About three years or so ago everyone was getting excited about the new solution to closing the educational gap - OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child, initiative with a low-cost, sustainable, easy-to-use laptop that any child could use. The idea was so compelling that there were for-profit competitors to the non-profit OLPC and there were plans to blanket the entire world with these devices.
It didn't quite turn out that way. While these devices are still being made and still being distributed, there came the next big thing - netbooks - and the buzz was all about how t
hese low-cost laptops would change the world. After all, their retail price was just a couple of hundred dollars more than the OLPC unit and they could do
so much more.
Netbooks are still around, but they stopped far short of world-changing. Smart phones did that though, as they can handle much of the routine interpersonal and Internet requests and still slide easily into the pocket of your jeans. Kudos to Apple for kicking off this revolution with the iPhone, and following it up with the iPad, for of course, now the new,
new thing is the iPad and competing tablets.
Going back to the education issue, there continues to be great deal of talk on how digital solutions will fix every problem. Just in the past day I read two articles, one in HuffPo titled
'The Future of Education is Mobile' and the other a
news item about the eG8 Forum with Rupert Murdoch calling for education to move out of the "Victorian age" and go digital. Interestingly, Murdoch's holdings were recently enhanced by the 90% acquisition of Wireless Generation which enables personalized web and mobile learning - for sure, the education tech industry is growing bigger every year.
I am all for it. I believe that technology, and specifically access to the Internet, can make a huge difference to the education of all children who are old enough to use it - my belief is strong enough to make it my business. (Caveat: I also believe that it is people who
deliver the difference, technology is just a tool, albeit a future-shaping one.) But it is not enough to access the Internet only at school as students, especially teenagers, do a lot of studying at home - it is greatly empowering for a student to have access as and when they need it. For sure, they'll play and chat, but that is fine, they will also learn, and sometimes playing and chatting is
how they learn. So it is disappointing that even after so many years of talk, the students who need access the most still don't have it. While there are novelty news stories of iPads in kindergartens, I'm finding many underserved high-schoolers without Internet access at home - in the heart of Silicon Valley. It is kind of embarrassing to see this in an area where so many of us boast multiple Internet-enabled devices per
person in the household. Worse, the organizations working with these students have no idea where to go to fix the problem; understandably it is just not a priority when there are so many other pressing challenges to be handled. According to a
survey done last year, 40% of the homes in the US do not have broadband or high-speed Internet access and 30% have no Internet access whatsoever, which is about what I'm running into, in my own small samples. You can expect that if they can't afford Internet access, they're unlikely to have smart phones with data plans either.
Desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones - they would all make amazing educational tools, but if you cannot connect to the Internet they're little better than calculators and typewriters (remember those?). And unless every student can connect from home, the digital and education gaps will stay unbridged. We have the technology - devices, software and network - we just need the collective will, and/or a driven social entrepreneur, to ensure that every student has affordable Internet access from home - sometime soon would be nice.
