[Research] research issues for OLPC

[Michael Best]

I was pleased to see the email on this list from Jennifer DeBoer 
exploring research questions related to the XO. I also have been reading 
email threads from SJ and understand his (and elements of OLPC 
generally) interest in spurring quality research - including monitoring, 
evaluation and assessment - around XO interventions.

For those who do not know me, I am an assistant professor at Georgia 
Tech working on ICT's for economic, political, and social development. I 
also happen to be an alum of the MIT Media Lab.

Jennifer mentioned research concerns related to educational outcomes as 
kids in schools begin to use XO's. This is no doubt the most profound 
assessment question. It is also not my area of research (I have never 
really worked in formal primary or secondary school settings) and it 
also is apparently a particularly hard nut to crack (how do you measure 
educational impacts without falling into pitfalls of pre- and post-test 
and the like). I suspect I know Negroponte's response to this: if the 
impact doesn't come out and smack you in the face then something has 
gone horribly wrong. I, personally, am not as sanguine and hope that 
some robust research into this question is attempted.

Personally, I am interested in drier and far more modest questions as 
they relate to the use of the XO.

Equity and access. I wonder how use and usage patterns will differ among 
differing communities. We know that technologies are not value nor 
culturally neutral. Some aspects of the initial XO may serve (or 
alienate) some communities. Do girls do something different than boys? 
Do lower-income community members do something different than those 
better off? And so on. I suggest this work not just for the purpose of 
data collection but in order to offer course corrections. If 80% of the 
heavy users are boys then what needs to be changed?

The questions above seem targeted towards use within a single community 
but similar questions might be asked across broad cultural contexts, 
countries, and indeed continents.

Sustainability. We know that most (regrettably) of these sort of 
projects historically fail to sustain themselves over long periods of 
time. The literature has a set of analytic frameworks to study various 
sustainability failures: political, institutional, cultural, 
technological, financial, and environmental. This is likely to be a more 
longitudinal study but it is critical to start it out at the very outset 
of a project along each of these dimensions.

Economics. Considerable attention has focused on the XO's purchase 
price. I am interested more broadly in the total cost of ownership. This 
includes maintenance and replacement cycles, failure rates, staff 
training, and so forth.

Institutional factors and change. The XO will not sit in a green field 
institutional environment. Formal education, especially, often have 
entrenched institutional structures and interests from the student to 
teacher to headmaster to ministry to.... We have seen in many cases 
where computers have served as institutional change agents; indeed often 
the computer itself becomes secondary to some broader institutional 
change its presence somehow fosters. The opposite is also, regrettably, 
often the case. The computer intervention cannot get past the entrenched 
interests or institutions (e.g. the computers sit unpacked and unused in 
the headmaster's office).

Related to the questions above is one of capacity development and 
management skills as they relate to the local projects themselves. How 
is an XO intervention staffed and how is the staffed trained? I am 
particularly interested in this as it relates to Linux and the other 
specialized software.

I am not sure how best to carry out any of these research projects but 
stand ready (as do my students) to brainstorm and look for opportunity. 
I would love to hear people's thoughts and comments. In addition - and 
getting rather out front of myself and my Harvard colleagues - a group 
of us will be in Cambridge Monday, December 3, having just concluded a 
get together with the Berkman Center. I wonder if some of us could 
gather for aan OLPC research f2f?

Regards,
Mike