[Grassroots-l] Fwd: OLPC - Ethiopia Implementation Report - Relevance in Nigeria.

[Edward Cherlin]

FYI.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pamela McLean <pam54321 at googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 8:01 AM
Subject: OLPC - Ethiopia Implementation Report - Relevance in Nigeria.
To: Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>
Cc: learningfromeachother at yahoogroups.com, mendenyo at yahoogroups.com,
yunus_discussion at googlegroups.com, tav <asktav at gmail.com>,
peakofi.thompson at gmail.com, Andrius Kulikauskas <ms at ms.lt>,
asmitchell at aol.com, Alexis Sumsion <runningincircles14 at yahoo.com>


Ed

Thanks for you reference to the OLPC trials in Ethiopia and
and the challenge of a rote-learning based culture. Ethiopia
Implementation Report, September - December 2007
http://www.eduvision.ch/en/meta/documents/ethiopiareport_080227a-mh.pdf
(I have put some extracts at the end of my email for reference)

This is a very useful report.  As I read it I found myself thinking -
I recognise what they are saying - it could have been written for
Nigeria.

I have written a few observations to support my statement that the
Ethiopian report seems equally applicable in Nigeria, where there is
also rote learning, and a very formal hierarchical social structure.
(People bow in different ways to different people, all kinds of
variations from a nod of the head to lying flat on the ground,
depending on the status of the people involved. A young person passing
an older one without offering the correct greeting will be called
back. It is not a culture where you normally question your elders.)

One of the things I have learned through Teachers Talking (an
introduction to ICT for teachers in rural schools) is that the
attitude to questioning in Nigeria is very different to the UK. One of
the problems I find myself facing when I present Teachers Talking (TT)
is the challenge of getting participants to ask questions. It is even
difficult to get them to generate questions for specific purposes -
i.e. where there is no suggestion that anyone is showing ignorance.
For instance there is one  activity in the "No Computer Computer
Course" part of TT where the participants need to generate ten Yes/No
questions which are appropriate for the children they teach. When I
first started to do this activity I was completely bewildered as to
why it seemed so difficult to get sets of age-and-culture-appropriate
closed questions.

I have now started to include TT sessions that specifically relate to
asking questions. I also try to make a point of thanking people when
they ask a question, and encouraging all participants to notice how
the question has added value to the session for all of us. I have
started to include a session on questioning and the difference between
open and closed questions. I have found adults intrigued to discover
the six key "Who? What? Where? Why? When? How?" questions - whicg is
something that is done at primary level in the UK. In TT now we even
have an "energiser" where we practice closed questions by playing the
childhood game of choosing one person to give answers and then all
trying to  trick the person into answering "Yes" or "No".

Another example comes from when I was teaching a group of young people
who are, by local standards, computer literate. They are also helpers
at a children's computer club, where they tend to do the  kind of rote
learning described in the Ethiopian report. John Dada had asked me to
help them see other options for their work with the children. I
suggested we might get the children to collect information in a
structured way, help them to put in into the computers, and then see
what they could find out. Initially  I found myself bewildered by the
young people's difficulty in taking this idea forward. Then I realised
that they had learned to input specific spreadsheets and databases,
but they had not really come across any genuine uses. They had learned
about "computers" but they had not learned about "information
handling".

It took me several days to realise how my assumptions about their
level of computer literacy were too strongly based in my own
information-rich culture. I  struggled with the problem, trying to see
why the trainees and I were not "connecting" on various issues.
Fantsuam Foundation colleagues Kazanka Comfort and Bala Bidi listened
to me patiently in the evenings as I tried to analyse what was going
wrong.

Then one evening, as Comfort and I were in the kitchen, and she was
crouching by the kerosene stove where our food was cooking, she picked
up a plate, pretended to look at it carefully and started talking to
me about it. We were both hungry and looking forward to eating, and as
she watched over the food, in the light of the hurricane lamp, she
described the plate to me  .. that it was called a plate... that she
had bought it at the market.. that she was very happy with this
plate...she managed to go on and on, earnestly explaining  how it
looked - its shape and the pattern of red and green peppers painted on
it .. how wonderful it was to have a plate...

We were both smiling at how long she could keep sharing all  her
knowledge about the plate. She had solved my problem about the
trainees and the computers! Of course the plate was useless to us
until there was food on it - that was obvious. But it was not so
obvious to the trainees that a computer was useless until it had
useful information in it.  They had seen computers. (They had even
seen computers decorated with examples of spreadsheets and databases.)
But they had no experience of people who were hungry for information
coming to use computers. To all intents and purposes the computers
they knew were "empty computers" - as useless as the plate before the
meal was ready!

