I spent a few hours in Tom Bradley International Terminal last night and was surprised at how much of a “hub” it has been in my own life.  While sitting in the food court upstairs, I could remember being in the same place at least 15 years ago while leaving for Scotland.  I also had memory flashes of my first trip to Nepal and saying goodbye to a girlfriend in the exact same place.  In fact, if it were possible to take a cross-section of time in LAX for the past 20 or so years,  you would probably see me at many significant points in my life.

As the lack of posts over the past month and half might suggest, things have been fairly quiet in my life. Work is keeping me very busy, as is the dissertation and two articles I have been working on. I just finished Nepal in Transition: Educational Innovation written by Horace and Mary Reed in 1965; it describes education in Nepal at a crucial time from a very unique perspective. I also read an article on BBC today that claims individuals are willing to make significant changes in their lifestyles to avoid climate change.

I’ve spent most of the past 10 days in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Dubrovnik (Croatia). Apart from the weather, Sarajevo was great…beautiful city, nice people, good food, etc. It is also very good value for money. On the road to Croatia you can see a lot of beautiful, snow-capped, rocky mountains. It is an interesting drive, as you actually go from Bosnia to Croatia, then back to Bosnia (for its 10 km of coastline) then into Croatia again.

While Dubrovnik is a nice place, it is clearly overrun with tourists. It seems that prices have shot up a lot in the past few years and are now on par with pretty much anywhere else in Europe (Greece, for example). Still, it is a very beautiful place and was worth going. The train back (from Ploce) was interesting, a relic from the 70s or 80s.

I’ve just left Sarajevo after attending the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) 13th conference.  Apart from the weather, it was a good experience, I met a lot of wonderful people and learned a lot.  My own presentation went fine, although though truthfully speaking it was poorly attended and not a very valuable experience.  Anyway, I now have lots to think about and to read, which should help with the ongoing dissertation.

I have been doing a lot of reading on ICT (information and communication technologies) and education lately. What continually surprises is the disjunct between what research shows ICT in the classroom can do and what proponents claim it can do. I have found the One Laptop per Child project, which aims to distribute the MIT $100 laptop, so questionable in this respect. Here are three reasons I feel this way:

1. $100 is a lot of money. In many low-income countries educational expenditures are less than USD 20 per student per year. It is hard to justify spending 5 years of a student’s budget on a laptop. If the project reaches its goal of 100 million laptops, this will mean a total expenditure of roughly $10 billion dollars. Could this money be put to better uses?

2. Theory over evidence. The OLPC mission is based heavily on the theory of constructionism as described by Papert, Kay, and Negroponte. However, actual research on 1:1 student computing (i.e. providing each student with a laptop) really don’t show the kind of results predicted by OLPC.

3. The challenge is not inexpensive hardware. The root causes of poverty today are to be found in complex social, political, and cultural relationships on both micro and macro levels. Information access and education are the this way to address this, but these do not require large numbers of computers. In fact, my experience is that these goals are best served by programs initiated at the community level.

I do think that the $100 is an impressive and socially-conscious piece of engineering. I do like the use of open hardware and open source software. However, I really don’t like the unsubstantiated claims made in the name of education and poverty alleviation for the world’s poorest children.

I finally gave in and watched “The Secret” movie online a few nights ago. Essentially, this movie claims one can have/acheive/become anything one wants by using the “law of attraction.”  This entails visualizing yourself where you want to be and eliminating negative thoughts and doubts.  I found several things to like and several more to dislike about this The Secret: Read the rest of this entry »