I recently posted a CNN.com story on my Twitter page about India’s unveiling a $35 computer prototype that could give affordable computer and Internet access to students and teachers.
That could be game-changer for education in the country of more than 1 billion people with a 65 percent literacy rate. India follows a list of developing nations to make huge economic and social leaps as technology has become more accessible and sustainable.
Thankfully, the United States does not have the same economic and technology-access issues as India, but we do have a digital divide. We can glean a lesson from India and its efforts to improve the standard of living for its citizens.
Two-thirds of American homes report having Internet access, according to U.S. Census figures. Most of those who don’t say that can’t afford it. Technology is cost-prohibitive for many American families, but as learning becomes more prevalent through various digital platforms, access to home computers and the Internet takes on a greater urgency. We cannot afford to lose ground in computer literacy and access to technology as we have in so many other critical areas of education.
What would it take to get more affordable computers and web access to kids and teachers to enhance learning in the United States?
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I don’t know about computers – but increasing broadband access is a step in the right direction. See: http://www2.nbc4i.com/news/2010/jul/22/6/30-million-award-expands-broadband-acess-western-o-ar-157534/
and what one Ohio rural area is doing with ARRA funds!
Byron, I couldn’t find a really good mathematical analysis of the $35 computer; still it seems this is more hype than reality. Here is one take on it. Here’s another. Its actually amazing how many journalists took this vaporware as a serious announcement of actual progress.
That’s not to say that miracles haven’t and won’t occur! Verizon tells me I can get a pretty wondrous smart phone for free. Yes, I have to pay them at least $50 a month–but remember that, in this decade, I had a 20 character x 5-line phone with analog signal! We don’t need extra hype; we don’t yet know how to use the miraculous hardware we have!!
And the iPad! Can you believe that the iPhone is not yet 3 1/2 years old? Yet who among us (ok, me) doesn’t have a phone with touch-screen technology? We’re moving that fast. Now a $499 iPad is available, and iPhone-like devices can be had for free. Where will commercial technology (not govt vapor-ware) put us in 2014? When my niece enters high school?
My question is, are we putting resources into software to make a difference?
Take economics. The Indian people have had the gift of Democracy since 1950. Yet they did not implement the laws for a working economy until 1990! Education–in economics–was the difference!
Today are we giving young Americans a solid introduction to the principles of economics? Are we teaching them that companies like Apple and HTC and YouTube put miracles in people’s hands (not ministers of Human Resources)? Are we teaching them supply-demand curves and the components of the demand relationship? Do they learn about the downfalls of tariffs and 10% GDP deficits? Do they learn biology and chemistry for pre-proteomcs to help cure cancers?
I ask this so we can focus our efforts where they will help the most kids. Will affordable computers for US students improve their education? I’m a longtime proponent, but I’m still looking for concrete evidence. How do we promote more open source software efforts?
I think the thing to get excited about is the potential for proliferation of cheap – albeit dumb – devices for accessing information. In the US access to the internet is limited by lack of free wifi – although that is slowly changing. Our urban and rural students should not have to bear the cost of a $ 50 a month Verizon plan simply to access the internet to do their homework. Providing the infrastructure for connectivity is only the foundation stone for merging technology and education. The intellectual curiosity required for students, and adults, to want to learn about GDP, biology and chemistry is another matter entirely but should not be used in the argument to dissuade us from marching forward in the quest to put technology in everyone’s hands.
I personally don’t buy the argument that the application pipeline has to be in place in order for any cheap internet device initiative to be considered successful.
Jeanne, “The intellectual curiosity required for students, and adults, to want to learn about GDP, biology and chemistry is another matter entirely “. Yes! That’s exactly what I was reaching for here. Inspiring intellectual curiosity! Or, at least, intellectual commitment to rigor. (Maybe I tried (again, sigh) to put too much in one comment.)
For example,…
Does a $35 computer leaves anything for the family of the person producing said computer? Should it? Consider: a $35 coffee maker is complicated enough to make. It has a case, a coil, and one electronic chip–the clock.
A computer, though, must have dozens of chips. Those chips are in turn constructed from gallium-arsenide and silicon and copper and gold and all sorts of minerals which must be pulled from the ground by men who put their lives at risk. Men who have families to feed, house, and educate.
Those minerals must be refined and shipped by smelters and truckers and longshoremen with families. The minerals must be grown into wafers, the other material deposited on them, then etched away in various long, complex processes. The chips themselves must be packaged; motherboards must be built to host the system; the lot all packaged.
Each of these processes requires intensely complicated machines; machines again designed, built, and operated by people with families to feed, house and educate. Likewise the display units have their own unique chain of families to support.
Add in all the supporting cast–the shippers who deliver the computer first to India itself, then to the remote areas of that vast nation, the accountants who make sure the miners and technicians and shippers are paid, the support staff who deal with firmware revisions, … that’s a long way to drag out $35!!!
My lament was simply that no journalist asked about these families; the children of all these workers.