[GKD] ICT for Education in Rural Areas (fwd)

[Irfan Khan <khania@super.net.pk>]

From:           	"Paula Beltgens" <paula.beltgens@home.com>
To:             	gkd@phoenix.edc.org
Date sent:      	Fri, 23 Mar 2001 10:08:19 -0800


Interesting article from WIRED magazine, online at
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/negroponte.html

Nicolas Negroponte
ONE-ROOM RURAL SCHOOLS

Will the information-rich get richer and the information-poor get
poorer? Will the divide shrink, or expand? The question might also be
phrased in terms of the education-rich and the education-poor. The latter
category includes some 200 million children who do not complete their
primary education.

Still, the state of the world in terms of access to digital technologies
can be viewed as half-full or half-empty. Optimists (like me) take solace
from the vast numbers of grassroots efforts on behalf of children by
educational activists who, against all odds, are dotting the planet with
experiments in computer- and Net-based learning. Pessimists find doom and
gloom in the odds themselves, which are aggravated by economic forces
paradoxically heading in the wrong direction.


Telecom paradox

The nations with the worst and most expensive telecommunications today are
precisely those that will pay the highest price in terms of development.
In any given developing country, improving the quality and extent of new
telecom infrastructure is perhaps the easiest problem to fix. The
economics on the demand side are much harder, in large part because
usurious billing schemes are imposed by local rÈgimes, whose leaders look
upon telecom as a luxury to be taxed.

Local calls in Africa, for instance, average US$2 per hour; phoning from
one country to the next costs $1.25 per minute. But consider that many of
these state-owned telcos are in nations that receive much of their income
in hard currency - earned from such steep prices, among other things. This
shortsighted approach, however, must change in favor of the long-term
economic view.


Computer paradox

Computers keep getting faster, following Moore's frequently quoted law of
doubling processing power every 18 months. Played backward, the law should
read: At a constant speed, the cost of computers will be cut in half every
year and a half. Manufacturing, of course, does not scale smoothly in
reverse. But the potential for very low cost computers is wildly more than
we have made of it. Why? Because inexpensive computing is a crummy
business. The margins are too low and the economic model is that of a
commodity, a prospect that frightens American business. US companies just
do not know how to tackle the low end. And by "low end" I don't mean the
much vaunted sub-$1,000 computer - I mean PCs that cost less than $100.


Education paradox

The most troublesome paradox - and the most difficult to change - is
that of education itself. Developing countries look longingly at
developed nations, with an eye toward copying their education systems. The
sad truth, however, is that the Western notion of school stems from an
industrial age in which the intellect of children is manufactured like
Fords:Instruction is a serial, repetitive process driven by strict norms
of curriculum and age.

As my MIT colleagues Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert are fond of
pointing out, such schools are an extreme form of age segregation.

Six-year-olds study with 6-year-olds, until next year, when they study
with 7-year-olds. Only schoolchildren with siblings get the real
advantages of age integration. Mind you, this isn't just younger children
learning from older ones - little brothers and sisters helping their older
siblings with computers has become a hallmark of our day. Age integration
is a fundamental change we need to consider as part of revisiting the
concept of school.

The little red schoolhouse One-room schools are often believed to be a sad
consequence of poverty. But instead of a problem, they may be a solution.
These schools, which may make up as many as half the number of primary
schools on the planet, are driven by the principle that young children
should learn as close to home as possible. The result is an educational
environment that is small, local, personal, and age-integrated and that
potentially provides a much richer learning experience than larger schools
in urban environments.

My advice to political leaders in developing nations: Adopt an
educational strategy that focuses digital technology on primary
education, particularly in the poorest and most rural areas. The goal is
not to boost national standards or to stem the population flow into urban
areas, though these may be by-products. The mission is to learn a lot more
about learning itself. In the process we may find new models of education
that can be used in all parts of the world - rich and poor, urban and
rural. The catch is access.


LEOpolitical learning

Low Earth orbit satellites, or LEOs, are the wave of the future. The
first such system, Iridium, will be put into service in September with 66
satellites serving the world as a single telecommunications system. Think
of it as a cellular telephone grid - but one where you are stationary and
the grid moves. Iridium, conceived in the late '80s, is optimized for
voice, not data, but in a few years it will be followed by a next
generation of LEOs (Teledesic being the most celebrated) optimized for the
Net. When that happens, suddenly, being rural does not matter. Being in
the most remote part of the planet does not matter. In fact, such places
are precisely where LEOs will not otherwise be saturated with urban
traffic. By contrast, when you physically wire the world, remote places
become the most expensive to serve. With LEOs, you have to cover the whole
world in order for any single part of it to work - rural and remote
access, in a sense, comes for free.

In the next five years, LEOs will thus change the balance of access.
With very low cost computers and some boldness in education policy, it
will be possible to touch the lives of all children, including those in
the poorest and most remote regions of the world. The right step to take
now is to use whatever means necessary to reach as many one-room rural
schools as possible - to learn today about learning tomorrow. These
apparently forgotten schools, paradoxically, may provide the best clues
for real change in education. *** The ideas above are in large part taken
from the real plans of the 2B1 Foundation (www.2b1.org/), in cooperation
with the Fundacion Omar Dengo in Costa Rica. Costa Rica is one of the few
nations to seriously embrace computers in primary education; one-room
rural schools make up 40 percent of the country's primary schools, serving
nearly a tenth of the K-6 population. (from WIRED MAGAZINE ONLINE
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/negroponte.html>



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