What education can poor kids get for $100?
In India, $100 is what the Central Government approximately spends annually on educating poor kids through its various schemes. The most optimist of people will say only 25% of that money is actually spent where it was intended, and if absent teachers, like in my native village, are the rule, availability of committed teachers is suspect.
Technology was supposed to bring quality education to all. What happened?
Let us discuss the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project:
The OLPC project promised an affordable, cutting-edge learning machine for kids in poor nations, costing only $100. In due time, the
project seems to have lost momentum and a season of abandon is upon us.Some accuse the project’s father Nicholas Negroponte of overreaching and
having ego issues, as a result of which people are
moving away from the project to start their own similarly noble-minded projects.
Others have said that the OLPC project was never a sound business proposition and manufacturers will always be conflicted about committing for a longer run.
Americans have blasted the OLPC of being myopic, saying kids in poor countries need food and clean water first.
Meanwhile, educators are still debating the usefulness of computers in the classroom.
Companies who thought the OLPC was a threat to their business deals in developing countries started launching their own initiatives, if they cannot
muzzle the program in the open –
Intel’s Classmate and
Microsoft’s Windows XP Lite are cases in point.
(note: This is same OS that OLPC will now have instead of the earlier Linus-based Sugar OS)
The fair market price of OLPC has now climbed to
$199.
I am still surprised that Americans, otherwise famous for being world-beating philanthropists, did not come up in sizable numbers to support the OLPC, not even when the project introduced the
"Give 1 Get 1" offer for Americans costing $399, which incidentally consisted of a tax-deductible portion of $200.
The most cynic say,
“What’s the use of OLPC, anyway? Kids in Nigeria are using the OLPC to view porn."So, how do we bring quality education to poor kids?My options are all centered on using Wikipedia:
- Distribute free copies of the best of Wikipedia, or respective Topics, in all languages. Do it everywhere.- Put the Wikipedia inside refurbished laptops, smartphones, iPods, whateverYou can also put the best of lectures from MIT OCW and other universities on refurbished iPods, smartphones, etc.
I know these ideas are not much but somehow, the world must do something about educating poor. And, yes, despite all its shortcomings, the OLPC was a noble and great idea.
Something is better than nothing. Something is also better than armchair analysis and criticism.
Related in MediaVidea:What does India need most? The $100 Laptop or the Rs. 1 Lac car?Top 5 things I would do if I were in charge of WikipediaLabels: OLPC
Time to regulate the Research and Consulting industry?
That Mckinsey was advising Enron is old story now. Robert Cringely has written a must-read column about the utility of technology advisory firms such as Gartner, IDC, Forrester, among other firms, noting that Tech Advice market is worth $2 billion now.
First Robert writes about Gartner, quoting from Gartner’s website:
"Gartner offers the combined brainpower of 1,200 research analysts and consultants who advise executives in 75 countries every day. We publish tens of thousands of pages of original research annually and answer 200,000 client questions every year. We can help you make smarter and faster decisions. Our years of relevant experience and institutional knowledge prevent costly and avoidable errors. Be confident that with Gartner, your decisions are the right decisions."
One might ask:
So Gartner and, by association, Gartner's competitors help customers make better IT decisions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But why do governments and big companies NEED help making IT decisions? Don't most companies hire IT professionals to make those decisions in the first place?
Now, much has been written about the consultants, and much of it is unflattering, often bordering on the comic but the fact remains that
the IT industry, as Robert says, “lacks professionalism”.If you care to click on the
link and read the comments, you might learn more about the state of the Consulting and Advice industry.
For example, a reader alleges that
Gartner does not test the IT products it writes reviews about, often relying on the documents vendors provide.
There is more: the reader alleges that Gartner does not review products from Vendors that have not paid the ‘fee’.
ROCA, anyone?
Regulator of Consultants and Advisors.Labels: consulting, forrester, research report
Curriculum 2.0: How to raid a bank
According to the
Information Times, students at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China have an assignment with a difference: they must plan to rob a bank with a team of six under seven minutes.
Through this radical assignment, the teacher wants to teach students
how to "allocate resources economically and efficiently."The above image is a sample layout of a target bank from the assignment.
Link
viaRelated: Idea of the year: Bachelor of inventionLabels: curriculum, education, innovation, students
Some cool Media Attention maps
Follow this link to some
cool cartograms that show color-coded world maps showing which regions received how much attention from editors, blogs, and some prominent news brands, including The Economist.
The above map shows how the blogosphere covered the world.
Labels: blogosphere, blogs, maps, Media, news 2.0
The 11% that matter (and why companies must get serious about social media)
Adam aggregates data from the Forrester studies on U.S. consumers' use of web 2.0 tools and sites in 2007 and reports:
* 75% of your customers don't read blogs
* 89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
* 71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
* 75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
* 82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
* 75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
* 89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
* 92% of your customers don't use RSS
The idea is similar to the
'10% creators- 90% consumers' idea about web 2.0.
When you look at these numbers from another angle, you realize that:
* 25% of your customers read blogs * 11% of your customers write a blog * 29% of your customers watch user-generated content * 25% of your customers visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook) * 18% of your customers participate in discussion forums * 25% of your customers read online ratings or reviews * 11% of your customers post online ratings or reviews * 8% of your customers use RSSDo you still want to ignore these people?
Labels: blogs, social media marketing, web 2.0, web strategy
Digital Sharecropping (and why Nicholas Carr is one of the real voices of web 2.0)
Nick Carr One of the few people who have written
in support of British folk-punk musician Billy Bragg's
op-ed piece in the New York Times, Mr. Bragg writes about how the owners of social networking site Bebo stand to pocket more than $600 million (out of $850 million sale value) after Bebo's sale to AOL goes through - without having to pay any royalty or other forms of incentive to the artists who helped make Bebo popular.
