Email Communications with Lesotho have VASTLY Improved. Yea!

 

Matlabe juggling two cell phones
at the bus station in Maseru

We've been working to improve email communications between the U.S. and the remote Ketane region of Lesotho since we started, but we kept running into huge obstacles.  The biggest problem has been that there are no internet signals in the area and the cell phone signals there are too weak to connect to with a computer. 

Last year, I bought a cell phone for our project leader, Matlabe Teba, that could be used to access the internet and send and receive emails, using those weak cell phone signals.  I used the phone almost daily while I was in the village to check my email. 

Unfortunately, I hogged the phone and didn't spend much time working with Matlabe to teach him how to use it.  My bad.  After I left, he ran into problems with the phone and didn't know how to resolve them.

He sought help from several people, but nobody seemed able to fix it, so we continued to have no email contact directly from the school.  To make matters worse, the clinic where he used to go to get on the internet, which is a long hike away, lost its signal.  The only way he could email us was to make a 2-day trek to an internet cafe in the district capitol, Mohale's Hoek, or Lesotho's capital, Maseru.

We had about given up hope of ever establishing good email contact when, a few weeks back, we started getting multiple emails from Matlabe that were being sent from the school and his home. 

I don't know what happened, but somehow he mastered the cell phone technology. 

It has been wonderful to carry on real-time back-and-forth conversations with him via email, to get timely answers to questions, and to be able to relay important information back and forth.   This is a huge breakthrough and is going to make our work so much easier now.

Better still, Matlabe seems to really enjoy these exchanges.  He has been sending multiple emails to me and to several of our volunteers.  He has even started teaching Sesotho via email to one of our directors. 

You should see the REALLY REALLY BIG SMILE on my face!

- Janissa

 

Teach Critical Thinking - Enable Problem Solving

It's Time to Compare Different Project Structures & Approaches

I think there is a great need to compare our approach with others to find out what works best and what techniques are most effective.

Here are some things I think should be compared when looking at the impact and effectiveness of computer projects in developing nations.

Computer Project Features

SPONSORING ORGANIZATION

• started by a large international organization like OLPC vs. started by a national government agency or national organization vs. started by a small autonomous nonprofit like L2L
• short-term involvement by volunteers vs. long-term involvement
• volunteers with little or no on-the-ground experience working in communities in developing nations vs. volunteers with some experience vs. volunteers with extensive experience

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION & INVOLVEMENT

little or no community preparation before deployment vs. extensive community organization and training prior to deployment
no individual or community investment before deployment vs. participant and comunity investment of time and money required before deployment

PROJECT STRUCTURE

designed by an organization outside the community vs. designed by participants
no explicit governing system vs. written governing documents and contracts

LAPTOP OWNERSHIP & RATIO

child ownership vs. school ownership with a laptop check-out system for home use vs. school ownership with no laptop use at home
1:1 laptop-to-child ratio vs. 1:4 laptop-to-child ratio

TRAINING

• no teacher training vs. one-time or short-term teacher training vs. periodic teacher training over an extended period vs. frequent or ongoing in-service teacher training
• no training of children by sponsoring organization vs. limited training of children by sponsor vs. frequent or extensive training of children by sponsor 

 

LOCAL CONDITIONS

There are a number of non-project factors to take into consideration because some deployemnt techniques may work better in one situation but not others. It would also be helpful to determine which if any factors can predict success of a computer project.  Here are some suggestions of variables to study:
 

COMMUNITY STRUCTURE

• urban vs. rural
large community vs. small community
easy access vs. difficult access
regular contact with people outside the community vs. infrequent to no contact with people outside the community
economic status

LOCAL LEADERSHIP

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION

EDUCATION SYSTEM

• qualifications, skills & abilities of teachers
• teachers' ability and willingness to learn new techniques
• class size
• teaching techniques
• teaching resources

INFRASTRUCTURE AVAILABLE

• on an electrical grid vs. not
• phone service vs. no phone service
• internet vs. no internet

Evaluating Impact & Effectiveness - Ethiopian Study

We are hoping to start collecting data for a quantitative evaluation of our project's impact and effectiveness in January 2013.  We will be looking at both short-term and long-term changes.

