[Educators] World Bank study on computer use, February 2009

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Yama Ploskonka <yama at netoso.com> wrote:
> Earlier this year it was announced there was a momentous World Bank study to
> be published. We  were warned it might be quite negative to the OLPC
> project.
>
> If this is that study, I find it very tame, nothing new really, and nothing
> we cannot improve - if we want and dare to see reality.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/d3gtto
> http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165259&piPK=64165421&theSitePK=469372&menuPK=64166093&entityID=000158349_20090211111507
>
> yes, computers in education are mostly useless, doh, unless they are
> integrated to the existing process.

Precisely what I wrote in a market study of so-called Educational
Software in 1981. "Computer literacy" makes as much sense as having a
room with paper and pencils that the children may use for an hour a
week, but they can't use them for homework, and there aren't any
textbooks. That is why Earth Treasury has launched a Digital Learning
Materials initiative to integrate Sugar into the "textbooks" and thus
into the curriculum.

> Why don't people focus on that, I don't
> know.

No imagination. A well-known fact, in some circles. Not Invented Here,
We Have Never Done It That Way, It's Not Like That Where I Come From,
etc. Jack London described the problem in his classic short story, To
Build a Fire. "He was a newcomer to the land, a chechaquo, and this
was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without
imagination." Which kills him. (Chechaquo is Chinook for Newbie, or
even Clueless Newbie. Not just ignorant, but aggressively, willfully
ignorant, thinking he knows it all, already, and ignoring the advice
of the locals.)

> (BTW, to integrate them to the teaching process, supporting the
> teachers' work, is the approach we expect to use within OLE Bolivia)

So tell me what teaching materials you need most urgently in Bolivia,
and we will see about creating them. Bryan Berry told XOCamp that the
most urgent need in Nepal was a simple visual program to practice
counting, and that it brought students from second-grade achievement
in arithmetic to sixth-grade in only a few months.

> (another BTW, talking with an international expert of UNICEF in Bolivia I
> was told she had never seen something like that kind of integration, ever,
> anywhere - go figure, seems so obvious!)

Before the XO, nobody could afford it, except a few research
organizations at IBM, Xerox, and the like. I can point you to the
literature from the 60s, when one-to-one computing meant a terminal
for each student. O. K. Moore, Ken Iverson, Alan Kay, Seymour
Papert...But then the research funding died out.

> Just to spell out what I am talking about right here, constructivism/ionism
> is not connected to the educational process.

Most teachers have never heard of either, don't know what they are,
and couldn't tell them apart with a scorecard. Or tell either from
"social constructivism", which has nothing to do with either Piaget or
Papert.

> My emphasis,
> from the abstract,
>            "Overall, the program seems to have had little
> effect on students’ test scores and other outcomes. These
> results are consistent across grade levels, subjects, and
> gender. The main reason for these results seems to be the
> failure to incorporate the computers into the educational
> process."

D'oh, as you say.

> from the text,
> " The main reason for these results may be the implementation
> of the program. Surveys of both teachers and students suggest that the
> program increases
> computer use among students and teachers by a surprising small amount, and
> most of the
> use of computers by students is for the purposes of learning to use a
> computer rather than
> studying language.    Additionally, the extra computer use reported by
> teachers is
> concentrated in the lower grades with older students’ teachers reporting
> almost no
> computer use in both groups."

GIGO: Asks the wrong questions, fails to get useful answers. No
imagination, I tell you, least of all among financial bureaucrats.



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.net/ (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)