It’s not the size of the tool, it’s what’s you do with it. No, I’m not going to treat you to some smut for your morning coffee, that’d be a little inappropriate, especially on an Easter Saturday, even though the smut industry has been a game changer in technological developments. But I’ve been thinking about technology again this week: specifically the fact that technology can, of course, do the most amazing things and I, for one, am not quite sure how I had ever found, or found out about, anything in the days before Google (I would google my car keys if I could). But just having the hardware bits in place won’t necessarily fix much.
Rwanda has busily been making a couple of Rwanda-type efficient, aspirational, ICT-savvy headlines: the government has plans to distribute 100,000 laptops to school children across the country. The laptops are provided by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) campaign, founded by MIT’s Nicholas Negronponte. When this initiative started out, it was a very ambitious venture with not much of an institutional framework: the expectation was to give every child a laptop, and that this would then automatically translate into all sorts of useful learning. Sniffing a whiff of competition, Intel then developed the Classmate, a similarly small, robust, energy-efficient laptop. Except Intel took a slightly different approach: They argued that just handing out the laptops to school children around the country would yield mostly - zilch. Zero. Nada. Their expectation was, realistically, that the laptops would, at best, be used for what most of us do a lot of the time anyway - faffing around on Facebook, emails, celebrity gossip, online dating, smut - and at worst get lost.
The big difference to the OLPC was that the Classmate was merely the hardware bit of a wider concept: Intel had also developed a teacher training to ensure that teachers know how to use the laptops as a learning tool, they had developed a curriculum and session plan for non-country specific topics, for their pilot projects, they had found partners to provide connectivity to the school, and had checked for electricity supplies. And a big cupboard to lock up the Classmates at the end of the day. That, I felt, was a more promising path to improving education. I had a similar reaction when I read the PS for Information, Dr Bitange Ndemo, expressing his wish that every school child in Kenya should have an e-reader to circumvent the problem of text book theft. It’s not the technology that matters here, it’s the system around it: Yes, e-readers would offer a fantastic platform for texts and teaching materials. But if text books are stolen on a worrying scale, then e-readers will walk out of schools faster than you can say e-learning, especially in an environment where vast sums of Free Primary Education money have vamoosed to some undisclosed location (I was comforted by a friend after an armed robbery in 2001 that my money hadn’t gone – it was just with someone else).
The same challenge applies elsewhere: On a corporate level, I’ve seen web agencies pull out the toolkit for an all-singing, all-dancing website in client pitches, and enthusiastically tell the client that yes, of course, look, there’d be a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ function, and a joke-a-day function, and multitude of other useful gadgets, too. It’s all there, have it! What fewer of them do, however, is sit the client down and ask them if they really want and need all the buttons that they could potentially have. And, importantly, point out that the technology is just the platform, but it needs someone to manage it: If you don’t have a newsletter editor, then you don’t need a newsletter button because the newsletter won’t write itself.
On a much larger scale, this topic was also reflected in the discussions around e-government and the Connected Government conference that was organised by the Kenya ICT Board this week. One discussion thread mulled over the need to roll out broadband services to deliver efficient e-government services – until someone pointed out that broadband was, of course, great for connectivity, but that alone would, guess what, fix nothing. E-government services do, above all, depend on the systems behind them, and not just necessarily the technical systems, but also how ministries and authorities are managed, how they deal with data, how data are opened up or used concurrently by other organizations. E-government isn’t, someone pointed out, a website (something that the Ministry of Immigration has not been able to provide this week). And there is limited benefit in putting a police abstract form online if I still need to take the form back to the police and get it signed and stamped, and obtain an official receipt. Well, I guess one benefit is that the police running out of forms won’t be a problem any longer – a worry in an environment where you usually need to physically fetch the police if you’d like to attend them to your accident.
Technology enables. It just doesn’t necessarily relieve you from using your brain. Now my car keys …
Republished with kind permission from the Star.
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