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I've hit the same article limit, but my reaction was just the same as yours. Perhaps the rest of the article would have improved my opinion of it, but at the m
by veddox 8y ago
I've hit the same article limit, but my reaction was just the same as yours.
Perhaps the rest of the article would have improved my opinion of it, but at the moment it sounds like Yet Another Rich Westerner trying to solve the Third World's problems with technology, plenty of money, and not a clue of what's going on.
I've lived in a Third World country in Africa for half of my life and am often astounded by the naivete of some (especially tech-based) development schemes. Recently friends of mine were in contact with a Western philanthropist who donated $10 000 to buy laptops for a village school. He came out twice for a few days, chose the school and had the laptops shipped. The problem? The school he chose didn't have any teacher who knew how to use a computer. The next teacher who did lived ~20km away... But of course the philanthropist ignored every piece of advice given him by the people on the ground, just to become upset when, six months later, he realized that his grand scheme wasn't working out.
He is not alone. Projects like these sound fantastic, thought out in a comfortable suburban home in America, but all too often they utterly ignore reality. The reality is that in rural areas here an Internet connection is not something you can take for granted (though this is rapidly improving), electricity is unreliable or completely absent, and an extreme climate and all-permeating dust play havoc with electronics. And that is before you consider social problems like rampant thievery.
Education is one of the most important and urgent areas for development, and we do need to do a lot more than we are right now. But to think that computers can magically solve the problems we have is just another typical case of Silicon Valley Syndrome - believing that social problems can be solved with technology. Yet, the most successful development projects I know all have a few things in common: they work with people, they work with what's there, and they work in the long term. There is no silver bullet.
- apatters 8y agoI don't get the cynicism. The article leads with a concrete example of technology working and producing better outcomes. I have no doubt that having a human coach is a big win and results in better outcomes, if you get a good one. One of the opportunities the tech can present is the ability to augment a good coach so that they can effectively help hundreds more students. I bet some teachers/coaches are bad enough that software without a coach would be superior. One thing the tech industry has proven to be great at is getting users addicted to things, I have to wonder, why aren't we seeing apps that get kids addicted to something they actually learn from? (My best guess is there just isn't enough money in the space to attract the best tech talent.) No disrespect intended to teachers, but a lot of times when they get involved in the discussion they keep going back to "that's why you need to have a good teacher who teaches correctly," and that's completely true, but the problem is, there aren't enough of them, and there may never be. To me it always feels like there's a lot of entrenched and regressive thinking in this discussion, well the reality is that Facebook owns the attention of millions of kids in the developing world now. The educators, the NGOs, etc. already lost the war. The kids are Facebooking instead of doing their homework. These people consistently applied the tech in dumb ways and Facebook won because they were smart. This lesson is a bitter pill but it needs to be swallowed.