This is a great article; thank you for sharing your experiences and insights.

I couldn't help but be reminded of Papert's 1993 follow-up to Mindstorms, "The Children's Machine" when you mention the problems encountered in use of computer labs (your point #7). Whatever your opinion of Papert, he makes a great point there about the consequences of placing and using technologies in isolation from other curriculum subjects, which resonates with much of what I think you're saying.

The 2009 PISA results ("Students Online") also point to the critical need for developing pedagogical practices that truly leverage ICTs to support learning *across* disciplines, which is something being incorporated widely into definitions of digital literacy.

And so I am curious about how this pedagogical integration process is going in South -- do the schools you work with have organized fora for sharing best practices / lessons learned with each other (e.g. do they share & connect through their Moodle work, or through their MXit profiles)? Or perhaps the sharing occurs even less formally? Or is that dissemination role something that SchoolNet takes on as a central hub?

The "School of One" in New York highlights so many of the possibilities related to "smart" teaching with ICT. This school is a fascinating example of the issues raised here by Wayan and I would encourage anyone interested to read the evaluation of their model that EDC produced in 2009.

The students' individualized instruction plans are produced by a "Learning Algorithm" that the teachers plug with data. This in turn leads the teachers to come up with individualized "playlists" of lessons that meet the students' abilities and interests at the needed pace.

Although this model would not work in many places, it does provide important details on the resources and inputs required for cutting edge integration of ICTs and truly "smart" teaching.

It makes sense to me that the cost of eReaders / equipped tablets will be lower than textbook costs, and continue to fall, but I am not convinced that it would be the best resource allocation decision for many countries. The teacher-training programs in developing countries I have witnessed and worked with are, in my experience, very costly and often only minimally effective at best. A large part of this relates to the constraints of cost that lead to mid-career trainings on new technologies / techniques that are a week or shorter in length. If you have details and budgets for trainings that have proven cost effective and feasible, I would love to see them.

I would say then that when looking at the SROI, I would want to examine each particular MoE's options for resource allocation. If teacher quality is particularly low, I don't see that eReaders or similar interventions would be the most effective investment. I think you would ensure a more sustained impact (and also SROI) through an increased focus on teacher quality in many countries (see education economists Levin, Hanushek and Carnoy), prior to a saturating the system with eReaders. I also think it would be a dangerous assumption to expect teachers and students to "update the OERs", as you say.

In sum I would ask; what is the added benefit of 10,000 new e-texts over 10 old textbooks if reading comprehension and critical thinking are absent in the classroom?

But again, if you have the fine details on the teacher training accompanying the calculation you present, I would love to see it. I am sure this could work in some places, but for many of the least developed I think it would be a gross misuse of funds.

Interesting calculation. Does the $25 bn annually cover anything beyond the $75 tablet for each student? To equate the provision of an eReader or equipped tablet with the provision of "an education" seems a rather long and dangerous extrapolation.

After reading the latest post on the OLPC project in Canada, it made me wonder more broadly -- Have you ever come across reviews or feedback from teachers that suggested they were mostly satisfied with the PD / training they received prior to an ICT intervention?

A graduate professor of mine once said that teachers will *always* claim that the training was insufficient or misdirected. I am not sure how true that is, but it does lead me to wonder: how do you (or someone in a position similar to yours at CEA) draw the line between ineffective PD / training and ineffective implementation by the teachers? Have you ever felt that the PD / training programs were unfairly used as a scapegoat for other problems with program implementation? How do you encourage teachers to continue their development and conviviality throughout the year? As they share their experiences and observations with each other, have you found that some platforms and formats for documenting best practices are better than others?

I found Dr. Laura Hosman's work on this issue to be very rich and informative.
Here is her blog post which contains the presentation she gave with Maja Cvetanoska (of AED) on teacher training & ICT4E in Macedonia, scroll halfway down the page for the ppt link:
http://ict4dviewsfromthefield.wordpress.com/2010/...

I'm glad you mentioned Peru's APAFA. Local APAFAs inputs are being taken in the evaluation of OLPC in that country, and I was pleased to see that the initial results show that teachers in treatment schools reported improved relations with the APAFAs (see the preliminary IDB report of July 2010, p.7).
Although not specifically mentioned in the report, my hunch is that the OLPC deployment significantly increased the face time between teachers and local APAFAs. Few would claim that an ICT4E intervention would be able to completely resolve the problem of incompetent teachers. And, as I said above, every teacher can always improve. But the intervention's role as a catalyst in improving stakeholder involvement in educational advancement is rarely addressed. I felt it was missing from your article, even on the mentions you made of successful ICT4E interventions.

