Are we headed for a 1:1 future?

The big news a few weeks ago was that after their snarky face-off on 60 Minutes in May, Intel and OLPC decided to "make up" and have Intel sit on the board of the OLPC/XO program (see news here).

The bigger question remains how the learning process utilized with millions of kids is going to change once there is a true 1:1 ratio of computers to students. It's easy for a national ministry of education spokesperson to say they're going to come up with $100 million to buy the hardware for their kids, it's quite another to describe exactly what the brave new world of 21st Century learning will look like.

Here are some key things that need to be in place for this to actually yield the outcomes we want (instead of outfitting 100 million students in developing countries with expensive toys):

1. A definitive (or at least confident) articulation of teaching methodology that takes into account the presence of the machine. Beyond saying "Kid's take to technology like bears to honey", not that many people have articulated a clear system for successfully incorporating laptops into the teaching process for any teacher (not just techno-enthusiasts). Large scale experiments (like the four-plus-year-old Maine project) have been strangely silent about what they've learned about specific teaching methods associated with the laptops, beyond the anecdotal and self-congratulatory. In some cases, large-scale efforts have failed or been scrapped for political reasons or lack of observable results. Even the research cited at the cheerleading "Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation" is heavy on the "perceptions of participants" and light on the recommendations for scientifically-based, sustainable methodological models.

2. A system that will seamlessly allow teachers to manage the flow of content, student work, assessment data, etc. This will need to be an easy-to-use, inexpensive, web-based platform for learning and teaching. It can't be a "course management" platform like so many so-called "Learning Management Systems" are. Rather, it must deliver the ease of use of iTunes and the robust data-driven management tools of a Salesforce.com or NetSuite.

3. Curriculum content. I've said in previous posts that there will always be a place for premium content. Nowhere will that be more manifest than the places that try to scale up a 1:1 laptop initiative. My prediction: the more students they try to put on it, the more the teachers, parents and administrators will call for high quality content. And solutions that count on "wiki" style social content development will not deliver what these participants want -- material that will engage students, guide them in an individualized way through the material, be responsive to data trails left by previous work by the same student (and by work of similar students), etc. This is not the kind of stuff that will be developed by a dedicated 6th grade teacher in her spare time.

I am a true believer that 1:1 initiatives can work. But we've only scratched the surface about how.

wjk