ICTs and leapfrogging development

Recommendations from whom?

Last summer, Craig R. Barrett, chairman of UN GAID and chairman of the board of Intel Corp., issued a list of "Recommendations from the UN GAID Chairman". A couple of the recommendations are worthy of a slightly raised eyebrow, and perhaps even a "wink wink nudge nudge" or two.

Barrett addresses education in his first recommendation. Conspicuously missing here is any mention of students. The gist of Barrett's first recommendation is "Train teachers to integrate technology into the classroom". This is pretty obvious, but he goes on to repeat the Intel mantra, "Computers aren't magic, teachers are." In light of recent spats between Intel and OLPC project (esp. Intel's teacher focus vs. OLPC's kids focus), one has to wonder whether this is coming from Barrett the UN GAID chairman or Barrett the Intel chairman. However, there is an abundance of research that gives ample reason to question the effectiveness of entrusting classroom teachers with the spread of ICTs. Numerous studies have shown that even after receiving special training many teachers are hesitant to fully integrate ICTs into their classroom activities. They are far less likely to attempt to do something innovative with ICTs, choosing rather to use familiar off the shelf products, the most common being word processors. Meanwhile, ICTs have been shown to be truly transformative in very unpredictable ways when put into the hands of users, even when those users have little previous experience with them. Put simply, there is plenty of evidence to support a claim that computers may be more magical than teachers.

Barrett's other point that raised my attention is his fourth recommendation, "Competitive telecommunications markets are necessary to allow for affordable Internet access." This makes sense up to a certain point. Competition certainly has brought the cost down, but only if there is a market to work with. Telecommunications markets have not seemed eager to seek out new markets where the most costly parts of the infrastructure are missing. East Africa remains the most poorly connected part of the world and it doesn't seem like the telecommunications market is exactly knocking at their doors with an adequate submarine cable in hand. We even have a rather dismal situation here in Iceland. Infrastructure within Iceland is very good (except for several rural areas) but the country is connected internationally by only two submarine cables, only one of which is for commercial use. Internet access outside of Iceland is metered (except for the most expensive services and even then there are limits) and quite expensive (not to mention the all too common outages that occur when something happens to that one cable). This will gradually get better, but still, it's a few years off. If Iceland's progress in this area is any indication of what can be expected for East Africa, there may be quite a wait for the telecommunications market to get around to delivering on the "free market" promise.