Some so-called web 2.0 experts of this world have rallied against Mr. Bragg's assertion, saying social networking like Bebo, Myspace, Facebook and others provide a huge platform to these artists, which is bigger and more engaging than Radio or TV - but, both Radio and TV pay musicians royalties for playing their music.
Come to think of it, I have a hunch that owners of social networking sites consider artists who post their music no different than how Google considers the new blogger - provider of free, long-tail content. Just like new blogger can't straightaway become a Seth Godin or a Nick Carr, the site owners do not think much about the artists because noone becomes Nine Inch Nails or Radiohead straightaway. Much is being made about how Radiohead changed the music distribution model, but would they been able to do that if they were new on the scene and not some 14 year old rock band?
For owners of social networking sites, creative people are fodder for growth, these owners are the new band promoters, someone who lets the creative- types do their promotion while the band promoters make money by selling the whole site itself.
The so-called web 2.0 experts point out that
the artists had the option of posting their music and videos on other sites as well.How convenient - in many cases, it is because of the artists that sites like Bebo and Myspace became famous, attracting other users and other artists - it is not a coincidence that Bebo is considered the TV channel version of social networking sites.
Comparing musicians who join social networking sites when these sites are still new and traffic is non-existent, to investors, Mr. Bragg says these artists should get a dividend when the site makes money.
If people think Mr. Bragg is wrong in saying what many have been saying private, then I think time has come to put an end to this entire web 2.0 charade. If people think Mr. Bragg is wrong to call for a share in web 2.0 sale profits, the participatory web is all about how smart people in the Silicon Valley are taking everyone for a ride.
When some so-called web 2.0 experts get righteous and respond to Mr. Bragg’s assertion by invoking the non-existent web 2.0 ethos, it is pukeworthy - you can be sure these web 2.0 experts are playing to their gallery of 250 other experts, sounding noble and all.
The reality is Web 2.0 experts have a stake in the continuance of the status quo in the web 2.0 field and if you want for an objective view on the topic, read stuff from people like Nick Carr.
However, if you want to start a me-too web 2.0 startup, read Techcrunch from A-to-Z, suck up to the site's owner, comment as many times as you can, and you are in the business.
Sites like Techcrunch cover web 2.0 startups - it is in their interest not to write about "digital sharecropping" - they would not want to annoy the cash rich founders and those 125 pixel ads, do they?
When Digg sells, I would like to hope that the Kevin Rose shares the money with his band of avid early Diggers, who are both the cause for the rise (and detirioration) of the social news sites.
In the words of Nick Carr,
"Digital sharecroppers of the world, unite!"Labels: bebo, controversey, Digg, facebook, social networking, web 2.0
9 solid reasons why E-mail still beats social networking
1. Because all the updates on social networking sites including Facebook still reach our Inboxes - email from social networking sites is the new SPAM.
2. Because we are getting tired of browsing profiles. Most of the people are like us anyway - bored, blank and uninteresting.
3. Because, unlike teens, school kids and college co-eds, we got to work.
4. Because, unlike social networking sites, it is not rude to send an e-mail to the SPAM folder - it is easy, and acceptable to ignore people using email.
5. Because email is the working person's most important social network - we can have all our important contacts in the address list, available in the chat section during our email sessions - Facebook is pretty late to the IM scene.
6. Because the next generation of email will have integrated RSS.
7. Because the next generation of email will sections for our favorite profiles.
8. Because a major part of social networking activity is SPAM - it is everywhere - on twitter, too. If they are not selling something, the people on these social networking are selling themseleves all the time. Everyone is shouting out aloud "Look at me! Look at my blog post. Look at my pic. " - it is all noise, and pathetic. A man can only take in so much in a lifetime.
9.
Because like social networking, e-mail does not make the service providers any money - how long before they start shutting down the social networking sites for lack of revenue?
Labels: e-mail, facebook, social networking
Hyperlocal: where is the citizen media in small-town America?
Compared to people in the big cities, citizen media activity is mostly limited to pictures on Flickr. Steven Clift at the
PBS Idealab finds that few small town people care to participate in forums, write blog posts, shoot and post videos and do all the things that apartment-living, "pressed for outdoors" us big city folks do.
Small Town America does not Twitter that much. Steven writes:
I've stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don't want to type in village after village. The best site I've found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.
All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. ...
How can we explain this?
1. Hyperlocal is an acquired taste. The failure of Backfence is case in point.
Everyblock is working so far because it works more on the automatic aggregation lines, relying on government data for things like police records. Besides, it focuses on big cities including New York only.
2. Hyperlocal needs proactive hand-holding - where editors and link curators encourage and help out local contributors, doing events and so on.
Thanks for the
linkLabels: citizen journalism, citizen media, everyblock, hyperlocal, twitter
The glut of social network activity aggregators/lifestreamers
Friendfeed, the Valley's (ok, the 250's) favorite social network activity aggregator/lifestreaming application is
not alone. We are going around in circle, and so far it is fun.
:-)
Labels: friendfeed, funny, lifestreaming, social networking, social networking aggregator
Idea of the year: why not have bachelors of invention?
Trevor Baylis has proposed a breakthrough idea about ideas, laying out that students of the 21st century have a first hand knowledge of all topics related to the art (or science, depends on who is talking) of invention.
Advocating that the Generation Y (or Z…what ever happened to Generation A-W?) gets a head start in their life, Trevor proposes a new course the study, leading to a
Bachelor Degree in Inventing, where students get to know things like
intellectual property, disclosure, trademarks, patents, business plans, creating prototypes, raising venture capital, the history of invention…and so on.
If the curriculum makers of the world respond to it in an enthusiastic fashion, it will indeed be cool.
Read more
here.
Labels: education, innovation, invention
