8 ms·

In poor countries technology can make big improvements to education

95 points by ivm 8y ago

choot 8y ago
One major problem is that in poor countries, opportunities are few, so a lot of effort is spent in you competing against your peers. Until i arrived in the West, i didn't realize what's possible with the collaborative approach instead of competing against each other. In west, average people were teaming up and achieving better result as a group than couple of sharp kids in my country where they spent a lot of effort killing competition. This is my experience, excuse if it's full of bias.
- simion314 8y ago
  At what age group are you thinking? I think collaboration is a tool that can be used for good results but not all the time. I also have no idea what do you mean by killing the competition, are children sabotaging each other somehow ?2 As an example of collaboration we were a group a students that we were solving independently math problems and next day we were helping each other on the hard ones that some could not solve, the ones that nobody could solve we would ask the teacher and he was very happy that we were asking, he helped us and then give us a new list of problems to solve. This worked because we were doing this for fun and we were not forced into it, if someone would have been forced into it he could just copy the solution and done.
- rafiki6 8y ago
  This is all too common in developing economies. Due to general economic mismanagement leading to limited opportunities and sticky cultural beliefs, students are pegged against each other. A national exam is used as a filter to allow those the exam deems "smartest" into the top programs in the country. These exams are notorious for being cheated on, and many students effectively spend their secondary education over fitting their education to succeed on the exam reducing the likelihood they will pursue any other interest. The thing that I don't think most of these countries realize is, if you've spent an entire child's life teaching them to compete with others, and making that a ticket to their success, all you do is enable that behavior and it becomes a habit. I've met many foreigners working in the West who strongly believe that because they were top performers academically in their countries they are better than everyone and it shows through in arrogance much more frequently than people who we in the West might consider "top performers". What I like about many Western education systems is the emphasis on collaboration. Some Western countries don't have a national entrance exam and that's really for the best. You create a funnel of homogeneity in your academic system by using that as your qualifying metric without much thought to anything else and your economic development persists on that path with those deemed to be top performers looking down on their fellow citizen. Of course, I do not want to over generalize. This is not ALWAYS the case and I've also met many foreigners who are humble and amazing to work with and Westerners who are arrogant and dismissive.
soneca 8y ago
"In poor countries technology can make big improvements to education Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work" I reached the article limit, so I could only read this, and I disagree. I live in Brazil and my wife works in a big NGO focused on education. She visits schools in poor regions all over the country. Her current understanding is that she sees no evidence that technology helps at all. And the NGO piloted lots of tech initiatives on lots of schools. "Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work" The first part is definitely true, the second one not so much. What seems to make a difference is a prepared and motivated school principal. EDIT: I just read the whole article (thanks to ivm letting me know about Outline). The title is kind of clickbaity. Big programs, with a lot good things going on, and they focus on the small part that use tablets and I don't think it is even an absolute necessity. "The coach-and-tablet element is just one part. A curriculum based on synthetic phonics (widely used in developed-country schools) has been designed and 23m books distributed, along with detailed lesson plans to make life easier for teachers. But the technology is crucial to supporting them and providing their bosses with data about their performance." It is "crucial" for a small part of the program with good results. They at least acknowledge some high profile programs that did not work and go on to share a few other few and specific cases that are very interesting and explain how tech could indeed help. I still think it overrates the tech part, but looks like the classic case where the journalist writes a more down to earth article and the editor adds a exagerated title.
- ivm 8y ago
  > I reached the article limit Add Outline.com/ before the URL, like: https://outline.com/https://www.economist.com/international/2018/11/17/in-poor-countries-technology-can-make-big-improvements-to-education https://outline.com/https://www.economist.com/international/...
  - asianthrowaway 8y ago
    Incognito mode works too
    - 8y ago
charlixcx 8y ago
in hacker news being a complete asshole improves your karma
ArtWomb 8y ago
The missing piece in the technology puzzle for rural education is broadband satellite internet. Iridium Network's bandwidth will be able to support HD video and rich internet applications. The key difference: every student, teacher and indeed every member of the village community will be able to use their connections in parallel. Rather than one person at a time or each sharing a single conn. Low-power, low cost ARM based hardware running linux or chromeOS, especially in networked appliance configurations for classrooms, could become standard. We'll witness a ton of emerging user scenarios: live video teaching, IoT, telemedicine. The future is already here. And it is about to get distributed everywhere ;)
- amrx431 8y ago
  Yes and No. What I see as more critical is the lack of capital. The public money in poorer country is highly contested amongst immediate welfare policies(like preventing child birth death etc), corrupt system and policies where the benefits would be observed not immediately but say a couple of years.
- veddox 8y ago
  Have you had any experience with computers in a school setting? It's all most school in Germany can do to keep their computer infrastructure up and running. Never mind rural Africa! Setting up and operating such a network requires some serious know-how - know-how that pretty much nobody in your scenario is going to have. And never mind the practical problems of running computers in a rural setting (see my post above).
clueless123 8y ago
In (some) poor countries, public teaching pays poorly and tend to have strong unions. Unfortunately this combination attracts bad actors that politicize education putting the interests of the children last. Technology can't do much about this. That said, is unbelievable what kids are getting on their own from access to what is available on the internet. It is truly transforming rural areas.
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  When you have only 2 dollars a day, you ain’t have no time for unions.
amrx431 8y ago
Although this article addresses the situation in rural areas of poor countries, I have personal experience that access to technology contributes to better education even at undergrad level of the education. I personally went to a college which was trying to mitigate the lack of good professors and instructors. I had the idea of doing assignments, recitals and lectures(if necessary) from Edx. I personally believe that completing and doing good in courses from MIT on Edx certainly if nothing else contributed to my self confidence.
