Xbox for the Developing World?
Is Nicholas Negroponte's $100 XO laptop simply a cheap version of the Xbox? A new paper by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches suggests this may not be far off the mark. They use data on a voucher program in Romania that helped low-income children purchase a computer. The economists find that children with computers tend to spend less time doing homework and get lower grades than other students. (An article in Slate gives more details on how the economists managed to come to this conclusion.) Is the money that countries like Peru and Uruguay are spending on the XO laptop simply being squandered?
It's hard to judge at this point. Clearly, computers alone cannot take the place of engaged parents and committed teachers. According to Malamud and Pop-Eleches:
[W]e find that having a stay-at-home mom and the presence of rules regarding computer use do mitigate some of the negative effects of winning a computer voucher, indicating that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors.
The context in which the computers are used matters, and the developers of the XO laptop have their own particular theories about how the laptop can improve learning outcomes. (The developers at least propose a learning methodology that sounds a little more interesting than Math Blaster or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.)
I haven't yet seen anything like a rigorous evaluation of the XO in the classroom, though. All I could find was this wiki about the pilot XO laptop program in Peru, but I'm not particularly convinced by it. Perhaps it's time for a randomized evaluation of the XO laptop along the lines of the Romanian experiment before Ethiopia, Thailand, Nigeria, and other countries all throw wads of cash at the next "big thing"?
Update: It appears that the Inter-American Development Bank is in the middle of carrying out an evaluation of the one laptop per child model in Haiti. Cost of the evaluation? $5,100,000.
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Maybe they're playing the Oregon Trail? =)
Anyway, obviously throwing new interactive media into a classroom is going to distract students, what these countries might want to look at is building an online and robust network of interactive education sites. Most of the games the OLPC PC can play are little more than Java games, hence educators only have to compete with low- budget easily created content to regain the attention of their students. Also, while grades might go down, what are the benefits of greater digital literacy? While the evidence isn't clear it's possible the games these kids are playing might have a positive effect on their IQ.
Posted by: Andrew | Jun 16, 2008 10:16:18 PM
I personally believe that games–& interactive media–foster the 'soft' competency skills that contribute to learning development. The likes of Internet Relay Chat helped a generation of kids develop fast typing and response skills. Games that provide mental stimulation and can be scalable (to increase the level of challenge) similarly contribute to learning skills development.
OLPC (at least, before the educationists started leaving the project) is trying to do things that have never been done before, on this scale. It's an experiment in real life, & the challenge is for the people working on the ground–educators, parents–to be open to learning of their own, alongside the students' explorations of new ideas and horizons.
Posted by: serena | Jun 18, 2008 8:22:42 AM