When I asked the Director how she hoped Conectar Igualdad would impact her school she did not hesitate.  Speaking through a translator she explained that the availability of the netbooks and the chance to gain a least some basic computer literacy—the use of spreadsheets, word processing—would convince some students to continue their education.  In fact, many of the students persuaded their parents to attend this school precisely because the netbooks would be available.  Conectar Igualdad has promised to give each student who finishes school a netbook.  The opportunity to connect learning to young people’s digital lives is often regarded as a source of motivation to further develop a learner identity. Like many other parts of the world some of the most economically disadvantaged communities in Argentina view technology as essential to getting a quality education.

Unless I'm missing the boat (always likely), the upshot is that technology in schools supports a motivational play: Kids will be more enthusiastic about learning if they use technology; enthusiastic and tech-enabled kids will, furthermore, stay in schools because there's a netbook in their future if they complete secondary education. 

Terrif. (I'm not arguing with the truth of tech's motivational impact. Or about the need for motivation.) 

As a long-term strategy, using technology to increase motivation is, well, not very long-term.

As the cost of tools comes down—as it has, sufficiently to enable the MOE of Argentina to dangle netbooks as bait—the scarcity-based value of those tools to the students will diminish in lock-step. (Try dangling a mobile phone in front of those kids. They can already see phones in their futures, so you won't get much of a bump.) 

OK, maybe a short-term strategy is what's called for.* But at the end of the day—or the end of the program—you're still likely to have massive educational inequality, with students in poor areas attending schools with under-performing teachers, irrelevant curricula, lousy instruction and little learning. And the "enthusiasm gap" will have widened again while you've spent what you can spend on a short-term fix.

*I'm aware that Conectar Igualdad also offers free online courses to students, PD to teachers and a few other supports (learner management software, anyone?). But there's nothing (so far as I've seen) to suggest that CI plans anything other than to increase the appeal and efficiency of schooling that's currently failing kids. Real change is hard, but real change is essential.

What's this mean? And what's it mean for education in developing countries? 

I'm not at all positioned to give anything other than a partial analysis. However there are a few points that are salient, even to me. Note that ALL of these points are offered under the assumption that that Knewton algorithm and software provide effective, personalized learning that enable university students to build foundational skills and in some instances (statistics? math?), develop higher-level math-operational skills—that the product works as advertised, in other words. 

(And note that the most recent "What works in math" review addressed Carnegie Learning's "Cognitive Tutor" software, a product that competes, broadly, with Knewton math products. The What Works Clearninghouse reviewed 24 studies and states that the CL product "was found to have no discernible effects on mathematics achievement for high school student." Let us say charitably that the jury is out on software-based adaptive teaching and learning.) 

Implications, general

• The term "personalized learning" will be co-opted by machine-mediated learning in higher ed and possibly in K12. (Pearson and Knewton are exploring potential developments there.) 
• Colleges and universities, already feeling the pressure of money (or lack of same) will cut staff, hiring fewer lecturer-level / graduate-student staff to teach first-year courses. (As someone who put himself through graduate school teaching undergraduates to write, I'm somewhat dismayed by this. But I'll try to remain objective.) 
• Even in entry-level or remediating courses, machine-based personalized and adaptive instruction isn't going to provide the critical thinking skills that are also essential for success in college disciplines. (And let me posit here that critical thinking in humanities and social sciences are analogous in math to a combination of conceptual and applied skills—in other words, we solve problems in all areas via a combination of high-level [conceptual or theoretical or structural] understanding and concrete/practical understanding.) 

Question, general 

Again assuming that the software provides the intended impacts:  

• Will the Pearson / Knewton combine lead to more disadvantaged students either entering college, especially in STEM-related fields? 
  
  
• Will university curricula skew even more toward competency and skill-based learning? 
  
  
• What will the impact of reduced opportunities for entry-level university teaching positions be?

And now, a few items on developing countries (where I might be on more solid ground in terms of the germaneness of my speculative approach)... 

Implications, developing-country education
And in this section, we add the further assumption—a reasonable one, IMHO—that costs of ICT access will decrease while access to ICT and the quality of the experience of using ICT both improve dramatically over the course of the next few years....

• As access to ICT increases in universities, the Pearson/Knewton combine will be successful—in part because the skill levesl of entry-level teachers will be questioned. 
  
  
• Fewer expat graduate students (attending universities in developed countries) will finish their programs—as a result of reduced teaching opportunities—so that gaps in available teaching skills (see above) will increase. 
  
  
• Matriculation rates into developing-country universities will be challenged by increased opportunities for machine-supported e-learning at private developed-country and "stateless" schools. 
  