- bluGill 8y ago
  Technology is a tool. Would a wrench help your education? If you take it out on the playground and throw is around it wasn't useful. If you leave it in the closet it wasn't useful. If you use it to cut the clay for your art project it was useful but you could have done better. If you use it to rebuild and engine thus learning how to do a career it was useful - how useful depends on if you actually want to be a mechanic. A computer is a tool, just like a wrench. You can use it to play games and get no use. They can gather dust and be useless. They can however open a world of information in some cases this can be a big difference.
dahart 8y ago
> Paying teachers more is not likely to improve the situation. As research by Justin Sandefur of the Centre for Global Development shows, poor-country teachers tend to be remarkably well-paid, by local standards (see chart). And evidence from countries as diverse as Indonesia and Pakistan suggests that teachers’ pay levels have little impact on learning. Is it at all reasonable to use units of GDP to compare salaries? That doesn’t seem right to me. The US GDP per capita in USD is about $60k. The Ethiopia GDP per capita in USD is less than $800. The only way to claim that teachers are “remarkably well-paid” by using units of GDP, while in reality 7 * GDP / person in Ethiopia (about $5,400 per year) is not enough to buy food or pay rent. If the cost of living in Ethiopia were 1% of the cost of living in the US, then teachers would be better off. But the cost of living there is only slightly lower, so teachers’ buying power there is a tiny fraction of what it is here. They’re getting a lot less than our minimum wage in relative dollars. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Ethiopia https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...
- biglenny 8y ago
  Those stats are beyond wrong. Those look like prices for specific parts of Addis.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  If 7 * GDP / person isn't enough to buy food or pay rent in Ethiopia, wouldn't you expect the overwhelming majority of people there to be starving and/or homeless?
  - dahart 8y ago
    That doesn't necessarily follow. Poor people can and do live in groups and pool funds. That said, the numbers of people in Ethiopia who are starving is much higher than in the US, it's something like 8-10% of the country.
- nabla9 8y ago
  Those numbeo stats are not accurate nor relevant for Ethiopians. They are only numbers some tourist, expat, NGO worker would use. GDP at purchasing power parity per capita is better measuring stick than just raw GDP. For Ethiopia it's roughly $2,100.
voidhorse 8y ago
It’s important to recognize access to information does not equate to education. No matter what sophisticated tools you have at your disposal, you still need an educator to do the job of teaching, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to craft some kind of coherent picture that synthesizes connections between what’s being learned. Niel Postman’s Technopoly puts forward a pretty good argument for why we can’t simply replace teachers with sophisticated tools and hope the information sticks. Technology is a great boon and enabler in the field of education, but’s it no replacement for teachers or communities, which remain integral to the pedagogical process. The same logic, at its extreme would suggest you could replace parents with sophisticated tooling and come out with children that are just as well developed and ready to contribute to society in meaningful ways.
- duxup 8y ago
  Having someone to bounce ideas off of, ask questions, is just so much more efficient and helpful when it comes to understanding. Granted that also requires a good teacher but the payoff is so high compared to just having text or video in front of you. Standing at a whiteboard thinking out loud with an instructor or peer has always lead to my deepest understanding / biggest breakthroughs as far as understanding a concept goes. Humans are social animals and we learn really well that way.
- yters 8y ago
  And then we could replace the children with tools and no humans are needed for education!
  - FiveSquared 8y ago
    /s
- Kalium 8y ago
  > Niel Postman’s Technopoly puts forward a pretty good argument for why we can’t simply replace teachers with sophisticated tools and hope the information sticks. This is absolutely correct! Information technology is in no way, shape, form, or manner an adequate replacement for a skilled, educated, professional, and engaged teacher and a supportive community. It may be worth considering that tools can provide some value when teachers have no idea what they're supposed to be teaching... or even are entirely absent! It's important to recognize that using technology to aid in the educational process does not have to mean handing kids iPads and hoping for the best. While by no means a substitute for a teacher performing to reasonable standards, tools can be a wonderful investment in situations where the education system cannot meet those standards.
Cenk 8y ago
I can confirm from first-hand experience that access to technology can make big improvements at the university level too. Tens of thousands of people from developing countries use one of Citationsy’s features to access scholarly research and papers that their universities do not pay to provide them access to.
qaq 8y ago
I live in 3d richest county in US in my kid's middle school it's not super uncommon for a teacher to just put on some YouTube video that covers what they are studying ...
- HiroshiSan 8y ago
  You could just home school your kid with khan academy.
  - qaq 8y ago
    I am seriously considering it
    - HiroshiSan 8y ago
      Look into artofproblemsolving.com as well. They have online classes for math that are very enjoyable. It's a great supplement to the horrendous math curriculum in schools.
      - qaq 8y ago
        thanx for the pointer!!!
Mankrik 8y ago
I like the idea of holograms being projected to schools https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/holograms-of-teachers-beamed-into-london-classrooms-from-around-the-world-a3449181.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/holograms-of-teachers... This could be useful for general teaching, while the role of face-to-face teachers may change for more one-on-one teaching. Something that many parents long for their children in an age where schools are being shut down and combined into "megaschools" (UK)
swiley 8y ago
I don't live in a poor country, but as a college student every time I've had a class that relied heavily on technology it's been miserable. The math classes where homework was done on paper, from a math book were pleasant. I also always like to think about Dijkstra and his opinion on technology vs paper for teaching. He seemed to avoid it's use when it replaced a more personal teaching style but he also seems to be a pioneer in distance learning[1]. I think a lot of people could learn a lot from him. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
picsao 8y ago
Diamond age answered that one completely? We do not learn to better ourselves or get to a goal--that is adult think. As a kid you want to please a person with how good /useful you are.

