some places as a pilot project
3. If that is proven, then remove functionality from the expensive ones until they operate like the cheap ones
4. If they still prove useful then maybe decide to make the cheap ones
Did this happen? If it did and the cheap ones worked in prototype form but not in their final form, then the OLPC's problems can probably be solved. If not, then it was probably doomed from the start.
The "do something I think is cool and see if people like it" plan of action tends to lead to disappointment when people don't like it. The likelihood of disappointment is proportional to how cool you think the project is.
If you donated $150 per child to each of these classrooms, would they automatically use the money for OLPC laptops? What if they could get real, full-scale laptops and support discounted to $150? Would they buy them? My guess is that the answer is no in most cases. They'd buy the things they need instead.
educators yes, educational theorists NO (Score:5, Insightful)
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure
Part of the problem may have been that the folks running the show often were "educators" (professors and such), but not of their target audience. Teaching at the K-12 level is not at all the same as teaching undergraduates and graduates at MIT. They certainly should have brought in experienced actual teachers from the K-12 (or K-6) level they wanted to reach.
But this comment from the summary is appallingly clueless or mendacious:
Among the reasons [for failure]:...uncertain pedagogical theories...and no input from education professionals in designing the software.
Anyone who has actually taught knows that "pedagogical theories" and "education professionals" (e.g. those who graduate with PhDs in education, as opposed to PhDs in the subject they teach) are worse than useless, that such things are responsible for half the time-wasting if not counter-productive garbage that clogs the educational system, total sidewalk-supervising theoretician castles-in-the-air bullshit.
Indeed, I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!"). The problems the OLPC people are having ironically self-illustrate the uselessness of "pedagogical theories" constructed in the absence of pedagogical experience.
Fuck them. (Score:4, Insightful)
>and the applications are too complex for children to use.
That line makes me want to say 'fuck you'. The idiots here aren't the children nor the hackers, that much I'm sure of. If I could figure out the C64 [mostly] on my own in a world where there was no 'world wide web' at my fingertips, and adults would go 'compute-what?', I'm sure today's kids will do alright with these computers.
I guess the upside is that even if this guy stood up before 100 children and told them the machine is too hard for them to use, if 99 of them would be naive enough to believe him, there would be that one kid thinking 'oh yeah? This is so on'.
Re:Fuck them. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who says it's a failure? (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a great success to me:
1) identify a need that the market is not addressing (cheap, simple, robust, networked machine)
2) make one in a non-profit for 3rd world children
3) convince all the industry that they need to emulate and best it
4) let everybody enjoy the resulting products
I really am thankful to the OLPC project for that.
I also read cool things about the OLPC's music and sound tools in Linux Journal. It will probably be part of Fedora or Ubuntu I install on my EEE when I hand it down to my son.
He will probably enjoy it a lot and that will be another OLPC success (albeit a modest one).
You won't see me count the OLPC project as a failure any time soon. They really helped change the world.
*everyone* thinks they can everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have news: Everyone thinks they can do it all.
Since you mention engineers, I'll start with them. I've seen a lot of code written by engineers, and it's been uniformly horrid. Many schools still teach FORTRAN as their first/main language. Good god.
I see a lot of code written by scientists. Not one would think of letting an untrained programmer run their wet lab assays, but they think nothing of having graduate biologists write their programs. Guess what, it's even worse than engineer code!
In an ideal world, we'd all farm out the stuff we're not good at to people trained to do it. I'm not holding my breath...
Applications are not complex (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking. They learned computers on Windows, and Windows and Windows app ui conventions are just how it should be, dammit. Anything else is scary and complex, from their solidified-brain perspective.
People aren't willing to give something new (and yes, pretty much objectively better) a chance.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now"
conservative viewpoint.
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, most discussions about charitable undertakings end there. Projects like OLPC make people FEEL like they are making a difference, regardless of whether or not any measurable long term benefit is actually being achieved.
Just look at the trillions of dollars that have been flushed down the proverbial toilets of many developing and third-world countries. Certainly the intent of such aid is noble, but what has it accomplished besides distracting us from the factors that prevent real change from happening?
I know that asking such questions often makes one a pariah in the eyes of narcissists more interested in self-gratification than actually helping people who need it. But when are people going to realize that sending money or goods to countries ruled by corrupt governments only benefits the corrupt governments?
The "Hackers" were successful (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the work they dreamed up will sweep the world in ways they did not envision.
As far as the "failure" of the OLPC to sell in the millions.
