Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
This letter from former OLPC security director Ivan Krstic is well worth reading. Krstic lays out the history of Nick Negroponte's "constructionist" educational failures, the managerial issues that have doomed deployment of the OLPC laptops to client countries, and the basic philosophical problems that continue to dog the machine's Sugar UI system.
There's also some tug-of-war in there about the conflicts between Linux, Windows, and evangelism on both sides, but I don't think that's nearly as interesting: it's fodder for the watchers on the sidelines, but not (entirely) why this project has failed.
As one of the people who predicted, early on, that it would indeed fail dramatically, I won't deny that it's a little satisfying. But mainly it's just sad. Poor countries paid good money for these machines. They bought into the Negroponte's hype. Well-meaning Americans did the same, hoping to benefit the lesser-developed nations through the Get-One-Give-One program. Those resources could have been used more effectively, and now they won't be.
It's worth pointing out, just to be clear, that the problem here was not technological. I don't think anyone doubted that the laptops could be built, or that they would be very cool toys. The OLPC has been a failure because it literally assumed that given the technology, learning would follow. It assumed that the laptops could form their own self-healing infrastructure, separate from any existing institutions. No need for a network: we've got mesh wifi! No need for power: we've got hand-cranked generators! No need for support: we're open-source!
No need for teachers: the kids will teach themselves.
But teaching is not something that comes from a box. It's part of a larger system, an institution built out of people. It's really hard work. You have to work hard to teach badly, and even harder to teach well. You can teach using technology. But technology on its own, as a general rule, is not in and of itself an education.
I didn't predict these exact failures when I wrote about the project a couple years ago. I was much more inclined to think in terms of capacity development. But in many ways, I'd argue that the lack of attention to capacity on the project's part is intertwined with its lack of attention to other basic social and pedagogical issues. Just as OLPC wasn't interested in building electrical or informational infrastructure, they weren't really interested in the workings of an actual classroom, or the problems of equipment distribution. Just as they simply assumed that their technology would make capacity development irrelevant, they figured that deployment and education would simply self-organize under the force of the OLPC's philosophical mandate.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn't particularly care about your philosophical mandate--just ask Marx.
12:03 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/development/technology x link x 4 comments
Today is tax day, as you probably know. I knew that it would bite me hard, but hopefully--seeing as how I'm no longer working full-time at the World Bank--I can look forward to a much simpler, more withheld tax experience in the future.
Yesterday I called the tax office at the Bank just to check on something. "I've heard that you pay half my self-employment tax," I said. "Is that true?" "Not for you," the accountant said. "We only pay that for term and open-ended employees." It is always nice to have a reminder that even while I worked 40+ hours a week for the Bank, on paper I was working for myself--and now I get to pay for it.
I suspect that the reason that the Bank decides to just drop the tax burden on its low-level employees is that, as I've noted before, most employees of the World Bank do not pay taxes, since they're working outside their home countries for an international organization. Perhaps it's just a sense of fairness: why do paperwork for Americans when the rest of the staff needs no such help? The fact that our situations really are dissimilar does not seem to have entered the equation.
Still, I don't particularly want to gripe about how the Bank treats its employees, even the American ones, because they did pay me very well. I suppose that's worth some hassle every quarter. It could be worse: for some time, employees living elsewhere were paid on fixed salaries in dollars, which was not terribly comfortable when the currency began to fall relative to the Euro. Or at least, that's what I told myself when I sat down every few months to write out what seems like a mammoth check for my "self-employed" day job.
15:50 x Thomas x /bank/experience/hr x link x 0 comments
Friday was my last day working at the World Bank. Unless they bring me back in for consulting, that is, but that really doesn't count. Starting Monday, I'll be working at Congressional Quarterly as their Multimedia Producer--a position which is nebulous but promising. Because CQ is understandably cautious about appearances, there will probably be little or no political content here in the future. Please, let's keep the sighs of relief to a minimum.
I will miss the Bank. Its stated mission--"Our dream is a world free from poverty"--lent every workday an energy and determination that you don't get working for the bottom line. And the institution is filled with smart, driven people. Many of them come from the developing countries in which the Bank works, and they feel strongly about the cause of poverty. It has often been a pleasure to work alongside the staff, particularly in the Multimedia Center, which makes it a priority to look ahead and remain open to new ideas and perspectives.
At the same time, it would be a lie to say that the Bank doesn't have issues. I certainly don't agree with all of its policies, and in my three years there, I've seen dysfunctional units, poorly-run projects, and a fair share of bureacracy. I don't want to go into detail, but I will say that these problems are all the more frustrating because of the Bank's lofty goals. We have a responsibility to do better. And I'm sure that the World Bank will do so.
Because when it comes down to it, I think we need the Bank. The problems of development aren't going anywhere, and it can be tremendously helpful for a single organization to act as hub for those efforts. Not to mention the Bank's strength as a knowledge-sharing and learning institution, which I personally think is its strongest asset. I may be leaving the Bank, but I'll be watching it with hope and anticipation.
In any case, this space may be a little quiet for a while as I settle into my new position and get the production process straightened out. As soon as I have something to show for it, I'll post links here.
14:34 x Thomas x /bank/events/staff x link x 1 comment
Great Moments in Management Consultants
"So pretend that you're a team at Chapeaux Hat company. What does Chapeaux mean? Right, it means 'hat.' So that's kind of a double entendre."
[for literally any situation at all]
"The example I like to use here is the iPod."
"'Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.' It was Abraham Lincoln who said that."
