Geek Heresy (36 page)

Above all, I thank my wife, Jasmit Kaur, whose unfailing support – and willingness to read draft after draft after draft – brought out the best in me as I wrote this book.

APPENDIX: HIGHLIGHTED NONPROFITS

For readers who might be moved to support any of the inspiring nonprofits that I mentioned in this book, I provide the list below. All of them are exceptional in their respective areas, and each works to build heart, mind, and will. I receive no material compensation from any of them, but for full disclosure, an asterisk marks those on whose boards I sit. Of course, the list reflects my limited knowledge; it is not meant to exclude other worthy organizations.

       
•
  
Ashesi University
(
www.ashesi.org
) is a world-class, nonprofit, four-year university in Ghana focused on educating ethical, entrepreneurial African leaders.

       
•
  
Digital Green*
(
www.digitalgreen.org
) uses a unique video-based teaching methodology to improve agriculture, health, and nutrition in South Asia and Africa.

       
•
  
Innovations for Poverty Action*
(
www.poverty-action.org
) applies evidence gathered from randomized controlled trials to develop and scale up solutions for the developing world.

       
•
  
Pradan
(
www.pradan.net
) assists self-help groups to form, organize, and improve livelihoods of poor families in rural India.

       
•
  
Seva Mandir
(
www.sevamandir.org
) supports communities in southern Rajasthan in their effort to improve their lives via democratic, participatory development.

       
•
  
Shanti Bhavan
(
www.shantibhavanonline.org
) provides India’s most disadvantaged children with a world-class education that emphasizes globally shared values and high career aspirations.

       
•
  
Technology Access Foundation
(
www.techaccess.org
) equips Washington State students of color for success in college and life through the power of a STEM education.

       
•
  
Village Health Works*
(
www.villagehealthworks.org
) delivers world-class, community-driven medical care and local development initiatives in the rural community of Kigutu, Burundi.

NOTES

Introduction

1
.
  
A full recording of the panel is available at Saxenian et al. (2011). The views that I presented there correspond roughly to Part 1.

2
.
  
“Tech-driven philanthropy” was the tagline on
Google.org’s
home page (
http://www.google.org
) on the day of the panel, and as late as Nov. 14, 2012. It appears to have since changed, but when I Googled “tech-driven philanthropy” on Dec. 20, 2014,
Google.org
was still (mysteriously) the top hit.

3
.
  
International Telecommunications Union (2014); Ericsson (2014), p. 6.

4
.
  
World Wide Web Foundation (n.d.).

5
.
  
Page (2014).

6
.
  
Zuckerberg (2014).
Internet.org’s
announcement is available at
Internet.org
(2013).

7
.
  
Duncan (2012).

8
.
  
Sachs (2008).

9
.
  
Clinton (2010).

10
.
  
DeNavas-Walt et al. (2009), p. 13, provide the US Census Bureau’s graph of poverty. Incidentally, it seems that something quietly devastating began in the early 1970s. Commentators in a range of fields cite that period as the turning point where America (and possibly the Western world as a whole) began to decline. Hedrick Smith (2013) blames the 1971 Powell memorandum for turning corporations into narrowly selfish, power-hungry profit seekers. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010) blame a political system bent to the will of the wealthy. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel (2012), 39:30, says technological advance has decelerated since the early 1970s (except in the computer industry). Economists Goldin and Katz (2009), p. 4, note that “educational advance slowed considerably for young adults beginning in the 1970s.”

11
.
  
The evidence for middle-class income stagnation and rising inequality is well-established. See, for example, Piketty and Saez (2003) and US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau (2011). Saez (2013) shows that the last time some
of these inequality measures were this high was in 1917. The facts are also largely uncontested – even fiscal conservatives such as Boudreaux and Perry (2013) agree with the statistics, even if they disagree about their causes and implications for policy.

12
.
  
CTIA (2011).

13
.
  
There is a chance that the poverty rate has been flat because nontechnological forces were increasing the rate of poverty from 1970 to now while technology was actually reducing it during the same period, and the two forces canceled each other out. If so, I’d be wrong that more technology by itself doesn’t help social causes, but that would also mean that our social system tends toward greater poverty unless new technologies are invented at a breakneck pace. That is an even darker scenario, which, if true, would only further justify the overall thesis of Part 2: that we need to pay more attention to social forces rather than to technological ones.

14
.
  
Carolina for Kibera (n.d.).

15
.
  
