SimCity on the OLPC laptop

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

Update: I didn’t dig deep enough to see what was really meant concerning constructionism and SimCity – see here – makes more sense now.
Game producer Electronic Arts has donated the original SimCity to the OLPC project (read more here). A GPL’ed open source version will soon be released under the name “Micropolis”.
This is an interesting addition to the growing collection of OLPC software. I played SimCity way-back-when and enjoyed it immensely. It certainly has educational potential in areas such as civics and citizenship. However, I’m not quite sure that I agree with Slashdotter Zonk that it is “the epitome of constructionist educational games”.
Papert’s constructionism builds on Piaget, et al’s constructivism. One of the key factors of constructivism is that knowledge is cumulative and adaptive in that it builds on previous experience and knowledge (“scaffolding”), and let’s face it, a lot of the intended OLPC users will be children from poverty stricken areas and not the have-it-all-and-be-happy cities that SimCity promotes. While SimCity does make it possible to play the bad politician, as I recall this generally led to a chaotic unmaintainable city. In many parts of the world, this doesn’t entirely jibe with the reality that people are faced with. Quite the contrary, poverty is quite carefully maintained through the wielding of political power. So, to provide a relevant context, will it be possible to carefully engineer and maintain poverty in the OLPC version of the game?

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School laptops in Nigeria – Microsoft or Linux?

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

The Nigerian government has finalised a plan to make 17,000 Intel Classmate PCs available to school children. The project then took some strange twists and turns regarding the operating system for the laptops to run on. A strange series of events that illustrate the growing competition for control over computing platforms in developing countries.
Initially, the plan was that these laptops would run on Mandriva Linux, as announced by French Linux distributor Mandriva. Meanwhile, it seems that the Nigerian computer provider, Technology Support Center (TSC) (note the “Our values are openness…” under “Who we are” on TSC’s webpage), decided that they would replace the Mandriva Linux system with Windows XP before distributing the laptops. Yet, they were still going to pay for the customised Mandriva distribution previously agreed to. Mandriva understandably complained and, finally, the government has stepped in and it appears that the initial plan, to have the laptops run on Mandriva Linux, will carry on, as reported in the ComputerworldUK article linked to at the beginning of this post.
Although I’ve not been able to find any explanation of what happened and why TSC was going to replace the operating system, it can’t be ignored that Microsoft has been known to employ questionable tactics when faced with the possibility that competing operating systems may be widely deployed.
In the end, I think the Linux decision is a good one. Open source solutions give developing countries far more power to adapt technology to their own needs and contexts. What’s more, the possibility to have an impact on the global ICT community is far greater with open solutions, which is something we all can benefit from.

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ITU and Microsoft announce data visualisation project

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

At the recently concluded “Connect Africa” the ITU announced a partnership with Microsoft to produce ITU Global View, an online platform for tracking ICT development. It will be based on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and will allow for visual representation of data on ICT infrastructure and implementation. I’m sure this will be a very valuable tool for policy-makers, researchers and others. However, I’m somewhat disappointed that this will be built on a closed platform when perfectly viable open platforms, such as Google Earth, are available (for ex. see Gapminder recently acquired by Google).
The problem, as I see it, is that a closed platform will be controlled by, and fed by, institutions. Institutions necessarily generalise, simply because they cannot feasibly gather data that would be truly representative of all the imaginable levels of locality that are involved with their projects. Open platforms have shown that they are able to give individuals and communities a voice in a larger global community. We see this daily on blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites and other open platforms. The sort of granularity that an open platform could provide would be far more interesting in a project like this.
For example, take a look at the Google Earth (American Cell Tower Density) visualisation posted here. That’s some pretty interesting info. However, the visualisation is broken down into sectors. So, we don’t know about cellular blind spots within those sectors, which might be very helpful. But, far more helpful and informative would be visual representations of the actual signal strength on a granular localised level. Then we might be able to look and say, “There are a lot of people in that spot right there that say they don’t get a signal. Why not?”
But, even more importantly is that communities and individuals can develop their own data representations, telling the world what they want them to hear, rather than what one of many international institutions decide to collect data on.

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Knowledge? Which knowledge?

Posted on September 11, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

I’ve just come across a paper written by Marcus Foth, Nancy Odendaal and Greg Hearn, titled “The View from Everywhere: Towards an Epistemology for Urbanites.” I found it a fascinating read because it echoes so many of my own thoughts concerning popular definitions of “knowledge”. My own thoughts on the topic are, in a very general sense, that the traditional notion of knowledge as objective truths has become increasingly dubious as global interaction increases. In fact, what that increasing interaction does show us is that being exposed to foreign “knowledge cultures” is a powerful means of revealing underlying assumptions, often unfounded, on which we tend to base our “knowledge” (that’s why global ICTs and internationalisation of education are such a great idea). Many of my past posts (usually the lengthier ones) include some aspects of my thoughts on this.
In their abstract, Foth, Oldendaal and Hearn say, “We argue for the development of an epistemological model which takes into account and values transitory, informal, soft, implicit, contextual and tacit forms of knowledge, and its sources and utility outside the hard sciences.” On the one hand I would say that, at least in philosophical epistemology, this view of knowledge is increasingly accepted. I think that this is quite clear from the abundant literature that the authors were able to draw on for this paper. What’s more, I don’t think that there are many philosophers today that would have a problem with this (except maybe some of the fine details, but that’s just how philosophers are, right?). The big question for me, that this paper does not answer (and perhaps was not meant to answer), is how this notion of knowledge gets transferred into educational practice (education here is meant to refer to any activity that facilitates learning whether that is an anticipated result or not) or any other useful activities?
There is one thing that bothers me about the paper. In their conclusions the authors ask, “How can this ‘other’ knowledge be trusted? How is tacit or informal knowledge justified, or what kind of justification will distinguish it from opinion, convention, religion, tradition or politics? ” It seems to me that they sort of missed the point here. I think the relevant question, that follows from the authors’ proposed definition of knowledge, does not concern the justification of “this ‘other’ knowledge”, rather, what knowledge is embedded in the ‘other’ knowledge and how was it formed and what function does it serve? I’m sure some will say that this is merely a loquacious description of “justification”. But my reason for putting it this way is that I believe that the authors’ proposed definition of knowledge suggests that knowledge is not necessarily justified (in the traditional epistemological sense), rather it is reinforced. Hence the role of context. It would be more difficult to make a case for “contextual justification” than for “contextual reinforcement”.