"And I'm sure that you all are very aware of budget. You're a bank, after all."
15:35 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 1 comment
Sometimes, especially as we've been holding job interviews, people ask me what I enjoy most about working at the World Bank. Is it the feeling of satisfaction that comes from working at a non-profit, albeit a huge and controversial institution? Is it the multicultural environment filled with brilliant and interesting people? Is it the wide-ranging nature of the issues that we get to present to the world? Is it the compensation package? Is it the big, shiny building?
Well, I say, those are all very nice. But I also really like the chocolate. Because on days like today, when our colleagues from offices in Europe or Latin America drop in at headquarters for meetings or training, they usually bring chocolate from around the world to share with the rest of us.
I'm getting spoiled.
14:59 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 0 comments
Today at work, we started discussing combining the World Bank's B-SPAN video archive with YouTube. This is a big step for the organization, and it may not happen while I'm still at the Bank. But I think it's a much-needed initiative, and I'm glad to see it taking place.
Right now, B-SPAN technically has two different kinds of clientele. We serve the wider Internet, of course, and our external viewers are about who you would think, as far as we can tell: academics and policy thinkers in Europe and North America. But the other side of the equation is the content for B-SPAN--event managers actually pay us out of their budget to tape and host their presentations. It wasn't always like that. B-SPAN used to be free for Bank teams, which meant that it had a lot more internal clients, but was also a bit unfocused and hard to justify within our vice presidency. About two and a half years ago, the decision was made to charge for B-SPAN services, and since then we've almost managed to recover our costs each year. Since the B-SPAN team tends to be made up of versatile young people who can also act as video (or in my case, audio) producers, it's a pretty good value for WBI.
However, charging event managers for hosting and writing costs did slow the flood of prospective clients a bit. And for the last year, we've started to take a hard look at exactly what we do. Online video services like YouTube or BrightCove have raised the question of why anyone would pay for B-SPAN. Our RealMedia solution, while a Bank standard (for whatever reason), has never been helpful for reaching a wide audience. And while we've tried to add features like RSS and podcasting to the site to stay modern, we still lag on items like e-mailing features, comments, and video embedding.
Now, I still think B-SPAN is a great value for the Bank. We provide a service that External Affairs so far has not addressed, and we try to invite the world into the institution in an honest way--something that for all its talk about transparency, still troubles the Bank. And for what we do--taping, indexing, annotation, and creating a rich content database--I think our prices are very reasonable. So the challenge we're taking on is to continue that richness, while using YouTube or similar solutions as a back end. In effect, there will be two ways to access B-SPAN videos: you can continue to use our worldbank.org/bspan front page, where you'll be able to sort the videos by categories like topic or presenter, or you can find us on YouTube searches like anyone else.
It will take a lot of work--our current production chain will have to adapt, and we'll have to scrape down the archives to convert our old metadata and Realmedia files into new formats--but I think once the growing pains are over, we'll have improved our service, and opened it up to our audience in a more useful and interactive way.
23:17 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
It is a little funny to watch the OLPC team run through their "world-changing laptop" schtick in the keynote presentation this morning, followed two sessions later by a Yahoo! team that points out that American students are as wired as anyone in the entire world, and yet one-third of them don't graduate from high school.
But if they just had a "constructionist" "school-in-a-box" with cute green plastic antennae...
Right.
12:02 x Thomas x /bank/analysis/development/technology x link x 1 comment
This month, technically for the August 1st podcast but let's call it July anyway, we dipped into the archives to highlight one of the events that's always on our top ten most-viewed. Our new coordinator/writer is also working on a new description for its main entry. What is it?
There's an old joke that Economics is the only field in which two people can win the Nobel prize for saying the exact opposite thing. For evidence that economic disagreements can be spirited, especially in development, look no further than this entry from the B-SPAN archives. After former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz published his controversial book, Globalization and its Discontents, which expressed his own discontent with the International Monetary Fund, he and IMF Research Director Ken Rogoff squared off in a 2002 panel discussion on its claims. The resulting debate has become one of the most relevant on the role of international institutions in promoting globalization.
You can listen to the dueling economists here.
20:52 x Thomas x /bank/events/bspan x link x 0 comments
Designing Learning Interventions that Last
Now that they're finally done, I've added one of the Learning Week podcasts to the audio section of my portfolio. It features Andrew Law, Head of BBC Worldwide Interactive Learning, and he talks about the impact of different formats and accessible media production on educational programs.
Although I'm not adding them to the portfolio, anyone who's interested in e-learning might also want to listen to the podcasts of David Kolb and Lorin Anderson. Kolb is one of the earliest proponents for experiential learning, and talks about its history and interaction with learning styles. Although he's arguably more important than Law, he required a lot more editing (sometimes more than 50 cuts per minute) to make his speech fully fluent. He still sounds a little odd sometimes, and I didn't want that to be a portfolio piece. Anderson was one of the academics who worked on an elaborate revision of Bloom's taxonomy in 2001. He discusses how the learning taxonomy is used for education, and also how to evaluate learning programs using these tools. It's slightly more obscure than Law's interview, but still interesting given the current emphasis on testing in education.
13:41 x Thomas x /bank/experience/personal x link x 0 comments
I have 26 days of leave accumulated over my soon-to-end two-year extended term at the Bank. 26 days--that's just slightly more than five work-weeks. And when I transition to a temporary short-term contract next week, the Bank will buy that leave back. Thoughts:
14:38 x Thomas x /bank/experience/hr x link x 1 comment