Together, Comfort and I had come to understand the culture gap in this
instance. I re-thought the way I was presenting the course and the
next day I could feel a much better connection with the trainees.

If OLPC is to be relevant in rural Africa, it cannot just be about
getting computers to places (beyond the interest of the elites) that
have virtually no education budget, precious few books and certainly
no computers, electricity or Internet connection. It needs to be about
helping poorly resourced teachers who are struggling against the odds
to do the best they can with large classes and a blackboard. Many are
trying hard to do the best they can, in the only way they know,
usually in a language that is not their first language (English) and
using a system imposed by the colonialists. Given the constraints they
face it is very understandable why they use rote learning.

However the system is not appropriate for the Information Age. One of
the great ironies of the present educational system, as I see it, is
that it was modeled on a system developed in the UK largely to serve
the commercial needs of the industrial revolution (all those
book-keepers and clerks with wonderful copperplate writing). But the
colonialists didn't bring an industrial revolution with them. No
wonder there is unemployment amongst literate Nigerians and the civil
service is ludicrously overstaffed. What do you do with people who can
read and write when there is little commerce for them to serve? As my
friend Mr Timothy says  (on the farms) "we labour like animals", and
once people are numerate and literate they expect better opportunities
than "labouring like animals" - but most people in Nigeria will have
to create those opportunities for themselves. That is the educational
challenge. As the excellent Ethiopian report points out, if OLPC is to
help, it will need to continue to consider cultural context as well as
technology.

It is refreshing to see OLPC starting to address cultural issues more
seriously now, as well as technical ones. If the designers are
considering those aspects, then it does makes the whole project seem
more potentially relevant to education in the rural areas that I know,
and others like them.

Pam

Extracts below from Ethiopia Implementation Report, September - December 2007
http://www.eduvision.ch/en/meta/documents/ethiopiareport_080227a-mh.pdf

The aim of the study was to assess both the educational
and technical effectiveness of the Eduvision software
when used on the XO laptops in Ethiopian classrooms.
(snip)
The dominant mode of education in Ethiopia can
best be understood against the background of a long
established model of teaching, influenced by both
cultural and religious traditions (Lasonen et al 2005).
Such traditional models still play a significant formative
role for the educated population, with most current
teachers and related professionals having received
their schooling within this context. Unsurprisingly, the
experience of learning in this environment has had
significant influence on the strategies employed in the
teaching and learning process of today. From primary
through to tertiary education, those responsible for
education are, on the whole, teaching in the way they
themselves have been taught and perpetuating a rote-
based approach to learning (Smith and Ngoma-Maema
2003; Negash, 2006).
(snip)
Attempts to simply deposit a constructivist model of
education into an Ethiopian educational system which
is firmly rooted in rote learning will face significant
challenges. The conceptual pedagogical shift required
is too radical to be implemented effectively without
time and attention given to gradual transition and
contextualisation.
(snip)

