ICTD - Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman

Experiences with OLPC Technology in Ghana, West Africa
Presenter: Suzanne Buchele (Southwestern University)

This presentation reminded me of my early experiences in Tijuana looking at computers in schools, crossed with my time(s) in Ghana, and my brief stints looking through computer labs in various schools in Jinja, Uganda. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of OLPC in general - Negroponte's attitude drives me nuts, even if I've loved most of the other OLPC people I've met. The relationship between computers and educational outcomes is unclear (ref: Larry Cuban), and most countries simply don't have the resources to plan computer based curriculum beyond the level of "this is a floppy disk, ram is memory, and this is how you create and save a document in microsoft word". From there, they don't have the teachers to teach the curriculum, the computers to test them on it, and the power to actually administer the tests. One school I visited complained about a timed test which was aborted because the power went out, and they didn't have a generator. They even had to test everyone in shifts - because the computer class was normally taught with 8 students to a computer, and the test had to be administered with only one person to a computer. (ref Patra, ICTD). Anyways. Off the OLPC soapbox. I still thought the work and the presentation was cool, and the fact that the the school had laptops was great. Somehow no matter what my development ideology may be I still get warm fuzzies inside when I see all these kids with computers and I know that they are learning new things in new ways. I hope they prove me wrong!

Resources:
http://www.laptop.org
http://wiki.laptop.org

Paper:
http://www.southwestern.edu/~bucheles/ICAST_OLPC_Paper.pdf


Experiences with OLPC Technology in Ghana, West Africa

Location: Torreys Peak IV

Presenter: Suzanne Buchele (Southwestern University)
The realities of implementing One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) technology in a
developing country such as Ghana, West Africa are complex due to
infrastructure, educational, and political issues, among others. First-hand
experiences with an OLPC pilot project in Accra, Ghana, will be presented, as
well as the larger issues of whether or not this type of program is possible
and sustainable in the large scale.

Suzanne Buchele
Fulbright Scholar to Ashesi University 2006-2007

Ashesi Universtiy - founded by UCB graduate in Accra
- spring 2007 started research group with unvergrads
- wrote paper on OLPC and applicability to Ghana
- fulbright renewed for 2007-2008

Talked to Ghana about acquiring OLPC
Turned out that they had already decided to acquired them

Why is OLPC a Good idea?

Pros:
* The digital divide
- poor countries are being left behind (-> so how does OLPC solve this?)
- LDCs - economic relais
* Educational problems in LDCs
- access to educatin
- quality of education
- access to quality education
- girls education
(mho: lots of generalizing here about poverty, lack of specifics
about ghana - is she aware of Accra girls school, Aburi girl's?
appealing to stereotypes)

Why is OLPC not the best idea?

Cons:
* Best use of money?
* Why not improve educational quality and acces?
* Why not improve infrastructure (or other initiative) so that
overall economies improve?
* Fundamental issue of technological know-how for implementation
and on-going support
* only about 6% of Ghanaian students graduate from high school
* only 3% get further training
* need teacher training ==> A cyclical problem!
* even if you can get teachers trained, people don't want to go to
rural areas - its not a pleasant place to live there,
especially if you are one of the elite 3%

Millenium challenge account - spend that money on infrastructure. But
taking that long view and looking for gains 20 years down the line.

Question: Who is going to support them?

If you want to put laptops in 5000 schools in Ghana who is going to
train people how to use them?

Educational realities in Ghana
* rote learning is the main means of learning
* not enough teachers
* Ashesi requires critical thinking - but this is something they have
never done before
ex. "i knew that 9x9 =81, but i never knew what that meant"
* schools are free up to 8th grade but.
- uniforms and supply fees
- short terms opportunity cost to families
- food...
[mho: note references to a uniform "they"]

Feb 2008 Teacher training
* some teachers had never used computers before

Feb 2008 Accra Pilot, School Training
* Kids Lined up outside looking in
* only one classroom got lapotps
* kids loved the camera

Placed order for 50,000 laptops

July 2008 Berekuso rural pilot

Observations
* difficult circumstances
* education is a human rights issue
* opportunity to fast forward educational advancement
* allow access to significant educational resource and opporunities
* funamdnal problem of dissemniation technology country wide

Ghana gov't is digitizing textbooks
-> ebook reader with textbooks would be a tremendous adv alone!
-> but a laptop would be even more!

Ghana Poverty reduction strategy!

The key to a government's success is the educational
quality of it's workforce!

Q: Work with Private Schools?
A: Ashesi is Private (q: yes i know). A lot of work has been done in labs, but
no not to date

Q: The issue of theft.. Do you find that preventative measures are effective?
A: We didn't register them with the server right away, and one of the laptops
was stolen. hundreds of kids go to the school and one go stolen and there was
a fight and the laptop got slammed to the floor and it still worked. One of
the keys is immersion - everyone gets a laptop. Everyone has one - so you can
always borrow one. Not being able to turn it on aogain?

Q: Is the software localized?
A: Ghana is english speaking. so it is in english. but we are working in local content. But the software is localizeable and you can choose local content.

Q: What are they doing on the laptops?
A: WHen we first gave them the laptops, camera videocamera, music. We didn't
have the textbooks yet, but we did have ebooks. A maze game, a matching game -
arithmetic. subtraction. Games are roughly educational. Critical thinking nad
logical thinking skills. Turtle art, etc. A lot of them were getting it.

Q: How do you deal with repairs? If soemthing stops working, rural areas?
A: It's up to the gov't grassroots things will spring ups. Kind of huts for
repair. For pilots. A screen went out. THe touchpads became desensitized. so
we figured out that people were scrubbing the.

Q: internet access?
A: no internet access. there is wired internet they could get through ghana
telecom but they didn't have free lines, and there are wireless line and
wireless ones were all pay by the bit. Some of the sentiment in the country is
that the internet is kind of evil and you don't want ot give them internet.
they'v eheard of the nigerian thing.

They didn't have textbooks - there was only one math textbook and that was
the teacher's.

Q: what was the criteria that was used for selecting the pilot schools?
A: maybe the test scores?

Q: were there any girls?
A: a lot of the girls were older? in the 4th grade classroom a lot of
the girls were 14.
Q: gender biases?
A: maybe 5 students were whizzes/ 6 weren't interested, tended to be girls

Q: is there a version of the laptops that uses OCR, is there a minimum age?
A: min age is 5/6, no OCR, there is a usb digital scanner, no OCR.
Q: maybe they could learn to write.