Recently in Technology for Literacy? Category

On Thursday, One Laptop Per Child (the nonprofit behind XO laptops) announced a partnership with Marvel to produce inexpensive tablet computers.  The founder of the project, Nicholas Negroponte, claims the tablet will likely combine the functionalities of a laptop, a Kindle, and an iPad all in one device. As Negroponte describes in the video below, the vision is a $75 slim, 9 or more inch, plastic, unbreakable tablet for children with a dual mode display both sunlit and backlit. Renderings of the proposed tablet show images of hands flipping through ebooks, typing a journal entry with a touchscreen keyboard or zooming in on Google maps. 

From Timothy Egan of the New York Times, in an article on the new iPad that will kindlepete:

The last outpost of books in Laredo was a second-tier chain store selling the usual ghostwritten celebrity tell-alls, branded fiction and political screeds for people who need more empty calories in their one-sided cable news diet. But if Denver were to lose Tattered Cover, or Portland lose Powell's, or Washington, D.C., lose Politics and Prose, it would be like ripping one lung from a healthy body.

Probably not would be like.  Curious about the imagery ... why ripped from a healthy body?  If the body were unhealthy, ripping the lung not as bad?

Just got an estimate for solar lighting for one of the village libraries.  Costs are coming down, not too rapidly but indeed steadily.  Now about $1200 to install lighting.  Our experience is that once installed they require very little maintenance, occasional replacement of bulbs (fluorescent) and every 3-5 years the batteries have to be replaced.

I'm a judge for the annual Tech Awards here in San Jose, and every year I write an article summarizing the Tech Award laureates and saying a few pearls of wisdom about technology and education.  So I sat down to write this year's article, and was reading last year's, and thought to myself, "Not bad... maybe I'll do a cheap reposting.."  So here are the first couple paragraphs and a link to more.

As an economist, I am sometimes asked to justify how my current research on reading habits in rural Africa is related to economics. "How do they let you study that?" people ask. A quick definition of economics as the study of how to make choices in environments of scarcity, and an addendum of economics as a toolkit of methods for empirical analysis, quickly reveals the naiveté of the question. Schools in Africa are grossly under-equipped for the task of developing the skills of an educated person, and parents, often non-literate themselves, have little appreciation of the power of reading practice as a way to reinforce reading ability. The same parents who will have their children patiently walk a young ox back and forth several hundred times, to train the ox how to plow a furrow, will believe that a child reading the same book twice is a waste of time: "She already read it." In this environment of enormous potential for improvements in "human capital," encouraging reading is crucial. Economics would seem to play a critical role in helping to understand.

     But for all its vaunted capabilities, the contribution of economics to the discussion of how to improve education outcomes is modest. This is because the more interesting and serious core problems in education fall rather squarely in the domain of psychology. Education is, after all, the process by which minds with particular ways of understanding the world (teachers) impart that way of understanding to minds that have different ways of understanding the world (students). Improvements in education come from more careful attention and insight into how the minds of children work in these structured interpersonal situations. What words should a teacher utter to inspire a student to overcome the hesitation and inertia that are the hallmarks of the reluctant reader? What practices can students carry out that will enable them, through repetition, to master a skill? How can active learning be fostered in a classroom with no electricity, no desks or worktables, and 75 students per teacher? Education psychology brings innovations to the table; economists are more likely to be technicians testing whether new methods actually work.

Read the full article...

Technology could really help with improving one of the most important cognitive skills of the human brain, which is how to process the written word quickly and effectively. What I mean is, how could we enable children to more quickly and effectively learn to read well. Well means both understanding the correct sense of the word they are reading, and also the sense of the entire passage they are reading.

This is especially challenging in a text-scarce environment like an African village. There are few signs, no newspapers lying around, the packages in little boutiques are "behind the counter", there are no Sears catalogues, no Boy's Life, etc.

So, should we choose One Laptop per Child, or a printed book, at this juncture, 2009?

Just send a $250 donation to FAVL, please... we'll get it into libraries straightaway...

Courtesy of Michele ODI blogger, in Ghana:

Five 1.5 squared meters boxes containing 600 OLPC computers each, for a total of 3000 OLPC computers, were delivered yesterday at the ministry unbeknown to most.

OLPCs are supposed to cost $100 each, but according to my ICT technician their cost is more like $250 - $270. Summing up to the handsome expenditure of $750.000 - $810.000, excluding shipment. And their impact on educational outcomes has never been evaluated.

