Geek Heresy (3 page)

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

No Laptop Left Behind

Conflicting Results in Educational Technology

I
ndia has pole-vaulted onto the global stage as an IT superpower, but only a thin stratum of the country’s educated elite is a part of that phenomenon. The rest – as many as 800 million people who live on less than two dollars a day – are lucky if they can work as servants to the rising middle class. There is a cavernous skills gap. Within the glass pyramids and shiny domes of Bangalore’s tech acropolises, recruiters struggle to find qualified engineers in a country with four times the population of the United States. Large IT firms like Infosys are so desperate for technical talent that they hire history majors on the basis of IQ tests and then put them through five-month courses in computer programming. Every year, more than 20 million Indians turn twenty years old, yet too few receive the foundational education required to fill the several hundred thousand technical jobs that corporations post each year.

In a country brimming with information technology but lacking in basic education, it seemed natural to investigate how personal computers could support learning. So, that was one of the things I focused on when I moved to India in 2004. I hired a team of designers, engineers, and social scientists. We began projects in education,
agriculture, health care, governance, microfinance, and so on. For education, we started by spending time in rural India’s government schools. They were blighted by absent teachers, broken toilets, and unquestioning parents.

Desperate administrators often turned to technology as a solution. A startling number of rural schools had computer labs. Because of small budgets, though, the labs were limited to a handful of PCs. Joyojeet Pal, one of our first interns, visited twelve schools across four states and returned with photo after photo of students piled on like rugby players around a single PC.
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There were never enough terminals for all the children. One dominant child – often an upper-caste boy – tended to monopolize the mouse and keyboard while others crowded around, hoping to have a chance to interact.

It was a perfect opportunity for innovation: What if we plugged in multiple mice per computer, each with a corresponding cursor on screen? As with a video game console, many children could engage simultaneously. Udai Singh Pawar, a smart young researcher in my group with a boyish sense of fun, ran with the idea. He quickly prototyped what we called MultiPoint, along with its own educational software.

Students loved it, and formal experiments confirmed its effectiveness. Pawar verified that for activities like vocabulary drills, students learned just as much with MultiPoint as with a single PC all to themselves.
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One child, enthralled with the prototype, asked, “Why doesn’t every computer come with multiple mice?” We filed a patent, convinced Microsoft to release a free software development kit, and imagined that schools around the world would benefit. We declared victory, and temporarily forgot about the lack of toilets, the silent parents, and the absent teachers.

Projects such as MultiPoint won us awards and recognition. Children inevitably smiled in front of new technology, and politicians loved photo-ops where they handed out new gadgets. I often found myself in teak-paneled boardrooms discussing technology strategy with government ministers, World Bank officials, and nonprofit luminaries. Our research seemed to offer proof that there were technological solutions to developing-world education.

We were not alone. An even bigger splash was made by a nonprofit with an ambitious name that reflected its ambitious plan: One Laptop Per Child. Led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the organization sought to design a $100 laptop that could be sold to developing countries a million units at a time. At the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society, Negroponte shared the stage with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. They unveiled what looked like a green-and-white Fisher-Price toy that boasted a fully operational PC with kid-friendly software. Annan gave an unabashed endorsement: “These robust and versatile machines will enable kids to become more active in their own learning.”
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Negroponte summed up our credo as technologists: “It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project.”
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By inventing and disseminating new, low-cost devices for learning, we believed we were improving education for the world’s less privileged children. But were we?

Geeks Bearing Gifts

The success of our MultiPoint trials encouraged us to expand its use, and we went looking for schools that could benefit from it. At private schools funded by wealthier parents or philanthropic donors, principals would lead us to sparkling classrooms with rows of well-kept computers. But those weren’t the schools that needed a boost. Their students would do well with or without MultiPoint. In the schools where help was most needed – where administrators were apathetic or underfunded, where teachers were absent or overloaded, or where students learned little and rarely graduated – it was impossible for MultiPoint to gain a foothold.

One visit I made to a government primary school just outside of Bangalore illustrates why. The headmaster unlocked a large metal cabinet to show me where he kept the school’s personal computers. Inside, desktop PCs, monitors, and keyboards were piled shoulder high, somehow caked in dust even though they weren’t out in the open. He explained that the PCs had been allocated to each school in the district
two years before. The equipment had been received with excitement. The headmaster had cleared a room in his spartan cement-block building for a computer lab. Classes visited the lab one after the other, and students, crowding five or six to a PC, found games to play. The teachers, however, complained that the games didn’t follow the curriculum, and in any case, they didn’t know how to incorporate digital tools for teaching. Then, within weeks, the equipment began to fail. Power surges were probably to blame.
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The school had no IT staff, and there was no budget for technical support. Soon after, the machines were locked away, and the computer lab was repurposed. The PCs were just taking up storage space, but the headmaster couldn’t get rid of them. As state assets, they might be subject to inspection.