1. A lot of money was being spent by MS and Intel to sink it.
2. It is hard to get $$$ out of many third world countries without graft.
3. It is hard to scale up the distribution and services side of an organization. 0-150 million in a few years is almost impossible on a shoestring budget.
Then, these problems are compounded by the unwillingness to gain volume by selling at retail. Then, they tick off the hardest core supporters by embracing MS.
Yep, this thing will tank.
Re:No different from business (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OLPC (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that the "and magic happens" is actually a fairly routine part of early education. Most kids like to learn, want to learn. It takes the education system several years of intense effort to beat this penchant for learning out of most kids. You may have to teach the kid how the card catalog in a library works, but once you do he'll cheerfully get together with a bunch of his friends and organize finding all they need to know for the essay assignments you give them. And probably more, I usually ended up with three or four essays for every assignment I'd been given. You may not even need to teach them how to use the card catalog, I figured out on my own not just the card catalog but how the Dewey numbers on the spines of the books worked (got a lot of teachers mad at me because I was supposed to go to the card catalog, and instead I'd head straight for the section of shelves I knew had the books on the subject I needed and I Wasn't Supposed To Do That and I should Stop That This Instant, Come Back Here And Start Again And Do It Right This Time).
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are plenty of business models built upon hyping a crappy 'mousetrap' and milking it for as much as you can. You've experienced this every time you've gone to a bad movie that had a well edited movie trailer & splashy ad campaign.
Re:OLPC (Score:3, Insightful)
That's adult thinking. What the child's learning is problem-solving, co-operation and collaboration, and how to go about finding answers to questions when you have a question you need an answer for. The OLPC is a tool for doing those things. Hence why most of it's applications network automatically. It's got puzzle games which teach problem-solving. If you're working on a puzzle, all your friends on the network can automatically see (just like they were looking over your shoulder) and you can talk with them to discuss how to solve it, get ideas, everyone can try ideas and everyone can see how they work. And pretty quick they get to "Joban three villages over's really good at these kinds of problems. Let's get him to look at this and show us what we're doing wrong.". Which winds up working a lot better than having an authority figure stand there and lecture at you.
Re:educators yes, educational theorists NO (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree with most of your comment except for the above parenthesized pseudo-quote.
The OLPC crowd has made it clear from the start that their intent was never to provide kids with a computer. Their intent was to provide access to information. The computer was included simply because to most of the target population, the only possible access to good information requires a computer and a wireless network. We have centuries of experience saying that the traditional books just weren't making it; kids in underdeveloped areas typically don't have access to those in any meaningful sense. But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers. So they were aiming at leveraging the Internet, via a wireless-only small computer, to give the kids access to real information.
But you'll find all over in comments from the OLPC folks that the computer itself was never the primary goal. It's just a tool. The goal is access to information, something that the commercial and political systems show very little interest in providing. We might also note that the listed problems can mostly be summarized as the results of commercial and political opposition to providing their kids with such information.
It's not terribly surprising that, with such a goal, the OLPC project might have a certain skepticism about involving education professionals except as occasional consultants. A personal anecdote: As a high-school in the 9th grade, I decided that math was interesting, so I started asking the math teachers if I could borrow their books. I'd read one, return it a few weeks or a month later, and ask for another. After a few months, I'd read all the texts for the school's courses, so I started asking if I could borrow their college texts. Each teacher flatly refused to let me read them. I "wasn't ready" for college stuff. I had some friends at a nearby college, so I started borrowing from them. This got my teachers very upset.
Since then, I've mentioned this experience to a number of teachers, and every one of them has agreed that I "wasn't ready" for the advanced stuff. This was clearly nonsense, since I could understand the college texts. The theory that I developed, which I've seen a lot of support for since, is that the teachers were simply threatened by the loss of control from my going behind their backs and getting more information from other sources. This is a common problem with "educators" everywhere. They control what the kids are supposed to be learning, and they tend to clamp down on kids who try to avoid the controls and advance too quickly or into areas that the teachers don't understand.
This was well before there was such a thing as personal computers, so it has nothing to do with computers. They might not say it too openly, but part of what the OLPC project has been aiming at is breaking the stranglehold of the local authorities, and give kids access to much better information than they've ever had. I'm not at all surprised that this should get "pushback" from the local authorities as well as the commercial world.
And anyone who has ever seen any ads should understand that the commercial world is not interested in education. It is interested in persuasion, something very different. So we should especially expect pushback from commercial sources.
(And my Firefox 3's spellchecker didn't like "pushback"; it suggested "pushcart" as the right spelling.
