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For quite some time I have been looking at reasons why some countries do better than others. Within these countries regardless of how well they do, you still find people on extreme ends of the economic and social scale. Some countries are fortunate to have more wealth to offset the overall level poverty, while others’ resources are overwhelmed by extreme poverty.

During this process I have come to notice several things that seems to be consistent in the two worlds. Things that others seems to have a better understanding of and are either able to control them or at least have found a way to effectively navigate their territory, while others are just trying to put out fires using any means possible without getting a chance to prevent their reoccurrence. Among these things are:

· Education
· Law enforcement and safety
· Food security
· Health
It is no secret that Under normal circumstances, every society works with only a limited amount of resources. That society’s survival is totally dependent on how they deal with the resources they have at their disposal. Thus to ensure everybody’s survival and the society’s long-term sustainability, such society has to create laws by which every member should abide. These laws then forms a legal framework that effectively regulate public resource distribution.

Another critical component is education, which is not necessarily classroom education, this ranges from knowledge of one’s environment. This include learning to distinguish right from wrong, preserving the society’s culture, acknowledging similarities and differences among the society’s members and learning how to respect and cope with one another. On top of that you add classroom education which normally serve as a progressive vehicle to future development and economic prosperity.

Any society with the ability to navigate the last two areas (education and respect for the rule of law), soon realizes what the society need to stay alive. Instead of fighting for the limited resources (which is common in poor societies), progressive societies come together and find ways to produce more of what is needed. Instead of politicking and painting ugly pictures of one another, progressive societies eagerly set aside their differences, embrace each other’s strength in an effort to push for a common cause with full knowledge that they are safer and stronger being stuck together than separated.

While poor societies are just living to get by, progressive societies are exploring ways to lead life to the fullest. Progressive societies survive on their own terms, while poor societies look to other societies for leadership and only to resent and blame other societies for their inability to control or at least navigate their own environment.

A progressive societies understand that you need a strong labor force to shoulder the responsibility of getting everybody from point A to point B. The health of every member is critical in the whole navigation process. If you have too many members with ill health, you would require twice the amount of energy and size in labor force to move everybody from point A to B and soon those doing the heavy lifting will be in the same boat as everybody else. Now you have a crippled society.

Poor and unprogressive societies have a weak support system, the fact that everybody is aware that they are operating on limited resources is likely to trigger a stampede to access the limited resources. Because the support system is weak, laws are easily broken. Those tasked with enforcing laws start looking out for themselves, leaving everybody else tired and hopeless. Soon they start entertaining the idea of using force and that gives birth to chaos, forcing everybody to fend for themselves which in the process puts everybody at risk and more so for the most vulnerable members of that society. At this point every rule, every sense of responsibility, respect for the dignity of other members get thrown out the window.

The strongest members of that society give themselves a false sense of security, for all they care, all they have to do is outrun the slowest camper when the wolf comes chasing. Soon they run out of campers to outrun, the wolf catches up with them and it is all the progressive societies’ fault. After all where were they when all this happened?

Filed under: Education | 1 Comment »

The state and quality of public education systems in many countries leave a lot to be desired. In many developing nations, the numbers associated with failing students are growing larger every year. Teachers are under constant pressure to produce results, while governments continue to allocate bigger budgets to education with little or no improvement in the outcome.

Year after year, calls to revamp public education systems are growing; not just in one specific country, but in many countries developing and developed alike. As an attempt to improve the situation some governments are beginning to engage what is being termed ICT implementation in public education; part of which is to provide basic computer skills to educators and then getting these educators to use the technology as a teaching and learning tool . The second part would then be to deploy computers in classrooms to support the learning environment.

To some people this may sound like a great idea, after all it is what every country is trying to do if they have not already done so; so the implication is that it must have the potential to produce extra-ordinary results. As one educator put it to me “Europeans are doing it, so do Americans and maybe the Chinese too. Somehow it must be working, right?” Well… I disagree for the reasons I will state bellow.

First of all, using ICT to support a flawed system does not produce better results. Many public school systems (regardless of the claims of learner-centered education) are not really centered around the students learning needs, teachers are showing up to teach and get on with the day (sometimes, not by their own fault, but because of the flaws in the system. These flaws are often presented in the forms of lack of quality control and not properly equipping schools with tools to deliver student-centered education). Thus implementing ICT in such education systems may make things a little easier for administrators, but will do very little for students. Students will still heavily depend on their teachers and textbooks as knowledge sources, well that is if they have them; given that there is a shortage of high quality or highly specialized teachers in many countries. In addition to that, most developing nations are being hit with complaints about lack of teaching and learning resources.