2008/6/22 Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>:
>
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 8:22 AM, christopher macrae
> <chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Back in 1984, we wrote :by 2000 the discrepancy in incomes and expectations
> > will be seen as man's biggest risk; to go globally and sustainably, systemic
> > poverty must be ended, give or take a few years this will require that by
> > 2010 a nobel prize winning economist to popularise to over 1 billion tv
> > watchers the new sport of searching for 30000 community-rising and openly
> > replicable projects http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html
>
> Oh, not that many. The great thing about replicable projects is that
> you can replicate them as often as needed. My short list of projects
> to replicate is
>
> * Microfinance: From Grameen to 10,000+ microfinance institutions
> worldwide so far. Also microinsurance for health care. Something like
> 100,000 institutions will finish the job
> * Partners in Health, including health as a basic human right: started
> in Haiti, now in Latin America, Africa, Russia. A long way to go
> still.
> * Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement: Integrated development in half of the
> villages of Sri Lanka. Beginning to move out to other countries. A
> very long way to go.
> * One Laptop Per Child: Promoting collaborative discovery, independent
> thought, and wider sharing in dozens of countries; breaking down
> authoritarian school cultures. A long way to go still, but well under
> way, like the others.
>
> I'm proposing organizations to research and deploy village-scale
> renewable power sources and Internet connections using microfinance in
> order to bring all of these and many others together. When we have
> powerful education tools with the electricity and communications to
> make full use of them, I am predicting a considerable increase in
> economic growth, fulfillment of the other UN Millennium Development
> Goals (health, clean water, and so on), and far more general
> cooperation in the younger generation, plus their parents and teachers
> to a lesser degree.
>
> I can provide documentation on the merits of each of these. For
> example, we just got a report on OLPC XOs in Ethiopia. Ethiopia
> mplementation Report, September - December 2007
> http://www.eduvision.ch/en/meta/documents/ethiopiareport_080227a-mh.pdf
>
> My comments:
>
> There are a few paragraphs of advertising, claiming that their
> software is better suited than the Sugar Activities for Ethiopian
> teaching methods. The reported test results mostly concerned
> Eduvision's Melopo activities, rather than Sugar Activities. Since
> Melopo is also somewhat collaborative, the results should transfer.
>
> The most important observation is that teaching with the laptops, even
> under the constraints of the prevailing system, changed teacher
> behavior toward more effective methods. Instead of reciting
> instructions without a chance to try them out, students began to be
> encouraged to work on the computers, following instructions as they
> are given.
>
> Teachers began to use structured group activities and competitions,
> and to ask students to present material to the class. The structured
> techniques that the teachers put into their XO lesson plans then
> spilled over into their non-computer classes. Where before any
> question from a student was seen as an insult to the teacher, teachers
> began to offer individual instruction while other students were
> occupied on the computers. Students were encouraged to work in small
> groups, and began to help each other. After a time, teachers began to
> allow questions generally, and to set aside time for them.
>
> Student motivation was observed to be higher because they could mark
> up their electronic texts with notes and highlighting. This is a
> critical software function. Document readers alone are not sufficient.
> Eduvision recommends adding hyperlinks and some software functions to
> electronic texts. (I recommend adding way more software functions.)
>
> The trial was quite successful in spite of many obstacles, such as XOs
> getting stuck in customs and delays in localizing texts to Amharic,
> and the somewhat unrealistic setting, with lots of professional help
> for teachers every day, and classes half the usual size. Eduvision
> sees how several components of teacher training can be automated, and
> recommends providing sample lesson plans. A larger trial with 5000 XOs
> was planned for April 2008. (I don't know what is actually happening
> with that.)
>
> We are not talking about a complete changeover to Constructionism on
> the part of teachers, but the basic premise of the program is
> verified: Opportunity to do things better because of appropriate
> technology leads naturally to doing things better, in spite of
> seemingly intractable cultural obstacles. We can get through to the
> teachers, to the great advantage of students. There is more to come,
> but let us be grateful that the XO is accepted as an agent of change
> in addition to its more obvious benefits to schools.
>
> > However apart from  backing Muhammad Yunus as the only person who would dare
> > say that good humoredly to a billion people- premiering on Brazil's
> > nationwide tv earlier this month for I hope a big audience to cheer! - what
> > culturally is community-scale is not something for microeconomics (or
> > Gandhian microentrepreneurs) not to be precise about
> >
> >
> >
> > Schumacher preceded my father by forecasting globalization would need to
> > network around 2 million villages: I am not clear if he was expecting a
> > village to be 35000 which is what 7 billion beings divided by 2 million
> > comes to.
>
> Villages are up to a few thousand. Most of the rest of the world's
> population is in larger towns and cities. I don't know whether 2
> million is right, but it can't be more than 4 million.
>
> > Equally my father and I would beg you to always think of at least
> > 2 ways to define communities classifications worldwide - for example if the
> > internet to innovate any value whatosever the virtual village of 35000
> > independent thinkers may be just as vital to your economy or the world
>
> One of the points about Constructionist education is to greatly
> increase the proportion of independent thinkers in the population.
>
> > economy as any geographical partition of 35000 people. If you can always be
> > cosy with 2 opposite classifications in mind handling 3 or more aint that