  
• Overall competencies among first-year college students will increase over time, however a "boundary-layer gap" will emerge among first-year graduate students (see above). 

Questions, developing-country education 

• Will the P/N combine develop separate content or make tweaks to its algorithm in response to different learning styles or approaches that arise from cultural and educational differences among developing-country learners? 
  
  
• Will donor agencies fund country- or NREN-level investments in MyLabs or other P/N-style products?
  
  
• If donor-agency funding is forthcoming,* will the P/N combine gain the kind of clout in terms of ICT4E projects that the Big Three (Intel, Cisco, Microsoft) have acquired? 
  
  

*USAID (which is the bi-lateral agency of the United States that funds education projects in developing countries, and you will note that P/N are titularly US companies) has included higher education as a target in is current 5-year education strategy. To provide context, secondary education, as well as primary education outside of literacy and numeracy, are not targeted. Thus there's at least a reasonable chance that USAID-served countries could swing funding for a P/N-driven higher-ed program. 

Finally, many of the world's most distributed university systems are located in developing countries. These include the massive open universities (IGNOU in India, Wits in South Africa) and some of the larger geograhically distributed systems such as that of Indonesia or University of the West Indies in Barbados and throughout the Caribbean. For these large, distributed, high-impact systems, investments in P/N-driven solutions would seem very likely. All of these large, distributed, bottom-of-the-pyramid systems are taking steps to radically increase their e-presence. They remain, however, weakest where P/N is strong. (In fact, if I were running the P/N thing, I would get a sales team focused specifically on developing countries. Tomorrow, if not today.) 

Many learning objects researchers and funding agencies were pushing to fully automate the selection and assembly of learning objects, essentially driving all human participation in the design of instruction (and all human interaction during learning) out of the educational experience, because humans are too “expensive.”

....Of course, the universal, ambient assumption underlying the reusability paradox is that learning objects must be used “as is” due to their copyright status. This realization allowed me to connect my passion for openness to my academic work on learning objects. From 2004 until today I continue to focus a good portion of my thinking and work on open educational resources – “learning objects with an open license.”

Mr Wiley's smart, committed and compassionate approaches to learning have, incidentally, given him a unique perspective on the history of educational technology in American and worldwide. However, his presentation of this perspective on the past isn't entirely comprehensive, which begs questions about the forces underlying the key issues that educationists are grappling with today.

The learning-objects/learning-automation nexus that Mr Wiley describes was driven, flogged even, by billions of dollars that were injected into education-technology by the US Dept of Defense. DoD was mesmerized by precisely the learning-object problem that Mr Wiley points out: How to design, tag, store and serve LOs that could be re-used to create compelling content cost effectively and on the fly. DOD funded among other things the Advanced Distributed Learning lab, which drove--flogged, even--the development of SCORM (Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model), a specification for making LOs shareable by lots of different Learning Management Systems, and one of the bedrocks of interoperability among today's LMSs, Virtual Learning Environments and other platforms. SCORM was, especially because it provided an early rule-set for XML, the mother of all standards (in online learning). 

Well and good. Mr Wiley's and others' work on LOs in the 90s and 00s walked the discussion away from military training and over to K12 and higher education—although the US military's emphasis on automation and cost savings can still be discerned in the configuration of Virtual Learning Environments and their resources. 

But we need to perform due diligence in relation to the origins of OERs, by traveling back up the roots of our current discussions of open content to better understand the underlying forces and actors that are driving that conversation as well. Why have OERs emerged at this time as critical, or potentially critical, means of improving education? How is the emergence of OERs similar to the emergence of LOs/automation? How different? 

OK, the core sub-principles are as follows: 

• Keep tools simple at the school level.
• Collect data that address goals.
• Ensure that data can be easily accessed and shared.
• Develop information-management tools in stages. 
• Support the use of data in schools and communities

These sub-statements all touch, at least tangentially, on theEMIS report card developed for Georgian schools idea that schools themselves should benefit from data. School report cards (there's one from Georgia, the country not the state, below) should help school personnel see where they fall in relation to quality-assurance standards (like, class size, textbooks-per-kid, and so on) and in relation to other schools like theirs. 

But what's interesting (and this links to one of the sub-principles addressed previously, "focus on learning outomes") is that new tools for data collection might open more complex and authentic fields of learning to developing-country researchers and decision-makers. If, for example, teachers were trained to recognize collaborative interactions in small groups, they might be able to use smart phones or tablets to assess kids' interactions in real time. This potential renders a soft, 21st-century skillset, comprised perhaps of cooperation, communication and empathy, into something measurable at both the school level and nationally. 

And in education in developing countries, if you can measure it, and you can pilot-test it, you increase the chances that you can, eventually, maybe, make it happen at scale.