95 points by ivm 8y ago

One major problem is that in poor countries, opportunities are few, so a lot of effort is spent in you competing against your peers. Until i arrived in the West, i didn't realize what's possible with the collaborative approach instead of competing against each other. In west, average people were teaming up and achieving better result as a group than couple of sharp kids in my country where they spent a lot of effort killing competition. This is my experience, excuse if it's full of bias.

simion314 8y ago
At what age group are you thinking? I think collaboration is a tool that can be used for good results but not all the time. I also have no idea what do you mean by killing the competition, are children sabotaging each other somehow ?2 As an example of collaboration we were a group a students that we were solving independently math problems and next day we were helping each other on the hard ones that some could not solve, the ones that nobody could solve we would ask the teacher and he was very happy that we were asking, he helped us and then give us a new list of problems to solve. This worked because we were doing this for fun and we were not forced into it, if someone would have been forced into it he could just copy the solution and done.
rafiki6 8y ago
This is all too common in developing economies. Due to general economic mismanagement leading to limited opportunities and sticky cultural beliefs, students are pegged against each other. A national exam is used as a filter to allow those the exam deems "smartest" into the top programs in the country. These exams are notorious for being cheated on, and many students effectively spend their secondary education over fitting their education to succeed on the exam reducing the likelihood they will pursue any other interest. The thing that I don't think most of these countries realize is, if you've spent an entire child's life teaching them to compete with others, and making that a ticket to their success, all you do is enable that behavior and it becomes a habit. I've met many foreigners working in the West who strongly believe that because they were top performers academically in their countries they are better than everyone and it shows through in arrogance much more frequently than people who we in the West might consider "top performers". What I like about many Western education systems is the emphasis on collaboration. Some Western countries don't have a national entrance exam and that's really for the best. You create a funnel of homogeneity in your academic system by using that as your qualifying metric without much thought to anything else and your economic development persists on that path with those deemed to be top performers looking down on their fellow citizen. Of course, I do not want to over generalize. This is not ALWAYS the case and I've also met many foreigners who are humble and amazing to work with and Westerners who are arrogant and dismissive.