Of course, it’s understandable that corporate spin highlights products even if executives praise employee talent. The problem occurs when the rest of society drinks the Kool-Aid. And it does. I once had a conversation with an influential Harvard development economist in which I mentioned the importance of growing wisdom in people. He fixed me with a quizzical look and asked, “How is that different from what you’d want for your kids?” He seemed to believe that what was good for international development ought to be fundamentally different from what was good for his family.

16
.
  
Denshi Burokku (“electronic block” in Japanese) was an educational toy popular in Japan during the 1970s and 1980s. They were discontinued in 1986, but have since been periodically reissued.

17
.
  
Viola and Jones (2001).

18
.
  
Criminisi et al. (2004).

19
.
  
Rowan (2010) tells the story behind the Kinect system; Toyama and Blake (2001) describe the technology.

20
.
  
Microsoft has a larger research lab in China, but it is based in Beijing – which, with its gleaming skyscrapers and slum-free environs, is difficult to classify as “developing world.” In contrast, unattended cows regularly walked by our center in India, and the neighborhood saw plenty of tarpaulin tents housing migrant workers.

21
.
  
The brilliantly chosen WEIRD acronym was introduced by Henrich et al. (2010), who argue that most psychology studies are conducted on rich-world undergrads, an unrepresentative slice of the global human population.

22
.
  
Plato (1956), pp. 64–65, refers to the self-animated “statues of Daidolos,” which “must be fastened up, if you want to keep them; or else they are off and away.”

Chapter 1: No Laptop Left Behind

Conflicting Results in Educational Technology

1
.
  
Pal et al. (2006). Joyojeet Pal visited eighteen schools in four states of India, with help from the Azim Premji Foundation. Pal (2005) maintains photographs and a slide presentation about his visits.

2
.
  
Pawar et al. (2007). MultiPoint was one of the first projects at Microsoft Research India that went through the full cycle of our approach to research: immersion in a specific environment; iterated prototyping and exploratory field trials; confirmatory evaluation; and ultimately, technology transfer and productization.

3
.
  
United Nations (2005).

4
.
  
Negroponte frequently repeats this mantra in public appearances. It also appears on the “Mission” page of the One Laptop Per Child (n.d.) website.

5
.
  
Surana et al. (2008) measured power surges as high as 1,000 volts in the rural Indian power grid; most consumer electronics are not rated above 240 volts.

6
.
  
The projects mentioned in this paragraph are a subset of the education-related projects that researchers in my group at Microsoft Research India conducted. The projects varied in their outcomes, but every single one of them saw something of the Law of Amplification to be described in Chapter 2, namely, that the pedagogical capacity of the school and teachers were critical to the technology having an impact. The following references match the order of their mention in this paragraph: Sahni et al. (2008); Paruthi and Thies (2011); Panjwani et al. (2010); Hutchful et al. (2010); Linnell et al. (2011); Kumar (2008).

7
.
  
Cuban (1986) provides a thorough deconstruction of the history of electronic technologies in America. The quotation by Edison appears in Weir (1922).

8
.
  
Darrow (1932), p. 79.

9
.
  
Oppenheimer (2003), p. 5.

10
.
  
Santiago et al. (2010); Cristia et al. (2012). The studies found no increase in either mathematical or verbal academic achievement, but they did find that cognitive skills as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test of spatial-visual ability, did increase significantly. The study demonstrates Chapter 2’s Law of Amplification exactly: Children have a natural curiosity and desire to grow their cognitive skills through play, and computers can amplify that. However, the directed motivation required for educational achievement requires strong pedagogy before technology can help.

11
.
  
De Melo et al. (2014), in Spanish. An English overview of the results with commentary appears in Murphy (2014b).

12
.
  
Linden (2008); Barrera-Osorio and Linden (2009). Linden’s studies are among the first to apply large-scale randomized controlled trials to measure the impact of computers in developing-world schools.

13
.
  
Behar (2010). Behar continues to be an outspoken critic of “silver bullets in education”; see Behar (2012).

14
.
  
The examples and quotations in this section are taken from Warschauer et al. (2004).

15
.
  
To be fair to Warschauer, I should mention that in private communication, he indicated some discomfort with my characterization of his work. If I understand him correctly, it’s not that I am misrepresenting any particular point he makes, but that my overall presentation fails to emphasize that computers can have positive impacts in well-run schools. I have tried to present a balanced perspective in this chapter, and I am not quoting Warschauer out of context. Any residual misrepresentations of his view are my fault. As to the underlying thesis that technology amplifies institutional capacity – a point described in greater depth in Chapter 2 and that concisely explains both technology’s potential and its failures – Warschauer and I seem to agree.