How often do we hear or see more than three children sharing a textbook in our schools? Dumping computers in the classrooms won’t help, because how they are used in teaching and learning is actually more important than their mere accessibility. Additionally, many people working in the public education sector are stuck

with the old mentality of one school competing against another, thus they tend to tightly guard the information they have so that others can not get it. They use these tactics to gain competitive advantage (in other words, what you have is a bunch of people with big egos competing against each other at the expense of students and on the tax-payer’s dime). Thus, even with ICT implementation, you are still going to have too many small un-integrated systems with severely incompatible data/information in them and provide no value to the nation as a whole.

Part of the flaw in the school system is that there is little investment in the operations of the system. In other words, the system does not run like a well oiled machine because much of the investment in the education sector is invested in the people and other components that are of little or no value to how we teach and learn, instead of investing in a working system, a system that ensure the same results regardless of who performs the function.

As an example, if you had a good teacher X at school x who for years had been producing exceptional results, it is only fair to expect that at some point that effort has to be rewarded. In many countries such rewards come in the form of promotions. Now, once teacher X is promoted, the chance of getting somebody who can do the job just like teacher X is very slim, after all, who on earth has information or a good understanding of how teacher X did things? Had we invested in the system instead of individuals, we would have captured teacher X’s working habits and use that knowledge to replicate his/her results even long after he/she had been gone.

Proof of this is in the volunteer program in many developing countries, school systems in developing nations are getting a constant flow of volunteers whose whole purpose is to boost capacity for the local workforce. Even after several years of working with such people, many institutions are still failing to replicate their results after they have left, thus starting from scratch with every group that shows up.

Now imagine this for a solution:

Somebody deploys a computer system, this system tracks everything that goes on in the school from administrative part to lesson planning and delivery. Teachers record their observation from the class on how students are demonstrating their understanding of a certain concept and so forth. . Every stakeholder (parents, teachers, community volunteers, students) have access to the software system, although what they can see varies depending on permissions they have.

The whole thing does not end there, the application allow students to teach other students concepts that they have mastered, in real-time!. There is no limitation to geographical area, if a student in one town, country or even continent sees the need to educate other students, there should be no reason why they can not have such an opportunity. In addition to that, engaged parents have the same access and ability to develop and distribute learning material for their children.

The premise to this is that, if these people are expected to help their children with homework, why not tap into the knowledge of how they are going around it? Students are exposed to extensive collection of learning material developed by many other people including professionals in different fields not just their teachers.

Now remember Mr. Y who left the teaching profession for a better paying job in the private sector, even though his passion was teaching? He used to be a good teacher until he took up that job, why not allow Mr. Y to once in a while get into the system and help the learners who are struggling, regardless of their geographical location. Teachers can share teaching materials, ask for help from other teachers and get the response immediately, instead of hitchhiking to the nearest town for help.

While all these fantastic things are happening in the teaching and learning environment, at any given time, administrators can get into the system, check how schools in their districts are doing and offer to help them as soon as they can. They can get on the system, get all the information they need to know before a school visit, thus in the process saving them a lot of time that they spend at schools digging for problem areas. In some cases cut off unnecessary trips to schools that do not need help, save the tax payers fuel costs and the whole cost of the trip.

The same administrator can check the state of every government property deployed to any given school and should students be dropping out of school, even the highest authority will immediately know and address the situation as soon as it occur. If you know what I am getting at, it is enforcing accountability and letting people own their roles. In cases where such functions are not performed, individuals paid and tasked with performing those roles must be held accountable.

The same application tracks down budget allocation for every school, enabling the government who, usually is the biggest investor in public education to track how every dime allocated is spend, which in the process improves transparency.

Smooth system isn’t it? Notice the difference between the approaches? The difference here is not supplementing a flawed system, but slowly replacing it by making ICT not a supporting tool, but “The learning environment”.

Does it work in real life? Yes, but all this can only happen under one condition, that all users/stakeholders be honest and report information as accurately as possible. Thus the investment will then be in making sure that such a learning environment is accessible to all, whether they are in urban or rural areas. Can you imagine, how power of a society this will produce? Can you imagine how fast such a machine, providing access to high quality knowledge and led by not only by teachers, but by the whole professional community; will turn our mostly consumer population to producers of goods and services?

Filed under: Education | 6 Comments »