And now for something completely different

[This is for CSC300: Computers and Society, an account of my experience during the "service learning" portion of the course]

My service learning entailed working as part of one of two teams exploring the use of OLPC laptops at Orde Daycare, a downtown daycare centre for children up to the age of twelve. Over the course of our participation, we worked with the ECE (early childhood education) teachers and with the children themselves with the goal of determining what, if any, pedagogical gap the laptops could fill, and how the children reacted to them.

OLPC stands for "One Laptop Per Child", an organization created with the goal of "creat[ing] educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning". Children such as those at Orde are not the target demographic for the program (the majority of laptops are deployed in the developing world, in Africa, Central America, and Asia primarily), but the XO-1 laptop, the model currently being used by the OLPC program, has certain virtues over a conventional PC that were considered worth exploring.

Physically, the laptop is designed with children in mind. The keys are smaller to accomodate child-sized fingers, the machine is designed to be very durable, withstanding bumps and drops, and the colourful casing and intuitive buttons are certainly visually appealing to a child. In addition, the software that comes loaded on an XO-1 varies considerably from what most children likely encounter on computers at home or at school. Rather than the ubiquitous Windows, the XO-1 uses a variant of Linux, a free, open-source operating system, with a user-interface ("Sugar") designed to be intuitive and visually appealing for children. The software, which ranges from memory games and mazes to bridge-building simulations to software for creating music, is all designed with learning in mind, especially collaborative learning.

Collaborative learning, the ability for two children working seperately on different laptops to share and work together on an activity is a central tenet for the OLPC program, and as such the XO-1's come with a powerful wireless antenna and a networking interface simple enough for children to immediately understand and use. Virtually any activity on the laptop can be shared with another user, and doing so (as well as joining a "mesh network" to communicate with other nearby OLPCs) is a very simple matter.

With this in mind, we made arrangements to start visiting the daycare in early March. Communication within the group was fairly robust during the early stages of the project, with everyone keeping in contact with e-mail, and making some use of the DrProject page. Because of conflicting schedules however, it was difficult to arrange in-peron meetings that included the whole group; in fact, during the course of the project, no such meeting ever took place, and this may have been a contributing factor to some of the confusion that arose later.

During an early visit to Orde we opted to work with some of the older kids (brushing up on 12 years old), with somewhat disappointing results. The kids seemed bored with the laptops and once they discovered that they had internet access, were only interested in watching videos on YouTube. This may have been because we didn't have enough activities appropriate for their age planned, or simply because the children's previous experience with computers led them to treat the XO-1s as any other, rather than wanting to explore its more interesting features.

On a later visit, we asked to work with some of the younger kids (who were probably around 5-7 years old). In them we found a much more receptive and inquisitive audience. Though familiar with their basic operation, these children seemed much less experienced with computers than the older kids, which may have made them more open to exploring the XO-1's features. From the beginning, the children used the "sharing" feature to play games in collaboration or in competition with each other.

None of the programs the children were using were specifically designed to teach a particular skill or bit of curricula, but they clearly all had some pedagogical purpose. A concentration-like game of matching cards with numbers to cards with arithmetic expressions (trying to pair, for example, "12" and "8+4") was challenging enough to make them think. Even a simple text-to-speech program, which the children found endlessly amusing, gave them an opportunity to practice their spelling.

Happily we found that, despite the notoriously fickle attention spans of young children, the XO-1s provided enough variety in ther activities that after working with the children for an hour they showed no signs of boredom and were reluctant to stop playing with the laptops.

I'm very optimistic about the impact that the laptops could have for the kids at Orde, especially, for the reasons noted above, for the younger children. However, during our time with the children we were in an approximately 1:2 ratio with them, not including the one or more ECE teachers who were present. This is probably not a sustainable ratio, especially if more children were to be taking part at once. We were fairly active in guiding the activities of the children as we worked with them, but the XO-1s are designed in a way that is conducive to children working by themselves (or ideally collaborating with another child), and something we didn't try which could be worth exploring is how the children react to the laptops with less guidance.

The reason the OLPC laptops fill a need for the children at Orde is certainly not the same reason they do for the world's poorest children, for whom the OLPC is intended; from talking to the children, it was clear that most of them had a computer in their home. What the XO-1s provide that the children would not encounter in their everyday interactions with computers is a learning experience tailored to them that fosters a positive attitude toward learning and technology (as the OLPC organisation's website says "children—especially young children—need the opportunity to learn far more than Word, Excel, and Powerpoint").

My understanding of the digital divide was certainly enhanced by my experience with the children at Orde - as a result of their canny with computers rather than their ignorance. Certainly the children were vastly more comfortable with computers than my peers and I would have been when I was their age. I was made aware how real the generational gap is with respect to technology, and how essential a part of everyday life computers are becoming.

Our group's communication was weak and only seemed to get weaker as the project went on. E-mails to the mailing list seemed to go unnoticed over time, and finding team members in person ended up being more dependent on serendipity than planning. Perhaps this was because of distractions from other course work, though we may in the end have created more work for ourselves, rushing to organize at the last minute, than was saved. We could have improved our group dynamic by scheduling more regular meetings, and trying to keep some form of constant communication, even if just through quick "status report" e-mails after visits to the daycare, and so on.

Whether or not our work will have made an appreciable difference to the community remains to be seen. Certainly I like to think we've made some effect on the attitude towards technology of the children we worked with, but we're eager to hear whether Orde will choose to continue to pursue a program with the XO-1s as a result of our work, and if so how.