The First Principles are intended, primarily, to guide education officers at USAID as they work with country governments, other donors (not USAID) and private-sector partners (like, for example, Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, who are everywhere) to design, plan and support technology projects in schools in the developing countries where USAID works. Education officers have a good general grasp of education, and of the systems in the countries in which they are working, but they are not specially cognizant of issues in relation to the use of new tools.

So. The FP document is written, despite my best efforts, in my own version of "development speak." That it's my version means that I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid using jargon and acronyms, I'm trying to say things plainly and to make sense to everybody, and yet I'm aware that for my main audience, "ICT" is more meaningful than "technology" or "computers," and "implement" is more compelling than "do" or "make happen" (or than "knife," fork" or "hammer," for that matter.)

The commentary that appears on the Natoma Group blog is my effort to move the FP writing further away from development-speak. My effort to make the principles a bit more usable. I'm aware that for teachers and planners in the US and other countries with mature school systems, all of the FP information is far too simple, far too axiomatic. There are established practices, there are regulations and constraints. But in developing countries the administration of rules and requirements is less stringent, and the use of technology is deeply retrograde. If we could just get ministries of education to work within the FP parameters we would impact millions of students (that's development speak for help a lot of kids learn;).

When you're planning an ICT project in schools in a developing country, there will be plenty of gaps to fill. Even when basic skills and schools' abilities to teach 'em are lacking, look for ways to build conceptual and contextual knowledge. 

As usual in reviewing these principles,* it's best to go straight to the core sub-principles. And those are: 

1. Help students build literacy skills & basic skills in all subjects 
2. Help students build 21st-century life and learning skills 
3. Focus on learning outcomes

Statements 1 and 2 aren't mutually exclusive, or contradictory. 

(*And why, you might ask, review these principles at all?)

This display dresses up the Armenian alphabet

In schools that are really low performing—one teacher shows up, for example, there are few books, kids have nothing to write on or with—ICT can be used to mitigate teachers' lack of capacity and to facilitate PD by providing direct instruction to students in one form (IRI) or another (e-learning). Depending on students' needs and the system's capacity, ICT can support instruction (of students and teachers both) across a range of skillsets running from basic to complex. Students can use an MP3 recorder to listen to phonics instruction; and they can use the same MP3 recorder to make podcasts for their classmates or to share messages with members of a distant team. Don't make the mistakes of assuming that without basic skills kids can't learn anything, or that basic skills will if all else fails and kids leave school be sufficient. 

(If your project is based on IRI [Interactive Radio Instruction—direct instruction in basic skills using audio], include stories. How hard is that?)  

South Korea is attempting to crack down on private test-prep services. Bounty hunters, known as the "hak-paparazzi" because they are busting "hakwon" or test-prep schools, earn payments when they deliver evidence that a specific hakwon is charging prices that are higher than those the government allows. The government controls prices and pays bounties as part of a program to:

...tame the ballooning cost of private education—a particular burden for citizens in a country laser-focused on education achievement.

By "private education," in this instance, we're talking about cram schools. These schools are offering, essentially, supplementary education services intended to improve clients' performance on high-stakes tests.

My elementary grasp of economics, however, suggests that there are a few other conclusions that can and should be drawn in societies where high-cost tutoring emerges to meet the need for test preparation.

• Demand for effective (i.e., career-advancing) education is high
• Supply of same is low
• The additional funds spent on education would be more beneficial if they were re-directed to public schools

Why the last? Because private test-preparation runs precisely counter to implied goals of high-stakes tests. Those tests serve, at their most benign, as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources comprising the opportunity to continue on to higher education (or in lower grades, to continue on an academic track rather than being routed to TVET). Students who perform well on tests are rewarded with better placement. From the point of view of a national social and economic system, accurate placement entails correctly predicting those students who will succeed academically and in later life. 

Test-prep services, especially when they are priced beyond the means of most citizens, distort the functioning of tests as mechanisms for resource allocations. 

(I once interviewed an administrator at Bilkent University in Ankara who said that he paid more for his kid's tutoring fees than for tuition at the college where he eventually matriculated.)

What to do?

Governments in these circumstances might, to address the situation, use progressive means such as income tax to increase public revenues (e.g., taxes, fees) supporting the improvement of schools' resources and teachers' skills. If most public schools can successfully prepare their students for exams and for later success—21st-century skills by day, drill-and-kill by night?—a country's overall productive and innovative capacities increase over time. The key however is to structure revenue-collection so that 1) enrolment in cram schools declines; 2) the rich pay a higher share of costs.

It's also critical that public schools build confidence in the effectiveness of their test-preparation courses.

