The topic of education is an obsession with me for the simple reason that one cannot address any development related issues without reference to education, however broadly or narrowly one defines education or development. My interest in the use — and misuse — of technology in education is a natural extension of that basic interest in development and growth. The One Laptop Per Child comes in for special scrutiny because the implications of such a program are phenomenal for a poor country like India. I have long argued that there …

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” ask Clay Shirkey in a blog post “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” (March 2009). The full implications of technological change is impossible to foresee even by those who are responsible for the change.

I received an SMS just moments ago: “A thirteen-year old’s day in Surat: school 7 to 2. Daily tuitions 4:30 to 7:30. Saw ICSE standard 8th textbooks. Detailed and depressing. What a state!”
No surprise to me as I have observed the same sort of insanity in the case of the children of friends and family.

I was invited to write a guest post on One Laptop Per Child News by Wayan Vota in connection with the recent news that 250,000 OLPC laptops have been ordered by two government agencies in India and one private sector firm. And I complied. Thanks, Wayan. I appreciate the opportunity. Below the fold I reproduce the post in full.

Endgadget reports that “India bids mythical $10 laptop adieu, turns to OLPC.”

So it’s time to unveil the IT policy that I had been promising for a while. I have already laid a bit of ground work in the previous three posts — “BJP’s IT for All“, “A Rational IT Policy: The Preliminary Bits“, and “Of IT and Pascal’s Wager.” In the following, I will conclude the introduction with a brief discussion on tools as means, and then present my version of a rational IT policy.

Technological Idiocy
Technological hubris is sometimes the result of infantile solipsism commonly encountered among those who are – paradoxically – at the two opposite ends of a spectrum of technical competence: those who are understand technology very intimately and those who have a very feeble grasp of what technology is. The former see the world and its concerns as merely a collection of technical problems just waiting to be solved by the available large collection of expensive technical wizardry; the latter are ignorant of technology but have a magical belief in …

Follow up to BJP’s Policy of “IT for All”.
In the following, I will present the features of a rational “IT Policy” and argue why it makes sense. This is only an academic exercise as this is not likely to be followed by the policymakers of India. Color me cynical but if Indian policymakers were in the habit of making rational policies, India would not be a desperately poor country, would it? Why India gets saddled with moth eaten policies made by inept policymakers is a different matter that we will …

Information technology (IT) is arguably one of the more remarkable products of the advanced industrialized countries (AIC). Its development in the AICs and subsequent widespread use there indicates that IT tools are not only a consequence of economic growth and development, but is also the cause of further economic growth. Developing countries such as India are attempting to catch up and they are fortunate to have the use of IT at an earlier stage of their development than the currently developed countries had when they were developing.
I am pleased to …

The radical ignorance displayed by those who claimed that the government had created a laptop costing Rs 500 (~US $10) is jaw-dropping spectacular. How on earth can one for even one moment entertain the idea that any entity — least of all the government and a bunch of students — could produce something for an order of magnitude less cost than currently possible is unfathomable.
As the photoshopped image in my first post on this matter previously states, “I see stupid people . . . they don’t even know that …

[Follow up to the previous post.]
I suppose it should not come as any surprise that it is now being claimed that the $10 cost was a mis-statement and the actual cost is $100. And like the “$100″ OLPC which actually costs twice as much, probably the Indian laptop will — if it ever is actually produced — cost anything between $200 to $400, at which point it would be pointless as currently laptops are being produced for around $200 a pop by many manufacturers. I think it is a safe …

Some years ago it was some genius who was making petroleum by twirling some sticks in a bucket of water. The Indian press reported it breathlessly and which is worse, some dimwitted “professors” from some “educational” institutions even considered it seriously. The details of that are hazy in my mind but I was reminded of it when I read that the government is going to produce a laptop for Rs 500 (or US$ 10).
A collaborative team between the Indian governments ministry of science and ministry of technology will unveil …

At the intersection of high-tech gadgets and public spending on education in poor countries lies XO, the machine from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project led by Nicholas Negroponte. I have been a critic of the program right from the start. I have argued before that the idea of providing one laptop per child is well and good if money were no object. Unfortunately, in resource-strapped economies such as India, the opportunity cost of providing school children with laptops is prohibitive.

I get to watch TV news only occasionally, mostly at airports, hotels and while visiting friends. Today at my friend’s place in Delhi, I woke up to TV news. It was wall-to-wall coverage of Dr Manmohan Singh’s heart surgery and the gunning down of two Pakistani terrorists just outside Delhi.
On the 24-hour news channels, the presenters have to keep talking non-stop about whatever is the breaking news. Naturally, it is humanly not possible to say something meaningful about any event without some time to think about it. So the …

Upstream and Downstream Choices
It is fairly well understood that information and communications technologies (ICT) tools expand choice. We all have access to a very large set of information and have the freedom to choose what we want to read, watch, listen to, etc., etc. ICT expands our “downstream” choice. What is not as well understood is that it expands our “upstream” choice also. It is a two-way medium, unlike say broadcast and print media which only allows us downstream choice: using ICT we send back information indicating our choice and …

I spent the last evening in the American Center near Churchgate, Mumbai, at a presentation on the launch of the “one laptop per child” — OLPC — in India. The event was hosted by a bunch of institutions: Asia Society, Digital Bridge Foundation (created by the Reliance ADA Group), MIT Alumni Association of India, and Consulate General of the US.
I had received an email saying that Prof Negroponte would like to meet with me after the presentation. Negroponte, as most people know, is the founder and chairman of the OLPC …

“Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper,” wrote Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow in 1966 about Milton Friedman, another Nobel laureate economist, the father of monetarism.
Everything reminds me of India’s failed education system — and by extension — the stupidity of the government policymakers, bureaucrats and politicians included. Unlike Bob Solow, however, I cannot keep it out of my posts.

Let me begin with an “I told you so.” For a few years I have been obsessed with the use of technology in education because it is my considered position that the smart use of technology provides the best hope of solving the problem of educating the hundreds of millions in India.
But a bit of thinking brought me to the (apparently contradictory) conclusion that laptops in the school learning environment is detrimental to learning. I love the idea of using technology in schools but totally distrust the idea of …

My friend, Arun Mehta, has some advice for the public sector telecom providers. They are losing customers. Arun believes that their approach is wrong and that they should see the opportunity in using their last mile access for affordable internet connectivity. I reproduce (with his permission) his recent contribution to the india-gii mailing list.

A magazine article in the New York Times of April 13th has the rather mistaken and misleading title “Can the Cell Phone End Global Poverty?” (Hat tip: Abhishek Sarda). The article title is misleading because it doesn’t even remotely attempt to answer that question. It is instead about what is called a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist,” in this case someone who works for Nokia and essentially tries to figure out how people actually use their phones and thus how phone companies should design phones for greater usability.