Homer-Dixon takes a dig at Negroponte

This is a cut-paste from:

The Ingenuity Gap:  Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future
Thomas Homer-Dixon
PhD Political Science, MIT

I don't know if anyone should read this book … he writes ...

"The people who work in political science are, for the most part, well-intentioned and smart."  *but*  "They have largely failed to produce any really valuable knowledge."

"Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives."

… Thanks but some of us have always known that!

Of course he is partly wrong (and I hope he is completely wrong) since we know from an earlier post that uneducated poor kids can use computers without being taught how to do so.  I continue to admire Negroponte's persistence.
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Sugata Mitra's accomplishments are very interesting, but he left out the question of how using the internet and being available to access random information will actually improve children's lives. I think its a relevant question to ask whether the money spent on ICT in developing country education systems would be better spent on other things. Or as Greg Mortenson puts it, "pencils before PCs."
— rehintz

I am sure it does something to their minds … and maybe their aspirations … hopefully that will improve their lives.  You must have hope!
— Ashish
Hope is one of the most beautiful human traits, but its no substitute for Randomized Control Trials :)
— rehintz
And the RCTs seem to indicate we still have some work to do:

The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of a Language Arts Program

Results and Policy Lessons:
The effects of the program where estimated by directly comparing the average test scores and survey responses in the treatment and comparison groups. Even though the program was successful in increasing the number of computers in treatment schools – on average these schools have 13.4 computers compared to 5.1 in comparison schools - the program had surprisingly little effect on test scores. In Spanish, the subject targeted by the program, treatment students did not perform significantly better than the students in the comparison group. Additionally, no improvements were seen in math. When considering the effects on specific subgroups of students, such as gender and age, there are no significant differences between treatment and comparison students either. Moreover, Computers for Education had little effect on a number of other academic variables including hours of study, perceptions of school, and relationships with their peers.

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/use-and-misuse-computers-education...

— rehintz
Complement or Substitute? The Effect of Technology on Student Achievement in India

Results and Policy Lessons:
The research design aimed at disentangling the effects of these variations of the CAL program in different settings. Results are found in the following areas:

Pull-out vs. Supplemental Method: Students who participated in the supplemental CAL program had math scores 0.28 standard deviations higher, on average, than students in the control group. Students who participated in the pull-out CAL program, however, had 0.57 standard deviations lower math scores than students in the control group. It is surprising that the intervention which assigns one hour a day to computerized learning, away from other instructional methods, has a largely negative effect on all types of students. The supplemental CAL program, for example, also demonstrated more positive results for low-performing students than for high-performing students, an effect which was not observed in the pull-out program. This difference in treatment effect for stronger and weaker students (ranging from small and insignificant changes for most students, but gains of 0.47 standard deviations for the poorest performing students) seems to reflect the design of the program which emphasized reinforcement of material that the students had already learned rather than self-paced discovery of topics not covered in class. Thus, the method and context of implementation of the CAL program may play a significant role in determining its impact.

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/complement-or-substitute-effect-te...

— rehintz
MIT fight!

One Laptop and J-PAL

Glennerster also said that J-PAL researchers had offered to evaluate One Laptop per Child but had been rebuffed. “We have a center for doing very rigorous scientific studies, and we have a number of people who have tried to do randomized control trials [of One Laptop per Child] and we’re just told, ‘No, you don’t get it, you’re just going to [study] test scores, you don’t get it, it’s transformative.’”

Asked by an audience member if he would let J-PAL evaluate One Laptop per Child, Negroponte noted that institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank have already positively assessed the program. “OLPC has participated in an enormous amount of evaluation,” said Negroponte, who is currently on leave from MIT. The program, he said, “still costs a little too much,” but is effective.

Jose Gomez-Marquez, program director of MIT Innovations in International Health initiative, noted that applying technology means more than just personal computing. “Information is an aspect of technology. But in reality technology is also about tools, about ways of creating devices,” said Gomez-Marquez, who has helped create vaporizers that deliver vaccines for the poor.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/technology-poverty-1209.html

— rehintz

Well those are now so fashionable because of the the Poverty Lab at MIT.  Economists finally discovered the scientific method. But try to use that on the rest of the stuff in your micro and macro textbooks. Here's another thought - how does having access to "random" information change your life (and you are neither poor or uneducated)?   I suspect in addition to random info - people look for stuff that matters to them or affects their life.  Clearly farmers will not be reading this blog.  Unless you are suggesting that there is a minimum level of education which is required for people to benefit from information … because that's what the internet ultimately gives us … information.  I do not know what that threshold level would be.  It is a similar argument that some apologists for dictatorial regimes make … at the initial stages of development democracy is not good but it is better to have a benign dictatorship (whatever that means!)  … after which it's ok to have a democracy, but they don't tell us when this transition should be made.  So I would argue that anyone can benefit from more information regardless of their level of education or income level.  It is elitist and definitely presumptuous for Homer-Dixon to suggest that you don't need the internet because you live in Bihar.

— Ashish
I am totally unsure of whether the 12 hours a day I spend on Wikipedia and Google Reader benefit me or not. How many important points have I missed in classes because I was buried in an RSS feed? Of course I have the luxury of being inefficient...
— rehintz
Life is a journey!  May be you are process driven and not end-product driven.

— Ashish
Sir, if you have any good critiques of RCTs, please share.
— rehintz
@Eugene: Chance favours the connected mind. You're just connecting.
@Everyone else: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU
— sezflom