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-