Technology and Change in Education #ED1to1 #TJC15

I have arrived at #ed1to1 ( a twitter chat organised by Bon Stewart over 3 days) via #tjc15 (a monthlyish one hour twitter chat organised by Laura Gogia about a journal article). The framing article for #ed1to1 is (25 years ago) The First School One-to-One Laptop Program  by Audrey Watters.
I didn’t know the first one to one laptop scheme was 25 years ago. I remember using a similar case study for teaching systems implementation in the late 1990s, and interestingly, the school concerned was also a religious all girls school.
Then I got to thinking about Project CEIBAL that seems to be still going strong* after 8 years in operation. I was very impressed with the vision and scale of the project when I saw Miguel Brechner speak about it at ALT-C 2011 and will be very interested in its longer term impact and what can be learned from the project.

This is a 15 minute (10 minutes presentation followed by questions) video where Miguel outlines the project as one of social inclusion  He shows clearly that this was not just a project about the laptop but also included the network infrastructure, support, evaluation and sustainability.  CEIBAL sees pedagogy and enabling teachers and students as at the heart of the project. The laptops used were from the OLPC project, a global mission to give every child a laptop that has itself been criticised for its relevance to poor countries.  What interested me about CEIBAL was that it acknowledged the wider context of change, as this description of the historical educational context in Uruguay shows. Watch this 45 second clip to get a sense of this.

What the laptop program described in Audrey’s article and Project CEIBAL seem to have in common is that they are driven by a commitment to universal and relevant education. In the case of Uruguay, from 1876 education was decreed mandatory, secular and free. Even though many religious schools are no longer free (and were never secular), they can often trace their history back to a commitment to educate working class children. This account of the early history of education in my own home town shows nuns living and dying in similar conditions to those they were trying to help.

I don’t have enough information to really compare these two projects but I admire them. Philosophical/political commitment can be an effective driver and good evaluation can be a gift to future projects (unless you are a disruptive innovator of course).

Education has always been a means by which lives can be improved, and technology has a complex reflexive relationship with changing lives and organisations. In my own old-fashioned way, I am interested in the role of social justice and context in the promotion and use of educational technology.  It’s less than a panacea and more than a business opportunity to my way of thinking.

*It’s difficult to get up to date information in English and this source questions the impact and use of the laptops in Uruguay http://www.humanosphere.org/social-business/2014/09/nail-one-laptop-per-child-coffin/ though I note blogger source works for a bank.