Here at Seismonaut we are involved in a great number of exciting projects. One of them is focusing on introducing the XO laptop (formerly known as the $100 laptop) in an educational context in Nigeria. In a series of 3 blog posts through December I will be sharing updates on the progress of this project. In the first post (link here) I discussed what the greatest impact of the project has been… Today I will focus on the challenges of establishing a successful project in Nigeria and a little on the digital skills being picked up by the school children.

One must understand that for most of the 250 children at the pilot school the XO laptop is their first ever encounter with a computer and the Internet. So is it possible at this early stage (the laptops have been in use at the school for only four months) to see any new digital skills being picked up by the school students? I aksed this question to Lars Bo Andersen, a Ph.D fellow, who is back in Aarhus after having spent a month at the school in Nigeria:

Some of the readers may be familiar with the “Hole in the Wall” experiment proving the ability of children to acquire basic computer skills independent of formal training. This insight also hold true at the project school. Even though the children are receiving formal training, they are continuously doing new things on their own that nobody taught them. They have, for instance, become experts in multitasking and many log on to their e-mail in the short timespans of teacher inattention when the class is supposed to perform some other non-computer task (at my University you could make the same observation). Being excellent learners, the children sometimes even surpass their teachers in skills and knowledge. In fact, one of the major transformations in teacher mentality is that it is becoming acceptable for the students to be experts and to be more competent than the teacher in some specific areas. These are, I think, however are observations you could make everywhere. Children are often better learners than their teachers, and this becomes even more outspoken when powerful technologies are involved.

In sum I would say that one should not differ to much between children in Nigeria, India or Denmark. What may differ from context to context is the acceptability of experimenting (is it OK to fiddle with the equipment) and the support from adults in doing complex tasks and going new places. If children are exposed to something interesting they will explore it.

Some of the teachers at the test school have understood the importance of this, while others seem to be stuck in an instruction based teacher-centric learning way which I guess once again is very similar to any school setting globally. To address this, we have focussed great efforts on teacher training together with two professors from DPU in Copenhagen and I believe this is one of the reasons while we have a highly successful project today. I am not saying that it has all come easy in the project. One has only to look at the challenges of introducing IT into the highly regarded Danish school system to appreciate that such a process is not trivial anywhere. There are two major challenges that for some reason often seems to be neglected:

1. Left to themselves, the computers will “do” nothing. They await their involvement in daily practice before they become something that can do something. Involvement of all stakeholders in negotiating a role for the computers is thus of uppermost importance. In this project, many people from Denmark, the U.S., and Nigeria have worked intensely on technical, pedagogical, institutional, and social issues, getting it all to work together. Neglect or underestimate any one such dimension and you’ll have yourself a white elephant – even if in Denmark.

2. We all know that IT is wonderful, the media tells us all the time, but how can it be wonderful in a science class or maybe during grammar lessons? If pedagogical training is neglected, the computers will remain in their storage (as was the situation in one Nigerian school I visited). It should be trivial, but I nevertheless want to emphasize that computers are not neutral to a teaching situation. It can be extremely difficult to make use of them in any positive way if you are not equipped to rethink the learning situation itself.

Now being in Nigeria we can add several additional challenges whereof the most prominent ones must be electricity, internet and maintenance. Keeping a technical arrangement up and going sometimes requires at least as much work as keeping humans focussed around a specific task. In fact, it is the same task, the task of having humans and machines service each other over a prolonged period of time.