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Googling the MDGs – some interesting trends

Posted on September 3, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

I recently conducted a very simple experiment. It is by no means a model of academic rigor, but interesting nonetheless. I conducted a search on Google Scholar of “Millennium Development Goals” for a few specific years. The results hint at a growing tendency to overemphasize specific goals.
First I searched for “Millennium Development Goals” in 2003. The results show a slight emphasis on poverty reduction and capacity building. However, overall a number of themes are evident, including health, education, gender equality in addition to discourse on the MDGs in general.
Next I searched for “Millennium Development Goals” in 2007. This time the results were very biased toward health related issues. In fact, of the first 40 hits, only about 4-5 concern non-health related issues.
As I’ve mentioned, this can hardly be considered a scientific experiment, but the results do raise questions about the attention given to the different MDGs. It is especially interesting to compare these results with recent reporting on MDG progress. In the UN’s 2007 Millennium Development Goals Report, many of the positive examples of the impact of the MDGs would fall under the poverty reduction, education and gender equality goals, while most of the current “key challenges” would fall under the health related goals. However, the report does acknowledge that while progress has been made in poverty reduction, education and gender equality, it has been spotty, at best. So, I wonder whether the form of reporting on the MDGs may have the inadvertent effect of prematurely diverting attention from some issues leaving them unresolved in the most problematic areas. I might even suggest that the tendency to focus on progress concerning specific goals, rather than adopting a more holistic view of the MDGs, exacerbates the problem. But, I would only seriously do that if this was a rigorous scientific experiment. But, still there’s that nagging feeling…

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The OLPC laptop – educational tool, technical revolution or both?

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Tryggvi Thayer

As distribution of the OLPC project’s XO laptop nears, has the shift of attention from the educational aspects of the project to the technical aspects injured the project?
When Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab started talking about their plans for a “$100 laptop” they never ceased to remind everyone that this was first and foremost an educational project and not a technology project. The project was well grounded in Seymour Papert’s “constructionist” theory of learning, an expansion on constructivist theories’ notion of “learning as creating meaning” to emphasise the conscious activity of creating, i.e. “constructing” as opposed to “having been constructed”. However, the primary target audience for this revolutionary educational project, children in developing and under-developed countries, presented the project members with considerable technological hurdles, ex. how to overcome limited access to electricity and the Internet, how to ensure that the computers can endure harsh environmental conditions, etc. Although it was clear that, if successful, the project would deliver many technological innovations, the claim was that the primary focus was always on the educational aspects of the project.
Critics quickly came crawling out of the woodwork. Many criticized what they felt would be a waste of development funds that would be better used to provide the poor with food, water, medicine, etc. As the project moved forward, we finally started getting glimpses of what the computer would look like, and even got hints of how it would actually work. That’s when the criticisms started to get confused. Many criticized the “non-standard” interface (and here) and the decision to use a Linux-based system, presumably based on the assumption that anything that isn’t Windows (or at least Windows-like) isn’t preparing users for a realistic future. Some even attacked the computer itself, claiming that it was too “cute”, too “gadget-like”. Even some big-wigs, like Bill Gates and Intel’s Craig Barrett (who, by the way, heads the UN’s Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID)) were delivering low blows, claiming that the $100 laptop would never amount to much more than a toy, all the while scrambling to introduce their own products to compete with the OLPC project (Barrett and Negroponte seem to have made up since).
Somewhere along the way, I think the critics managed to put OLPC on the defensive and directed attention away from the initial educational goals to technical and other aspects of the project. Negroponte lost his cool – lashed out at Intel for competing with his non-profit, started making unfounded claims. He played right into the hands of the critics and the critics seized the opportunity.
Although the OLPC project continues to receive considerable attention, very little is said about the initial educational goals of the project (ex. this BBC piece). Almost everything is about the technology, which, while certainly noteworthy, is really more a means to an end than a goal in itself. There is little if any mention about the nifty “activities” (why should a “desktop” metaphor make sense?) and software being developed.
I think that the real value of the OLPC project is in the educational goals of the project and the foundation that they are built on. These certainly are not above criticism (Robert Kozma has done a good job of shaking things up), but they are what will make or break the project in the end. With delivery of the machines apparently right around the corner, the OLPC project should put more resources into these educational aspects. In fact, they should never have stopped doing so. Kozma’s criticisms of the theoretical assumptions of the OLPC crew are perfectly valid. The OLPC project could have spent a lot of valuable time testing and refining these theoretical aspects.

Posted in Development, Education, ICTs, Leapfrogging development | 2 Comments