Ideal conditions for any education evaluation are extremely difficult to come by. The IDB response to Berk's post is worth reading: http://blogs.iadb.org/desarrolloefectivo_en/2012/...

The Mobiles for Education (mEducation) Alliance will launch its website very soon, which will contain a projects map users can browse & contribute to.
You can sign up now at the url www.meducationalliance.org and follow @m__eudcation on twitter to receive notice when the whole site goes live and to keep informed about events, including the upcoming mEducation Alliance Symposium, to be held Sept. 5 - 7 in Washington D.C. The call for proposals for this event is available on the mEducation site, and is open for submissions through May 25.

All good points. On evaluation in Uruguay, while I'm not half as familiar with the program as you, I think there are plenty of opportunities still possible - it's just that the baseline is wholly different than what it was before saturation. Now that saturation is the reality, the treatment and control groups can actually go down into the nitty gritty of the variables of XO use and integration at play for each classroom, each school, each district, etc.
This could mean finding out which types of community support and continuing professional development programs work best towards achieving program objectives, or also in some cases using the saturated baseline as a means to evaluate and compare various pieces of Sugar against objectives in a carefully designed and controlled experiment.
There are really quite a lot of details to explore and delve into further after saturation, for Uruguay and likely for many of the other programs which this great list will identify. Thanks for getting it going!

Oscar, further to your point #3, I'm curious: now that Peru and DIGETE have invested so many resources into the OLPC program, do you see any areas ripe for further spending (some of which might be of low cost relative to total spent on OLPC so far)? I ask because it seems you are saying that the impacts of the program are yet to be seen or realized, but you also mention the threats from withdrawn political support, so it is unclear to me whether you think Peru would be on track to see long-term gains from the program or is in danger of losing the chance for long-term positive impact entirely.

I'm wondering about infrastructure, further training (whether directly for teachers or for accompanied support), software development, improved curriculum integration guides, etc.). -- Are there any activities you could identify which would be the best opportunities for Peru to invest in now with a view towards capitalizing on the investment in XOs already made?

I agree that the gains in general cognitive skill are something to look into further. Five months is noteworthy, and even more so considering cognitive development is often an exponential growth curve. The fact that academic Math and Language academic achievement were not found to have been significantly affected by the program should not be used to dampen or disregard the effects found in general cognitive skills. The research cited in the report to this point further emphasizes the reasoning:

From p. 2 "...computer use can increase performance in cognitive tests and the strong
documented link among scores in these tests and important later outcomes such as school
achievement and job performance (Maynard, Subrahmanyam and Greenfied, 2005; Malamud
and Pop-Eleches, 2011; Neisser et al., 1996)."

This is a great article; thank you for sharing your experiences and insights.

I couldn't help but be reminded of Papert's 1993 follow-up to Mindstorms, "The Children's Machine" when you mention the problems encountered in use of computer labs (your point #7). Whatever your opinion of Papert, he makes a great point there about the consequences of placing and using technologies in isolation from other curriculum subjects, which resonates with much of what I think you're saying.

The 2009 PISA results ("Students Online") also point to the critical need for developing pedagogical practices that truly leverage ICTs to support learning *across* disciplines, which is something being incorporated widely into definitions of digital literacy.

And so I am curious about how this pedagogical integration process is going in South -- do the schools you work with have organized fora for sharing best practices / lessons learned with each other (e.g. do they share & connect through their Moodle work, or through their MXit profiles)? Or perhaps the sharing occurs even less formally? Or is that dissemination role something that SchoolNet takes on as a central hub?

The "School of One" in New York highlights so many of the possibilities related to "smart" teaching with ICT. This school is a fascinating example of the issues raised here by Wayan and I would encourage anyone interested to read the evaluation of their model that EDC produced in 2009.

The students' individualized instruction plans are produced by a "Learning Algorithm" that the teachers plug with data. This in turn leads the teachers to come up with individualized "playlists" of lessons that meet the students' abilities and interests at the needed pace.

Although this model would not work in many places, it does provide important details on the resources and inputs required for cutting edge integration of ICTs and truly "smart" teaching.

It makes sense to me that the cost of eReaders / equipped tablets will be lower than textbook costs, and continue to fall, but I am not convinced that it would be the best resource allocation decision for many countries. The teacher-training programs in developing countries I have witnessed and worked with are, in my experience, very costly and often only minimally effective at best. A large part of this relates to the constraints of cost that lead to mid-career trainings on new technologies / techniques that are a week or shorter in length. If you have details and budgets for trainings that have proven cost effective and feasible, I would love to see them.

I would say then that when looking at the SROI, I would want to examine each particular MoE's options for resource allocation. If teacher quality is particularly low, I don't see that eReaders or similar interventions would be the most effective investment. I think you would ensure a more sustained impact (and also SROI) through an increased focus on teacher quality in many countries (see education economists Levin, Hanushek and Carnoy), prior to a saturating the system with eReaders. I also think it would be a dangerous assumption to expect teachers and students to "update the OERs", as you say.

In sum I would ask; what is the added benefit of 10,000 new e-texts over 10 old textbooks if reading comprehension and critical thinking are absent in the classroom?

But again, if you have the fine details on the teacher training accompanying the calculation you present, I would love to see it. I am sure this could work in some places, but for many of the least developed I think it would be a gross misuse of funds.

Interesting calculation. Does the $25 bn annually cover anything beyond the $75 tablet for each student? To equate the provision of an eReader or equipped tablet with the provision of "an education" seems a rather long and dangerous extrapolation.

After reading the latest post on the OLPC project in Canada, it made me wonder more broadly -- Have you ever come across reviews or feedback from teachers that suggested they were mostly satisfied with the PD / training they received prior to an ICT intervention?

A graduate professor of mine once said that teachers will *always* claim that the training was insufficient or misdirected. I am not sure how true that is, but it does lead me to wonder: how do you (or someone in a position similar to yours at CEA) draw the line between ineffective PD / training and ineffective implementation by the teachers? Have you ever felt that the PD / training programs were unfairly used as a scapegoat for other problems with program implementation? How do you encourage teachers to continue their development and conviviality throughout the year? As they share their experiences and observations with each other, have you found that some platforms and formats for documenting best practices are better than others?