 

There was a study done of a small Ethiopian OLPC project by the University of Groningen, published in 2009.  It is called Does Technology Drive Social Change?.  (See the report at http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/ict4d/NinaandTom.pdf.) 

 

This report is not a rigorous presentation, but it does summarize general results of the study.  They compared 3 schools with XO laptops to 3 without.  They found:

• Most of the children used their laptops everyday at home and often at school. 
• They used them mostly to learn, much less to play or communicate.
• Their favorite activity, by far, was writing.
• They sometimes shared them with their parents and friends.
• After two years, social and educational changes were seen in the locations with laptops but only personal growth was seen in places without them.

Other results I found particularly interesting, given the remote rural location of our work, were:

• In the rural school, there was a slight increase in valuing the equal treatment of boys and girls. This was not seen in the city schools, which had much higher values for this even before the introduction of computers.
• The same was true for attendance.  In the rural school, the laptops greatly improved motivation to attend school, whereas city schools didn't see much change because motivation was already fairly high.

I like that this study used a control group that didn't have laptops for comparison.  We consider that a very important component of our evaluation.  I'd also like to see our project do much more in-depth analysis of impacts than they reported in the Ethiopian study.

See related L2L blog posts: Project Evaluation Meeting published on 11 July 2012 and Inquiry into Scientific Evaluation of L2L, with replies, published on 13 May 2011.

- Janissa

 

Looking for Funding for a Project Evaluation

Does anybody know of a foundation or organization(s) that might be interested in funding a rigorous, in-depth quantitative evaluation of our project's short-term and long-term impacts and the project's effectiveness?  We have an interested researcher, but we need funding. 

We think it's important to evaluate our work because we are using a different approach than One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and most other computer projects in developing nations.  (See our 13 May 2011 post for a summary of our approach.)

- Janissa

A Few Pictures - Laptops to Lesotho

Children use XO laptops
during L2L teacher training

Child carrying XO laptop home from school

A student's family and friends caught by the XO laptop camera

Top graduates who earned scholarships
to continue schooling beyond free
primary school, holding XO laptops,
with Principal & L2L Project Leader
Matlabe Teba.

Mafikeng, Ketane, Lesotho, birthplace of L2L

 

Computers can bring out hidden talents in some students. The boy in the foreground struggled to accomplish tasks other students grasped quickly. But when they had to do an activity with the XO laptops forming tesselations, he soared ahead while the other students floundered. When he finished the task well ahead of the rest, he jumped up and shouted triumphantly. 
Students must earn the right to take a laptop home after school.  This is done through a structured point system that rewards good behavior, academic effort and achievement, and volunteer service.  Students who qualify are allowed to check out laptops much like a library book.


Parents say not only has the children's behavior improved, but the students have begun teaching their siblings and parents how to use the computers.  Here the student's friends and family are caught peering into the laptop camera's lens.



Proud scholarship winners holding XO laptops donated by Laptops to Lesotho.
Retsepile Nthuba, second from the left, injured his eye while play-fighting with sticks. It went untreated for a month. When the community, school staff, and a Peace Corps Volunteer found out, they paid for surgery and related expenses. Ultimately, he lost the eye. Despite the trauma, he came back to take his exams and managed to get firsts in all subjects.



This is the remote mountain village of Mafikeng (Place of Rocks) where Nohana Primary School is located (seen here just above the left foreground rock outcrop).  Laptops to Lesotho got its start here.

 

 

Click on any photo to view an enlarged version.



XO-1.5 Laptop Donated by Contest Winner

Michelle F. of Florida won an XO-1.5 laptop through a General Mills promotion. When she contacted OLPC about donating it, they referred her to a website with a list of projects accepting donated XO laptops. She chose Laptops to Lesotho from among all the other projects listed. I’m not sure why she selected us, but I’m happy she did.

We’ll put her laptop to good use in Lesotho.  Because the XO-1.5 has more memory than the XO-1's that we normally distribute, we might use this laptop as a network server at Kokobe Primary School.

Thanks Michelle!

 - Janissa