Frederik Questier

I’m invited for the scientific committee and a keynote presentation at the ATEE (Association for Teacher Education in Europe) winter conference in Prague, February 2010. The conference theme is “Early Years, Primary Education and ICT”. This is the title and abstract of my keynote:

What can we learn from One Laptop Per Child Projects?

Five years ago, Prof. Nicholas Negroponte announced the “One Laptop Per Child” idea. The mission of the non-profit OLPC foundation is to give the children of developing countries better opportunities to explore and learn by means of a cheap Internet laptop (the XO). The laptop and software is specifically designed according to constructionist learning theories and aimed at primary education. Many critical voices dismissed these ideas as undesirable and impossible. Why laptops while there is a shortage of food, teachers and electricity? Why a laptop per child instead of a few computers per school or class? Isn’t this a form of neo-colonialism?
Whether today OLPC is a failure or a success remains in the eye of the beholder. The projected milestones proved too optimistic. The XO laptop still costs around $188 instead of the projected $100. Over the last two years, “only” one million XO laptops are rolled out in 40 countries. The impact on the computer industry is very visible: the XO gave inspiration to a dozen cheap netbook models, increasingly popular at least in the developed world. The impact on education and the developing world is less visible. Two years of pilot projects and national deployments is understandably short for long term research evidence. Establishing a deployment is hard, but the first results are promising. Teachers report that the children are more motivated to learn, read and write and that they do so more accurately. The children teach each other and their parents what they learned. The one laptop per child ratio, the children’s ownership and the fact that they can take the XO home seem to have indeed the desired benefits of equal access (no matter the gender, competencies or socio-economic status) and low incidences of theft or maintenance needs. The children are most positive about the Internet connection, which gives them a window on the world, not only for exploring, but also for expressing themselves. The laptops and the software seem indeed well designed to allow a lot of learning by self-exploration. Of course many things are hardly self-discoverable, and the quality of learning remains mainly influenced by the teacher’s design of learning scenarios. Teacher training plays a crucial role, not only about the laptop and the software, but mainly about learning methodologies that fit best with these technologies (and today’s society).
The OLPC foundation focuses on developing countries, where the need is highest. But the demand for similar projects in developed countries is rising. The challenges are smaller in countries with good education and good availability of ICT. This means however that the increase of learning efficiency can be expected to be smaller. Recently, the first small pilot projects in Europe have started. These projects deserve the attention of European teachers, teacher educators and researchers.

I’ve bookmarked the most relevant OLPC reports and evaluations in my Diigo library. I’m still preparing the presentation, so contact me if you want yours or other additional OLPC reports and evaluations shared with the European Teacher Educators community!

The 8th Ethical Forum of the University Foundation will be held in Brussels, November 19th 2009. The topic is “The University in the age of Google and Wikipedia.
New potentials, new threats, new duties.”

Since they ask short reactions to the question “Should we resist or should we expand the role of Google, Wikipedia and the like in the life of our universities? Why? How?” I prepared the following:

Let’s integrate our academic knowledge into the global brain!
Prof. dr. F. Questier, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Google, Wikipedia and the like have become cornerstones of our information society. Their disruptive innovations were impossible without flirting with the boundaries of privacy and copyright laws. We should remain very critical and teach that even ‘don’t be evil’ Google and non-profit Wikipedia have their limitations and related risks. We should teach what is good and what is bad scholar use of these tools. Wikipedia and Google have proven that mass collaboration and innovative use of web & user data can create services that tend towards collective intelligence. In a certain sense they have become complimentary to the academic knowledge and practices. More important than the question about the role of these internet services in universities is the question about the role of universities in this new collective intelligence. Let’s unlock the academic knowledge by embracing open innovation, open access, open learning materials, open standards and free & open software. Let’s teach our students to be not only knowledge consumers and producers, but also knowledge publishers. Today it’s not enough to publish single resources, such articles and books. We have to integrate our academic knowledge into the global brain.

My reaction is maybe a bit too general, but I found it difficult to go more specific, without loosing my general perspective, in the 5-15 lines asked.

Disclaimer: I have no affilitations with Google or Wikipedia. Yes, I’m a user of their services; I was contacted by Google for a job offer; and I contributed to Wikipedia and similar projects such as Wikibooks (Educational Technology course book).

Together with Frits Hoff from the Openwijs.nl foundation, I was invited to Aruba for consultancy around ‘One Laptop Per Child‘ projects. We discussed with the minister of education, parliament members, directors from educational networks, the University of Aruba, and the teachers & parents of two schools that want to start OLPC pilot projects. My focus was on the training & coaching for teachers, and monitoring & evaluation of such innovation projects. All stakeholders were very enthusiastic and we got nice press coverage (at least 3 news paper articles [1, 2, 3], 1 press website, 1 radio and 2 tv transmissions). Pilot projects should start in january, and scaling up to all childeren in primary school starts hopefully next school year. Thanks to Kiwanis Club of Palm Beach for sponsoring our travel and stay.

See my Aruba pictures.

One Laptop Per Child program presented to Aruba - The News 20091016