Local Educators Applying for Grant

One thing I am very proud of about our project is the work we have done mentoring and training local project leaders and educators so they can eventually take complete control of every aspect of the project and expand it to other schools all on their own.



Top to bottom:  Fortunate Gunzo, L2L volunteer, Tsela
Mapeshoane, Project Manager, and Locadia Tenene,
Nohana Primary School teacher, work on writing grants
at a workshop in Mohale's Hoek, Lesotho, 2011.

(Photos by Cecily Salmon)

Last year, we arranged for two project leaders, two teachers, and a project volunteer to take a 2-day grant-writing workshop.  (Our project participants were sponsored at the workshop by the Maseru Rotary Club.)

A few months later, with the help of  Peace Corps Volunteer Delia Helie, they wrote a grant application for the purchase of 44 XO laptops to start a program at another school, Kokobe Primary School.  The grant was successful and awarded to Laptops to Lesotho by an anonymous international foundation we have been working closely with.

We're now approaching the deadline for new grant applications for 2013.  Project Leader Matlabe Teba is working again with the teachers to write a grant to expand the solar-powered electrical system at their school, Nohana Primary School.  This will accommodate the 50 Dell laptops donated earlier this year by Pueblo West High School.

Project Leader Matlabe Teba (second from left) attending grant-writing
workshop in September 2011.

The foundation representative has indicated that she will accept the grant application directly from Nohana Primary School this time, rather than going through L2L, as long as L2L vets the application first.  This is because Matlabe has showed great reliability, integrity, and now has mastered email communications directly from the school so he can send regular reports to the foundation.

One huge step closer to our goal!

--  Janissa


 

Volunteer Needed to Design Evaluation Methodologies

We're looking for a volunteer evaluation consultant. 

We need to select and customize survey techniques to evaluate our project in Lesotho.  In the short-term, we want to look at changes in academic achievement and computer skills and evaluate supplemental materials used with the school curriculum.  (We've got an independent researcher working on evaluating long-term educational, social, economic, health, and cultural changes.)

Is there anyone out there who has knowledge and experience designing evaluation methodologies who would like to work with Laptops to Lesotho between now and January? 



Nohana Primary School, Laptops to Lesotho

We'd like to start collecting some data in January when we have a group of volunteers going to Lesotho for several weeks.  We've defined our evaualtion goals and the basic data we want to collect.  Now we need to get down to the nitty-gritty and develop detailed methodologies.

Can you help or know someone who could?

 

-- Janissa

 

 

 



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