I'm glad you mentioned Peru's APAFA. Local APAFAs inputs are being taken in the evaluation of OLPC in that country, and I was pleased to see that the initial results indicate that teachers in treatment schools reported improved relations with the APAFAs (see the preliminary IDB report).

Although not specifically mentioned in the report, my hunch is that the OLPC deployment significantly increased the face time between teachers and local APAFAs. Few would claim that an ICT4E intervention would be able to completely resolve the problem of incompetent teachers. And, as I said above, every teacher can always improve. But the intervention's role as a catalyst in improving stakeholder involvement in educational advancement is rarely addressed. I felt it was missing from your article, even on the mentions you made of successful ICT4E interventions.

Thanks. Regarding the pervasiveness of paternalism in development discourse, I agree wholeheartedly. At the root of it, that is why I take issue with your claim that certain educational systems do not possess the capacity or informed intent sufficient to benefit from the scalar multiplier you mentioned as a possible positive outcome.

If I should be more specific, I would say that I think it is a fundamental mistake and dangerous oversimplification to classify any educational system as either "broken" or "fixed." I understand you were likely meaning to speak in general terms, but it smacks far too much of No Child Left Behind to be left unaddressed. Namely, I believe that an environment of educational regulation built on such a linear projection will inevitably hinder innovation for everything from teacher training to definitions of functional literacy. We are far more complex than that, and the immense diversity and idiosyncrasies of our education systems worldwide are the best living and organic examples.

If we then take your claim at face value, it must follow that no teacher-training certification program has never (fully) fixed an education system, because the systems receiving the teachers are themselves in constant flux. Teacher training programs need persistent refinement and contextualization, as do ICT4E interventions, as do the educational systems themselves. I mostly agree that nothing replaces a good teacher. Nothing, that is, except for a better teacher.

I could not agree more with Rob Van Son and Doug Houlton's above comments on the nature of how myopic the definition of "technology in education" is presented in this article. I'm reminded of Kevin Kelly's recent tome "What Technology Wants." (http://www.kk.org/books/what-technology-wants.php). If there is to be a proper and comprehensive definition of "technologies" and an equally thorough review of their role in the acquisition of education throughout history, I am convinced that the conclusion is positive. Your statement, "Technology has never fixed a broken educational system" is thus confusing: are you speaking to the history of all technologies in all educational systems?

I do appreciate the nod this article makes to the importance of holistic approaches to ICT integration, however I cannot help but marvel in discomfort at this apparent need to define benchmarks whereby "experts" descend to qualitatively (and thus subjectively) decide when and if a given education system is "ready" to use the tools of the well-off. I believe Maria Sara Rodriguez, above, referred to this "paternalism" as well.

This article did make me think of a catalytic benefit of ICT4E that we've seen mentioned on ETD before. If interventions in the classroom (or in the telecenters you visited in your Boston Review article) prove ineffective in showing positive results on the (sometimes narrow) matrices used for measurement, and if the analysis concludes that improved teaching is needed, is that not a benefit resulting from the intervention itself? In other words, had the school continued to pump money into its existing teacher training prior to the intervention, they might not have articulated what about the training process was failing. The intervention can serve to isolate these inefficiencies, much like biologists use frogs to measure air quality.

I kept waiting to read mention of parents in your article. Most schools, even poorly performing ones, depend on parental approval for survival. This is ever-more true in India's low-cost private schools, as you probably know. If parents are on board with an ICT4E intervention, they very well might put pressure on their child's school to catch up on the times, without loosing a beat on the development of critical thinking or analytical skills. It is a functionalist and catalytic role for ICT4E, and the consumers of education are voting for this all over the world. Are they all wrong? Is it that dichotomous?

Lastly, I'm not sure I understood your comparison with textbooks. I have read similar "rhetoric" before, and the reply I come to: netbooks in recent ICT4E interventions typically come with encyclopedias and, increasingly, an eGranary (or similar) e-library. The sheer magnitude of texts available needs to be more accurately described in your comparison, as it can be a significant consideration in the TCO.