Of course the same could be said of many a library project. Human personnel and incentives are critical.

At the end of the day I am still asking myself if the computers are worth the money spent on them. The cost of the laptops was about $2300, enough to pay the tuition for 23 students for a year. Jes and I plan on using them occasionally, but I suspect that after we leave they will be relegated back to the stockroom. The computer teacher may use them to illustrate networking, but without commercial software, he can’t use them regularly in his classes. I am afraid that in the case of MCV the tech project has failed. In many ways the OPLC laptops at MCV illustrate why high-tech projects are so risky. The computer required charging, a difficult proposition with intermittent power, no converters, few plugs, and no power strips. The laptop design also failed to accommodate the population to which they were given. These inconveniences, combined with a lack of prerequisite computer knowledge, doomed the project and wasted thousands of dollars. This example would seem to demonstrate why appropriate technology should be embraced and high-tech projects dismissed. However, living in Malawi I have been exposed to a perspective which also should be given credence.

Read more...

HT: Kim Dionne... great blog!

From tukopamoja:

In The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia, by Felipe Barrera-Osorio and Leigh L. Linden, the authors examine a program that

aims to integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the program seems to have had little effect on students’ test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the computers into the educational process. Although the program increased the number of computers in the treatment schools and provided training to the teachers on how to use the computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the computers into their curriculum.

Two thoughts on this:

1. This reminds us - and I’d say “as if we needed reminding” except that we do - that you cannot just dump inputs into schools and expect changes. If inputs don’t get used well, they don’t matter. Even though this seems like a no-brainer, many development programs are very narrow: build a school or give some books or …. Same problem, I’m afraid.
2. That said, a quick look at the tables suggests to me that the authors may be confusing a noisy result with a narrowly bound zero result. In other words, there seem to be differences in outcomes between kids who got computers and those who didn’t, but there is so much variation in both groups that we cannot be sure. What this really means is that we don’t know if there is an effect, that there might be a heterogeneous effect, or there might not. (Either way, clearly this program wasn’t a raging success.)

Clearly the technology is converging (e.g. Kindle) and it will only be a decade before there is digital paper. But for right now, the issue is relevant.

Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen, According to Expert
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008)

"Swedish researchers believe we understand more and better when reading on paper than when we read the same text on a screen. We avoid navigating and the small things we don't think about, but which subconsciously takes attention away from the reading. Also texts on a screen are often not adapted to the screen format. The most important difference is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."

Mangen has mainly been looking at hypertext stories. These stories exploit the multimedia possibilities of a computer and use both hypertext, video, sound, pictures and text. They are constructed in such a way that clicking one's way around them comes close to a literary computer game.

As a researcher, Mangen is interested in the physical aspect of reading and applies theories from psychology and phenomenology linked to the relationships between motor functions and attention in order to highlight the difference between reading a novel and a hypertext story.

"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else," Mangen says.

Read more...

I am way too cynical for my own good... but whenever I see articles like these, I keep thinking of my own son, whom I can't get to listen to an audiobook on the Ipod... he'd rather read it. There's a place for everything. And I'd love to have these tried out in the libraries in Ghana. But the premise really is a little strange... I mean, radios already do this... and they've been working well for like 100 years... and Christian groups are giving away little MP3 players with bibles on them all over the world... and Fry's sells a little MP3 player for like $9.95... well, this one so does have a cool design...

From International Reading Association blog...

Literacy Bridge begins testing Talking Books in Ghana

February 12, 2009

Think Kindle is exciting? Take a look at this book that talks, was developed entirely by volunteers and costs less than $10. Seattle-based non-profit Literacy Bridge launched its pilot program Wednesday, February 11, 2009, to test dozens of its Talking Books in Ghana. The digital audio player and recorder is designed as a tool to teach literacy when used with textbooks, and help rural people who can't read get access to information.

The man behind the project is Cliff Schmidt, a former Microsoft program manager who studied artificial intelligence and thought a lot about how literacy can play a role in moving people out of poverty. He left Microsoft to form Literacy Bridge.

In a place like Ghana, Schmidt thinks having spoken information at hand will help people avoid lengthy trips to visit clinics or other offices. Next he hopes to use the Talking Books to reach women in Afghanistan (90% of whom are illiterate), but ideally the device could be used anywhere in the world. Read more in The Seattle Times online.