The alternative? 

“Day after day we are cornered into an unrelenting competition that smothers and suffocates us,” the council said. “We couldn’t even spare 30 minutes for our troubled classmates because of all our homework.

“We no longer have the ability to laugh freely.”

Young people in South Korea are a chronically unhappy group. A recent survey found them to be — for the third year in a row — the unhappiest subset among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The article highlights different activities supporting unrestricted Internet and social-media access in schools, including email campaigns, debates over the pros and cons of censorship (Would you want your kid accessing Tea-Party websites at school?) and, at New Canaan HS in Connecticut, a 'social-media solidarity blackout.' The upshot of the blackout? 

“It’s not even lunchtime, and I’m already dying,” said Michael DeMattia, 17, a senior, who carries a laptop to school.

In his Advanced Placement Biology class, where lab groups have created a Facebook thread to collaborate and share data, he could not log in. In honors comparative literature, his classmates were unable to show a YouTube video during a presentation.

The Internet, Michael said, has “made cooperation and collaboration inside and outside of class much better and faster,” adding, “It’s really has become an integral part of education.”

Indeed. 

Just so we're clear, Michael is talking about using social media in his AP biology class and his honors comp-lit class. A lot of kids—a lot—aren't enrolled in classes or in schools where their teachers have the skills, support and opportunities (including access to hardware, prep time and professional development) to integrate FB, Twitter, YouTube or other trending tools. 

But the critical quote, underplayed perhaps in the middle of the article, is the teacher who frames the real reason that web censorship is self-defeating: 

Deven Black, a librarian at Middle School 127 in the Bronx, also said that filters had blocked a range of useful Web sites.... “Our job is to teach students the safe use of the Internet. And it’s hard to do that if we can’t get to the sites.”

Would you want your kid accessing Tea Party websites without critical-thinking skills?

As mentioned, the bogey-man lurking behind this principle, and some of the others, is the IT curriculum—and more specifically the acquisition of computers and the funding of resources and the Internet to help kids learn how to use computers. It's incredibly inefficient and wasteful. In some countries, kids start taking basic IT classes in junior secondary school (or middle school) and continue through the end of senior secondary (or high) school. In a lot of instances, the kids don't build many usable skills, although they can identify a CPU, provide the definitino of a motherboard, and tell you how many bits are in a byte. And this requires six years of classes? Plus an exam? 

To be fair, integrating the use of computer tools (e.g., laptops, desktops, tablets, smart phones, netbooks, etc) into other subjects is extremely difficult when the kids don't have basic mousing and keyboarding and file-management skills. But these can be learned in a two-week camp. 

But "development goals" deserves a special call out. In poor countries, it's not unreasonable to consider ways in which education might contribute to social and economic development. Hence, "development goals" are something that can and should be considered in relation to the significant costs and risks of an ICT-supported project. Are the kids going to learn something that, eventually, ultimately, with many confounding factors that make evaluation challenging, will increase GDP? Or that will increase participation in government and civil society? Hmmmm? 

(If not, perhaps the project should be reconsidered.) 

What are some of the sub-principles undergirding Principle 1?:

Use ICT to support comprehensive change.
While education-technology projects often focus on single areas of activity, such as introducing digital learning resources, the cross-cutting quality of technology can enable comprehensive approaches that extend to many core components of the education system... information management and school leadership, teacher development, learning-resource distribution, and direct instruction. 

The point, with this sub-core principle (so to speak) is that you are creating infrastructure, and that infrastructure can support change (and hopefully improvement) across the full spectrum of educational services. Primary-grade math-learning supported by multimedia? TVET for adult villagers? The same system, once it's in place, effectively maintained, and overseen by in-the-know leadership, can provide both. 

Here's the idea, graphically:

Address areas of high need.
Given range of areas where technology can support improvement, projects can target specific factors or problems that have the potential to yield high impact or support further improvement...

Uh huh. Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) is a wonderful tool, partly because it addresses a common problem in developing-country schools—teachers poor mastery of the subjects that they are assigned to teach. 

Conceive of technology as “education infrastructure.”
Projects that establish the use of technology in schools—whether the tools used are radio, video, mobile phones, or computers—contribute to the strengthening of a school system’s education infrastructure. 

OK, I wrote this sub-principle. But I still struggle to understand it. To my way of thinking, education infrastructure includes all the elements that contribute to a system's capacity. These can include, for example, a VPN linking schools (Indonesia), management skills for technology roll-outs (Syria, Pakistan), and a storehouse of digital content (Armenia, one hopes, and in the US, the excellent Hippocampus website offered by the Monterey Institute of Technology and Education [MITE]).