soneca 8y ago

"In poor countries technology can make big improvements to education Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work" I reached the article limit, so I could only read this, and I disagree. I live in Brazil and my wife works in a big NGO focused on education. She visits schools in poor regions all over the country. Her current understanding is that she sees no evidence that technology helps at all. And the NGO piloted lots of tech initiatives on lots of schools. "Teachers are often unqualified, ignorant or absent; tablets show up and work" The first part is definitely true, the second one not so much. What seems to make a difference is a prepared and motivated school principal. EDIT: I just read the whole article (thanks to ivm letting me know about Outline). The title is kind of clickbaity. Big programs, with a lot good things going on, and they focus on the small part that use tablets and I don't think it is even an absolute necessity. "The coach-and-tablet element is just one part. A curriculum based on synthetic phonics (widely used in developed-country schools) has been designed and 23m books distributed, along with detailed lesson plans to make life easier for teachers. But the technology is crucial to supporting them and providing their bosses with data about their performance." It is "crucial" for a small part of the program with good results. They at least acknowledge some high profile programs that did not work and go on to share a few other few and specific cases that are very interesting and explain how tech could indeed help. I still think it overrates the tech part, but looks like the classic case where the journalist writes a more down to earth article and the editor adds a exagerated title.

ivm 8y ago
> I reached the article limit Add Outline.com/ before the URL, like: https://outline.com/https://www.economist.com/international/2018/11/17/in-poor-countries-technology-can-make-big-improvements-to-education https://outline.com/https://www.economist.com/international/...
- asianthrowaway 8y ago
  Incognito mode works too
  - 8y ago

charlixcx 8y ago

in hacker news being a complete asshole improves your karma

ArtWomb 8y ago

The missing piece in the technology puzzle for rural education is broadband satellite internet. Iridium Network's bandwidth will be able to support HD video and rich internet applications. The key difference: every student, teacher and indeed every member of the village community will be able to use their connections in parallel. Rather than one person at a time or each sharing a single conn. Low-power, low cost ARM based hardware running linux or chromeOS, especially in networked appliance configurations for classrooms, could become standard. We'll witness a ton of emerging user scenarios: live video teaching, IoT, telemedicine. The future is already here. And it is about to get distributed everywhere ;)

amrx431 8y ago
Yes and No. What I see as more critical is the lack of capital. The public money in poorer country is highly contested amongst immediate welfare policies(like preventing child birth death etc), corrupt system and policies where the benefits would be observed not immediately but say a couple of years.
veddox 8y ago
Have you had any experience with computers in a school setting? It's all most school in Germany can do to keep their computer infrastructure up and running. Never mind rural Africa! Setting up and operating such a network requires some serious know-how - know-how that pretty much nobody in your scenario is going to have. And never mind the practical problems of running computers in a rural setting (see my post above).

clueless123 8y ago

In (some) poor countries, public teaching pays poorly and tend to have strong unions. Unfortunately this combination attracts bad actors that politicize education putting the interests of the children last. Technology can't do much about this. That said, is unbelievable what kids are getting on their own from access to what is available on the internet. It is truly transforming rural areas.

FiveSquared 8y ago
When you have only 2 dollars a day, you ain’t have no time for unions.

amrx431 8y ago

Although this article addresses the situation in rural areas of poor countries, I have personal experience that access to technology contributes to better education even at undergrad level of the education. I personally went to a college which was trying to mitigate the lack of good professors and instructors. I had the idea of doing assignments, recitals and lectures(if necessary) from Edx. I personally believe that completing and doing good in courses from MIT on Edx certainly if nothing else contributed to my self confidence.

bluGill 8y ago
Technology is a tool. Would a wrench help your education? If you take it out on the playground and throw is around it wasn't useful. If you leave it in the closet it wasn't useful. If you use it to cut the clay for your art project it was useful but you could have done better. If you use it to rebuild and engine thus learning how to do a career it was useful - how useful depends on if you actually want to be a mechanic. A computer is a tool, just like a wrench. You can use it to play games and get no use. They can gather dust and be useless. They can however open a world of information in some cases this can be a big difference.

dahart 8y ago

> Paying teachers more is not likely to improve the situation. As research by Justin Sandefur of the Centre for Global Development shows, poor-country teachers tend to be remarkably well-paid, by local standards (see chart). And evidence from countries as diverse as Indonesia and Pakistan suggests that teachers’ pay levels have little impact on learning. Is it at all reasonable to use units of GDP to compare salaries? That doesn’t seem right to me. The US GDP per capita in USD is about $60k. The Ethiopia GDP per capita in USD is less than $800. The only way to claim that teachers are “remarkably well-paid” by using units of GDP, while in reality 7 * GDP / person in Ethiopia (about $5,400 per year) is not enough to buy food or pay rent. If the cost of living in Ethiopia were 1% of the cost of living in the US, then teachers would be better off. But the cost of living there is only slightly lower, so teachers’ buying power there is a tiny fraction of what it is here. They’re getting a lot less than our minimum wage in relative dollars. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Ethiopia https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...

