[Optimal Philanthropy] Laptops without instructions

Raemon

Just read this article, which describes a splashy, interesting narrative which jives nicely with my worldview. Which makes me suspicious.

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.

So this sounds really inspiring and stuff, even subtracting some obviously sensational stuff (I assume "hacked Android" means "opened up the preferences dialog and flicked a switch"). I've poked around a bit and found similarly fluffy pop-philanthropy articles. Anyone know if there's more reliable information about this out there?

There's research on OLPC, you know. I recall reading a... randomized Peruvian study? which found less than impressive results on scores in villages receiving laptops.

School is a huge, huge confounding factor in any study of education. Kids exhibit extreme reactance against anything pushed in school. The educational theories that OLPC is based on assume that kids will enjoy exploring and learning, but in a school setting, this is unlikely. A study like this (which is, of course, exploratory and thus mostly only as a guide to what to study next) is a better design, although of course it's harder to perform.

Full disclosure: I have friends who have worked on OLPC, but we pretty much haven't talked about the project.

How many of us learned to use computers for fun despite teachers who made us type assignments and parents who gave us educational games (I'm remembering "Math Blaster")?

Everyone on this site enjoys learning (mostly despite schooling), but we're not exactly typical. As far as I know, nobody has yet done a randomized study of unschooling (with educational resources available), against traditional schooling.

I did find that, but from what I could tell that focused on using them as supplements for traditional schools, with the vague conclusion being "teachers need to learn how to use the tablets effectively." I can easily see bypassing teachers having a significantly different result (either in a good, bad or weird fashion).

From the looks of it, this experiment was only started a few months ago so we don't have much information about it's longterm viability. I'm hoping it eventually contributes to new approaches to education as a whole, not just third-world illiterate villages.

I thought the kids were allowed to take the laptops home in the Peruvian village study I was thinking of? If they can take them home and scores still don't improve much...

I could see (potentially) there being a dramatic difference between a teacher saying "take this computer home and play with it" and finding a box that comes with no external social pressure from authority figures. Not sure if the latter would be replicable though (some teachers have told me the biggest problem with educational research is that all the most promising experimental schools turn out to only really work in their original context).

I'm not sure if OLPC is optimal, but if they really can turn a capital investment into a long-term basic literacy program with very low operating costs, the ROI is in the same realm of discussion as vaccinations.

I've followed OLPC for many years, and can only regard it as a well-intentioned charity with terrible real-world results along any metric you'd care to name. Negroponte is now a name with very negative associations in my mind. What you're reading is marketing for the program.

Did you read anything in particular to come to think that?

Yes, though I don't have the links, since I don't save the links to things I dislike. In general, mismanagement of the project and a belief that "technology" is somehow equivalent to "education".

I see the Criticism section on Wikipedia is several pages long.

I don't know whether this is general knowledge or not, but questions like this have empirical answers.

We can look at how well providing children with a certain kind of primary educations fairs against providing children with a laptop as an intervention on aggregate.

Sure, the project may have found that teaching children 'stuff' isn't that useful, but are laptops consistently useful either? Just the other day my laptop kicked the bucket and I lost a bunch of data. Now, my remaining laptop doesn't have a working headphone jack for me to listen to lectures. And, the keys are broken. I can certainly gain more from a new laptop than more formal education. But, that's just an anecdote. It's not as evidence-based as answers to this class of question can be when making decisions about optimal philanthropy.