The situation wasn’t unusual. Many schools had neither staff nor finances for ongoing technical support. Computer budgets in education tend to pay for hardware, software, and infrastructure, but they neglect the ongoing costs of storage, upgrades, troubleshooting, maintenance, and repair. And PCs need a lot of care in the hot, dusty, humid conditions of rural Indian schools.

Meanwhile, teachers who had PCs dumped into their classrooms felt like seafaring captains suddenly asked to pilot a jumbo jet, all while the unruly passengers are given free access to the controls. For teachers already struggling to keep their students engaged, a computer was less help, more hindrance.

In the course of five years, I oversaw at least ten different technology-for-education projects. We explored video-recorded lessons by master teachers; presentation tools that minimized prep time; learning games customizable through simple text editing; inexpensive clickers to poll and track student understanding; software to convert PowerPoint slides into discs for commonly available DVD players; split screens to allow students to work side by side; and on and on.
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Each time, we thought we were addressing a real problem. But while the designs varied, in the end it didn’t matter – technology never made up for a lack of good teachers or good principals. Indifferent administrators didn’t suddenly care more because their schools gained clever gadgets; undertrained teachers didn’t improve just because they
could use digital content; and school budgets didn’t expand no matter how many “cost-saving” machines the schools purchased. If anything, these problems were exacerbated by the technology, which brought its own burdens.

These revelations were hard to take. I was a computer scientist, a Microsoft employee, and the head of a group that aimed to find digital solutions for the developing world. I wanted nothing more than to see innovation triumph, just as it always did in the engineering papers I was immersed in. But exactly where the need was greatest, technology seemed unable to make a difference.

Textbooks of the Air

We were hardly the first to think our inventions would transform education. Larry Cuban, a veteran inner-city teacher and an emeritus professor at Stanford, has chronicled the technology fads of the past century. As his examples show, the idea that technology can cure the ills of society is nothing new. As early as 1913, Thomas Edison believed that “the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system.”
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Edison estimated that we only learned 2 percent of the material we read in books, but that we could absorb 100 percent of what we saw on film. He was certain that textbooks were becoming obsolete.

In 1932, Benjamin Darrow, founder of the Ohio School of the Air, made a similar claim for radio. He said that the medium would “bring the world to the classroom . . . [and] make universally available the services of the finest teachers, the inspiration of the greatest leaders.” Radio would be “a vibrant and challenging textbook of the air.”
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In the 1950s and 1960s, it was television. President John F. Kennedy convinced Congress to authorize $32 million for classroom television programs. For a few years, American Samoa based its entire school system on televised instruction. President Lyndon B. Johnson approved. “The world has only a fraction of the teachers it needs,” he said. “Samoa has met this problem through educational television.”
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All of these predictions sound achingly similar to today’s claims for digital technology. If history is a guide, new technologies will be
absorbed by schools but will do little in the end to advance education. Audiovisual teaching aids are common in modern classrooms, to be sure, but they have hardly revolutionized learning. It now seems quaint, even silly, to think that a generation hung its educational hopes on the boob tube. Television was supposed to uplift millions. Instead, millions sit in thrall to the Kardashians.

Maybe, though, digital is different. After all, real education involves two-way interaction, while broadcast media is only one-way. Don’t computers, the Internet, and social media offer something that television doesn’t?

Rigorous studies say no. The economist Ana Santiago and her colleagues at the Inter-American Development Bank found no educational advantage in a One Laptop Per Child program in Peru. Three months after an enthusiastic nationwide rollout, the novelty factor had worn off, and each week saw less use of the laptops. Even after fifteen months, students gained nothing in academic achievement.
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Another team of researchers found similar results in Uruguay: “Our findings,” they said, “confirm that the technology alone cannot impact learning.”
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Economist Leigh Linden at the University of Texas at Austin conducted experimental trials in India and Colombia. He found that, on average, students exposed to computer-based instruction learned no more than control groups without computers.
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His conclusion? While PCs can supplement good instruction, they don’t substitute for time with real teachers.

One of our research partners in India was the Azim Premji Foundation, a nonprofit organization that at the time ran the world’s largest program involving computers in education. In 2010, its CEO, Anurag Behar, published a brave article in an Indian affiliate of the
Wall Street Journal
. Casting doubt on his own group’s work with computer labs in over 15,000 schools, he wrote, “At its best, the fascination with [information and communication technology] as a solution distracts from the real issues. At its worst, ICT is suggested as substitute to solving the real problems.”
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We Don’t Need No Digitization

The lessons of a place with circuit-frying electrical supply and no running water might seem irrelevant for those of us who live in the developed world. American schools, though, suffer similar fates with technology. In 2001 and 2002, Mark Warschauer, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the world’s experts on technology in the classroom, led a study of eight schools in California that spanned rich and poor socioeconomic groups.
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Foreshadowing my experience in India, he found that US schools also had problems maintaining technology and using it meaningfully.