> > difficult. Choice of 2 truths is so much harder to debate in mass media's
> > soundbiting era than one.
> >
> >
> >
> > PRACTICAL CASES (please help improve their write ups if you will)
> >
> > Consider 2 Examples of How Community Economics seems to work in Bangladesh
> > and possibly why community has never worked its transparency in Africa
> >
> >
> >
> > 1 Bangladesh
> >
> > This most brilliantly human place on earth lets us look at what sort of
> > community banking sustains communities and enough independence at a global
> > scale; here I absolutely need to read through a lot more literature to
> > understand the Bangladesh model (in fact we are forming at least 2 different
> > book clubs that I expect will take a year to correct these first parses)
> >
> >
> >
> > but roughly Bangladesh as a nation = at least 100,000 dedicated community
> > servants (at Grameen, ASA, BRAC etc) empower over 25 million female
> > microentrepreneurs- according to Bill Clinton that superscaling up is enough
> > to drive the whole economy even if the top politicians are all in jail -
> > currently 7% sustainbale compound growth
> >
> >
> >
> > again with just over 10,000 Bangladeshi branches a bank like Grameen has 8
> > million owners or 800 per branch (though I want to treble check that
> > arithmetic and again does a community of 800 owners sound like what you
> > would expect as village size -particularly as we only have one owner in each
> > household and these may be 5 per household -oddly bringing us not far from
> > 35000 again )...in fact I feel that a grameen bank actually serves whatever
> > villages are within say 10 miles radius of each other (ie multiple villages)
>
> Yes.
>
> > -before the English invented trains (and unless you boatd) that was the
> > average distance a human being explored in a lifetime - remeber that when
> > you first intall mobile telegram connections because te economic
> > multipliers of you can hear me now are big!
> >
> >
> >
> > 2 AFRICA
> >
> > I am taking a wild guess (so no worries on my side how much you can help me
> > learn) but I suggest that Africa suffers from a virulent problem that I am
> > not aware any 20th C nation has solved
> >
> >
> >
> > what happens when 0.1% of your land is oil/gold etc and 99.9% sand
> >
> >
> >
> > ie how is wealth and health shared across all the geography of an Africa
> > nation rather than creating 2 asset-rideen apartheids: those who live in and
> > own the oil well/gold mine and those who don't. I am aware that the
> > communities who own the gold are variously called corporations, state
> > government, some hybrid but in all cases I am not aware (though future
> > hopeful of middle east models) of a "poor" nation that shares the natural
> > wealth equitably across its peoples as intergenrational time goes by.  And
> > Africa's bad luck is to be endowed with more natural commodity wealth than
> > any continent but never to have progressed equitably beyond the mess that
> > European Empiredom historically mined
> >
> >
> >
> > even as at a detail level I have made lots of errors, I hope you will never
> > forget to relentlessly debate how  community is everywhere in the jigsaw
> > puzzle pieces wherever future crisis of human sustainability is compounding
> > up or down
>
> Bangladesh was also part of the British Empire, and was remorselessly
> pillaged for centuries.
>
> One of the better correlates with growth in the last fifty years is
> the prior commitment to education in the culture, including the idea
> (if not always the practice) that the purpose of government is the
> well-being of the entire nation, for various definitions of
> well-being.
>
> >  Can we research the original truth of ENTREPRENEUR
> >
> > http://www.ned.com/group/community-general/news/240/
> >
> > there can be a lot more in the economics debate at this ned thread which
> > could hugely benefit from you swarming there – though I will try to
> > summarise learnings at http://journalistsforhumanity.com
>
> I hear that free markets work well. We should try it sometime.
>
> > which leaves how do we the people debate- I am sorry but I believe the worst
> > in the world for community sustainability is the American democracy every 4
> > years system  fanned by 15 minutes of ads per 60 minutes of tv viewing. I
> > say this as a mathematician of media not someone who understands politics of
> > left or right anywhere at national levels.  I agree that is extremely
> > ignorant of me.
>
> There is definitely something to be said for a simple vote of No
> Confidence rather than a legalistic impeachment process that the
> legislature dare not invoke.
>
> > PEOPLE POWER DEBATES
> >
> > If I could wish: Dr Yunus on tv every might linked into google.org
> > communities searching for 30000 open community projects
> >
> >
> >
> > If world citizen nets cannot weave that wish,  we also like:
> >
> > Oxford union debates http://oxbridge.tv/_wsn/page3.html
> >
> > Open Space 1000 person gatherings the HO way http://futuresunited.com/
> >
> > 31000 person Gandhi-Montessori schools in one city and thus their parent
> > etacher networks
>
> The Montessori movement has become utterly hidebound. Instead of
> continuing to recognize even more ways that children invent for
> themselves to learn, they have become rigid orthodoxies each assuring
> themselves that the others have got it all wrong. (The experience that
> did it for me was when my daughter decided to do a jigsaw puzzle
> upside down as an additional challenge, and the Montessori school
> teacher wouldn't let her.)
>
> One Laptop Per Child has inherited the Montessori mantle by promoting
> collaborative discovery, encouraging students to find new ways of
> using the tools provided, and even to create new tools.
>
> > We also know ways of turning any global brand into such a Q&A debate but
> > that needs closing down the brand's ad agency for a year while the people
> > debate how to return communications of image and reality to the same means
> > and the same ends
> >
> >
> >
> > You might have guessed the bottom line. As a lover of true community, I
> > would love to hear of other communications methods that celebrate the
> > humanity or flow with the hi-trust entrepreneur.
>
> We're working on it.
>
> > chris macrae
> >
> > worldcitizen.tv, wholeplanet.tv  washington dc bureau 301 881 1655
>
> --
> Edward Cherlin
> End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
> http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay




-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay