[alialkhatib]

Kentaro Toyama talks about education and the failed promise of the OLPC program and other technological endeavors in education in Geek Heresy. His thesis is that technology "amplifies" the characteristics in society and self. If you have an underperforming school with ill-equipped or overwhelmed instructors, technology won't fix these issues. But in education research, where studies very carefully select a field site, you don't see experiments involving problem schools; you find experimental deployments in idyllic settings, with instructors who are extremely competent, and the researchers might even take a relatively hands-on role to ensure the technology gets used as desired by the protocol of the study.

In one chapter he points out that studies such as the OECD's tend to find middling results (as this one seems to, although I see more explicitly negative conclusions, like that students do worse with technology in some circumstances) mainly because you're studying students from across all schools; look at the successful schools and see how technology affects them, and he seems to argue that you'll find those students make even greater leaps over the underprivileged students.

His bigger point is that technology's benefit is contextually determined by human factors, and that we need to understand the cultures in which we hope to use technology to benefit the members of that culture. Throwing tablets, laptops, or smartphones at everyone won't magically make the world a better place. It's a good read (so far, at least).

Also, I'm getting more and more annoyed seeing news outlets publishing summaries of third party studies without linking to anything. The BBC don't even link to the OECD's homepage, let alone the study they ostensibly published.