DOI: 10.1145/1536616.1536619

Why Invention and Innovation Diverge

My compliments on the ar- ticle “One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality” by Kenneth L. Kraemer et al. (June 2009). It is incredibly valuable for the ACM community to understand the profound difference between invention (which OLPC certainly is as both concept and product) and innovation (the widespread adoption of new mores). How and why political, economic, cultural, and sociological factors influence, if not trump, great ideas, concepts, and products is pertinent with OLPC, especially in light of the project’s public visibility.

MediaX@Stanford University (like the MIT Media Lab) encourages the study of how technological solutions affect individuals, organizations, and institutions. We especially encourage small research projects, like OLPC, that pursue “grand ideas” through experimental discovery. Last fall, we hosted Kentaro Toyama, lab director of Microsoft Research India, on “Computing for Socio-Economic Development” in which he described work prompted by a student at Stanford’s Center for Innovative Education. Toyama’s lab bought and placed several hundred XO laptop computers in Bangalore elementary schools, encouraging students to take them home per Nicholas Negroponte’s hope of inspiring parental involvement. To his dismay, many of the machines were stolen and put on the black market where they were worth six months of discretionary family income and clearly too much of a temptation.

The lab concluded that a mouse, at $2 each, had useful attributes: worth nothing on the black market without the XO, could have initials carved onto it without affecting its operation, and inexpensive enough for educators to buy. The Microsoft team designed a “mouse docking station” that could accommodate up to 10 mice, color-coding each cursor on screen so students would require far fewer machines. Despite initial worry that the students would be confused by the multiple cursors, experiments found no particular difficulty

with this new operating mode.

Learning could now truly begin. Working in classrooms much larger than those in the U.S., Bangalore’s teachers are seldom able to help individual students even if they get stuck, though classmates quickly recognize when their fellow students need help and come to their aid. An early discovery with the XO was that students mastered arithmetic in one-third the time and retained vocabulary drills far longer. Research also found that boys, as well as girls, begin to exhibit cooperative rather than competitive behavior in games and problem-solving sessions on the machines.

Microsoft Labs built a simple reference model—MultiPoint, available as a software development kit—that has since been adapted for teachers in the U.S. and anecdotally found to have similar educational value (http://www.mi- crosoft.com/unlimitedpotential/Trans-formingEducation/ MultiPoint.mspx).

MediaX researchers often find analogous dichotomies between designer functionality and the intended user community at a more systemic level than those usually considered by HCI designers. These techniques, coupled with Kraemer et al.’s excellent coverage, provide additional skills and approaches to the ACM design community.

charles house (past president of Acm), Stanford, Ca

 

Technologists have a moral duty to ensure that their activities contribute to solving the problems at hand and not diminish other, better, solutions. In this light, the analysis by Kenneth L. Kraemer et al. (June 2009) was helpful in articulating some of the dangers that befall technology projects in sub-Saharan Africa where establishing a vibrant education system in rural areas is a wholly different proposition from its counterpart in urban areas. Schools even a few kilometers from a large town have markedly less-developed infrastructure than those in town. The result is that education often must wait until children are old enough to walk those

kilometers to the nearest school.

Try to imagine what OLPC project success would look like in such a context. A typical rural school is constructed with great commitment by the local community but consists of only mud walls, tin roof, and muddy floors. It has a thousand students but no running water, electricity, sanitation, or food service or even enough pens and paper. It is staffed by surprisingly dedicated but inadequately trained, underpaid, and undervalued teachers. Now imagine that the same school receives a large stock of laptops (even if specially designed) that promise a pedagogical revolution. I find such a prospect laughably unrealistic.

It was therefore surprising to read that initial OLPC trials should be conducted in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, through a large-scale deployment ( 50,000 XOs), presumably much of it in rural areas. This imposes on the government an unrealistic expectation to establish a technical-support infrastructure, satellite distribution of digital books, and large-scale teacher-training program. This in a country that invests heavily in improving school enrollment and dramatic university-expansion programs but has difficulty ensuring enough textbooks for its children.

All this is in marked contrast to another initiative emanating from MIT. The online open courseware initiative is well known; less well known is the initiative to put open courseware onto hard drives for distribution to eligible educational institutions with poor Internet connectivity. How helpful it would have been if more MIT professors included adequate reading materials in their open courseware offerings.

OLPC appears to give priority to a technocratic solution to what is essentially a social problem. Technology to support pre-service and in-service teacher education is a much more urgent priority. Incremental advances in technology infrastructure must be used to develop technical skills. That way, the development of teacher and support-technician skills would support future possible large-scale com-