Why the surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I always saw this project as a rather hare-brained attempt at making MIT significant again the way it had been in it's Project Athena glory years. It's not so much that Negroponte failed to delivery a solution for a given problem, as much as MIT developed a solution no one asked for or wanted.
Re:A poor understanding of end user needs (Score:3, Insightful)
"I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop"."
And had that stayed the main focus, then perhaps the project would have been more successful. What the military calls "Mission Creep" ended up sinking an interesting, practical approach to making laptops more affordable.
two week learning curve: must be way too hard (Score:2, Insightful)
"In Luquia, Justo Miguel ComÃn, a fifth-grader who is the youngest of seven children of subsistence farmers, was delighted to get his laptop in late April. "I like the math games, and I love the camera," he said two weeks later.
[...]
Yet when BusinessWeek asked her son detailed questions, it became clear he didn't fully understand the computer's capabilities"
--wow... a fifth grader can't completely understand the full capabilities of a new piece of technology in TWO WEEKS. Maybe they should ask him again in two months, or six months.
Heck, my great-grandmother spent her whole life thinking that soap operas on TV were as real as news reports.
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
People do realise this, but it is very hard to get money to the right people, even if you can find them. Politically the World Health Organisation and the World Bank cant just ignore ministries, however corrupt they think they are. That's not to say they aren't trying.
It's also very hard to measure the successes, since we have no baseline or no indication of what would happen if there was no aid or no intervention. It's very easy to interpret our failures to completely fix problems as a failure to make any positive difference, especially since when a situation does get resolved it stops being news. You are right that good intentions plus money does not necessarily equal success, but a lot of good is done.
Since we in the West have got wealthier our perception of what is poverty has also moved upwards. Attempting to lift an entire continent out of a state it has essentially always been in is a task of unprecedented difficulty and will never be fully achieved, since our goalposts will continually move further and further away, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Having said that the OLPC project does not seem to have been very well thought out, but a lot of the ideas, especially that of empowering the children of poorer nations, are sound. It's got people thinking in the right direction, and as others have pointed out has prompted the development of similar commercial products.
Re:OLPC (Score:1, Insightful)
How the hell did this get modded up? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not true. It "started out" as "how do we distribute information cheaply?" It works very well indeed at that. Among other things, it's a superb ebook reader, which a HUGE thing for kids in a place where they have a massive book shortage.
You, afaict, don't know a damn thing about the OLPC project and even less about project management for this kind of work. Now maybe I'm wrong, I've only worked on a few dozen tech development projects, only a few of which were related to education, but in my world, you start out with whatever cheap crap you can get your hands on, you modify it with stuff that you built yourself to get your proof of principle, and that is how you get your first data. Now, the truth is, I've seen projects done your way (sort of). In fact there are dozens of valid ways to test out a concept and different teams may equally validly choose different approaches.
How about you go off, actually learn something about the OLPC project and the developing world and maybe even learn the idea that maybe the world contains approaches you don't know yet and maybe a thing can be done in ways you're not used to and still be valid and then...
Naw. Go away. You're clueless.
Re:Don't get me wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, the OLPC may or may not achieve major success and impact, but the concept seems sound and good, and deserves a second try if the first one doesn't succeed. As long as the second try is absent of monopolisation.
Winning by Losing in this case (Score:3, Insightful)
Another thing to understand is that OLPC is not best suited for the very poorest countries. It is better suited for moderately poor countries. Peru, where people generally are not absolutely starving, is a better choice than Haiti.
Might sell more if they would sell it... (Score:3, Insightful)
They really need to cut that elitist 'only for the third-world' bullshit and just sell the devices over regular retailers.
It's the textbook companies, stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason computers have failed as general educational devices so far is because (at least in the US) there's no material to use on them--no textbook companies will offer a fully-digital version of their textbooks. And that is why in most schools, the ONLY classes that commonly have computers for each student are computer-specific courses.
The MAIN advantage of computers in a general classroom use would be digital textbook storage (and the cheaper distribution costs that could be passed on to schools and students), but textbook publishers will not offer digital versions of their books. Why that is I don't particularly know--since they are in electronic form at some point before hitting paper anyway--but until there is a good base of digital text material to work with, computers in the general classroom situation will go nowhere, because the potential cost savings of them cannot be realized. If schools could spend more money for some mini-PC's or e-book readers but spend a lot less money on "books", that might work out to be financially attractive--but it's not legally possible now. (Electronics prices are always dropping; what are textbook prices doing??? Going up or down???,,,)
In a general gradeschool situation, using "the internet" to teach is usually not useful for learning about anything other than goatse and tubgirl.
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