biglenny 8y ago
Those stats are beyond wrong. Those look like prices for specific parts of Addis.
umanwizard 8y ago
If 7 * GDP / person isn't enough to buy food or pay rent in Ethiopia, wouldn't you expect the overwhelming majority of people there to be starving and/or homeless?
- dahart 8y ago
  That doesn't necessarily follow. Poor people can and do live in groups and pool funds. That said, the numbers of people in Ethiopia who are starving is much higher than in the US, it's something like 8-10% of the country.
nabla9 8y ago
Those numbeo stats are not accurate nor relevant for Ethiopians. They are only numbers some tourist, expat, NGO worker would use. GDP at purchasing power parity per capita is better measuring stick than just raw GDP. For Ethiopia it's roughly $2,100.

voidhorse 8y ago

It’s important to recognize access to information does not equate to education. No matter what sophisticated tools you have at your disposal, you still need an educator to do the job of teaching, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to craft some kind of coherent picture that synthesizes connections between what’s being learned. Niel Postman’s Technopoly puts forward a pretty good argument for why we can’t simply replace teachers with sophisticated tools and hope the information sticks. Technology is a great boon and enabler in the field of education, but’s it no replacement for teachers or communities, which remain integral to the pedagogical process. The same logic, at its extreme would suggest you could replace parents with sophisticated tooling and come out with children that are just as well developed and ready to contribute to society in meaningful ways.

duxup 8y ago
Having someone to bounce ideas off of, ask questions, is just so much more efficient and helpful when it comes to understanding. Granted that also requires a good teacher but the payoff is so high compared to just having text or video in front of you. Standing at a whiteboard thinking out loud with an instructor or peer has always lead to my deepest understanding / biggest breakthroughs as far as understanding a concept goes. Humans are social animals and we learn really well that way.
yters 8y ago
And then we could replace the children with tools and no humans are needed for education!
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  /s
Kalium 8y ago
> Niel Postman’s Technopoly puts forward a pretty good argument for why we can’t simply replace teachers with sophisticated tools and hope the information sticks. This is absolutely correct! Information technology is in no way, shape, form, or manner an adequate replacement for a skilled, educated, professional, and engaged teacher and a supportive community. It may be worth considering that tools can provide some value when teachers have no idea what they're supposed to be teaching... or even are entirely absent! It's important to recognize that using technology to aid in the educational process does not have to mean handing kids iPads and hoping for the best. While by no means a substitute for a teacher performing to reasonable standards, tools can be a wonderful investment in situations where the education system cannot meet those standards.

Cenk 8y ago

I can confirm from first-hand experience that access to technology can make big improvements at the university level too. Tens of thousands of people from developing countries use one of Citationsy’s features to access scholarly research and papers that their universities do not pay to provide them access to.

qaq 8y ago

I live in 3d richest county in US in my kid's middle school it's not super uncommon for a teacher to just put on some YouTube video that covers what they are studying ...

HiroshiSan 8y ago
You could just home school your kid with khan academy.
- qaq 8y ago
  I am seriously considering it
  - HiroshiSan 8y ago
    Look into artofproblemsolving.com as well. They have online classes for math that are very enjoyable. It's a great supplement to the horrendous math curriculum in schools.
    - qaq 8y ago
      thanx for the pointer!!!

Mankrik 8y ago

I like the idea of holograms being projected to schools https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/holograms-of-teachers-beamed-into-london-classrooms-from-around-the-world-a3449181.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/holograms-of-teachers... This could be useful for general teaching, while the role of face-to-face teachers may change for more one-on-one teaching. Something that many parents long for their children in an age where schools are being shut down and combined into "megaschools" (UK)

swiley 8y ago

I don't live in a poor country, but as a college student every time I've had a class that relied heavily on technology it's been miserable. The math classes where homework was done on paper, from a math book were pleasant. I also always like to think about Dijkstra and his opinion on technology vs paper for teaching. He seemed to avoid it's use when it replaced a more personal teaching style but he also seems to be a pioneer in distance learning[1]. I think a lot of people could learn a lot from him. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX3URhx6i2E

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

picsao 8y ago

Diamond age answered that one completely? We do not learn to better ourselves or get to a goal--that is adult think. As a kid you want to please a person with how good /useful you are.