One Laptop Per Child News

Inside Constructivism

Constructivism gets its name from "Constructing Knowledge" in the students mind. Constructivism has its roots in Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, where it is noted that the subject has no direct access to external reality. The problem with pure theoretical Constructivism:

Constructing and learning together

"Since constructivism rejects any direct verification of knowledge by comparing the constructed model with the outside world, its most important issue is how the subject can choose between different constructions to select the "right one".

Without such a selection criterion, constructivism would lapse into absolute relativism: the assumption that any model is as adequate as any other. The two most often used criteria are coherence, agreement between the different cognitive patterns within an individual's brain, and consensus, agreement between the different cognitive patterns of different individuals." Francis Heylighen

The flaws in theoretical Constructivism do not mean that it is worthless. It just has to be refashioned for use in real life. This would be the applied version of Constructivism. Once you infuse Constructivism with some realness, it has some valid points. To understand why the current schools don't work, you have to understand their origin...

"Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled." - Gatto, NYC teacher of the year.

The one to focus on is Edward Lee Thorndike: His work on animal behavior and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for modern educational psychology. Note that he worked on animals, and treated children as animals.

A theory called "law of effect": a principle of psychology described by Edward Thorndike. It holds that responses to stimuli that produce a satisfying or pleasant state of affairs in a particular situation are more likely to occur again in the situation. Conversely, responses that produce a discomforting, annoying or unpleasant effect are less likely to occur again in the situation. This is where we get the A = "good child" F= "bad child". There are two main problems:

1. Student apathy and massive drop-out rate
2. Thorndike's ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, takes you places that you really don't want to go; Orwellian totalitarianism.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow, in the early 1950's, gave education a new goal. The goal was for people to reach their full potential; this he called "Self-Actualization". A former student of Maslow's - Barbara Clark, an educator, noticed that students that were off the charts on the Benet tests (IQ tests) were failing in their classes. The reason was that the traditional education system was set up to "Program" people, and gifted children put up a mental block to stop it from affecting them.

Her solution was the first instance of Constructivism backed by the Government. The reasons she could do it were:

1. Only 2% of the student body is gifted.
2. It would be implemented within the framework of Special Education.

However, something is better than nothing. To advocate a head on challenge to the education system would have resulted in her being crushed by the prevailing education system.

Philosophy of cybernetics

AI is predicated on the presumption that knowledge is a commodity that can be stored inside of a machine, and that the application of such stored knowledge to the real world constitutes intelligence. Only within such a "realist" view of the world can, for example, semantic networks and rule-based expert systems appear to be a route to intelligent machines.

Cybernetics in contrast has evolved from a "constructivist" view of the world where objectivity derives from shared agreement about meaning, and where information (or intelligence for that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity stored in a computer. These differences are not merely semantic in character, but rather determine fundamentally the source and direction of research performed from a cybernetic, versus an AI, stance.

Limits to knowing

In working to derive functional models common to all systems, early cybernetic researchers quickly realized that their "science of observed systems" cannot be divorced from "a science of observing systems" - because it is we who observes.

The cybernetic approach is centrally concerned with this unavoidable limitation of what we can know: our own subjectivity. In this way cybernetics is aptly called "applied epistemology". At minimum, its utility is the production of useful descriptions, and, specifically, descriptions that include the observer in the description.

Origins of "cybernetics"

The term itself began its rise to popularity in 1947 when Norbert Wiener used it to name a discipline apart from, but touching upon, such established disciplines as electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology, anthropology, and psychology. Wiener needed a name for their new discipline, and they adapted a Greek word meaning "the art of steering" (the term "governor" derives from the same root).

OLPC's descendence from Special Educational

There have been programs that have implemented the cybernetics and construction combination. It has evolved far beyond the more obvious combinations.

• Biofeedback centered learning (Barbara Clark) students learning with computerized biofeedback
• Visual Spatial learning (Alexandra Golon) students learn via computer graphics
• Brain based learning (Linda Williams) students with computerized brain activity monitoring

It should be noted that most people are not aware of such programs due to the deals made between Clark, the Teachers Unions, and the Department of Education. It was this Clark doctrine that alternative forms of education would be tolerated and allowed to exist only if it was agreed to stay within the confines of special education.

Thus, it would be unfair to consider that such alternatives "just didn't catch on". It ignores the reality that such researchers and programs had to remain under the radar.

The OLPC project would be first time such teaching methods and the fruits of decades of researcher would be made available to a large population...any large population. They are not new or experimental, but rather suppressed.

Tags: Barbara Clark | Biofeedback | Constructivism | Cybernetics | Francis Heylighen | Norbert Wiener | Robert Lane |

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Being the geek that I am, I got a copy of Mark Warschauer's latest book, Laptops and Literacy, having been a huge fan of his insightful commentary on the "digital divide" in Technology and Social Inclusion.

You might remember Mark from his New York Times article which he clarified here at OLPCNews, as well as his recent posting of a case study-like look at the Intel Classmate at the Newport Heights Elementary in Newport Beach, California.

Laptops and Literacy Overview

Laptops and Literacy is a different kind of book. Where Technology and Social Inclusion was more of a framework or theoretical book, L&L focuses on case studies of one-to-one laptop studies in the United States, focusing on some school-based programs in California and the statewide initiative in Maine which has often been help up by the OLPC Foundation as a perfect example of the power of the one laptop per child model.

Mark stays away from the OLPC project in his books. Indeed, in all of L&L, he only mentioned OLPC in passing, excluding it from his US-centric study as "unsuitable to the U.S. Market" (p.152) (to be fair, the book went to print long before Alabama got interested), and obviously before the recent announcement of OLPC America. Regardless, he drives home some important points for the OLPC project by revealing what makes a 1:1 laptop program thrive (or not) in the U.S.

Maine provides the "flagship" 1:1 laptop program for the U.S. with a statewide mandate providing laptops to all seventh graders for six years this fall (and to all eighth graders for 5, and was extended to 31 of 176 high schools in 2004). Nevertheless, Warschauer and his team of graduates are the only ones with independent research on the Maine program.

Warschauer also draws heavily from 1:1 programs in California, where the average socio-economic stats (SES) is lower in the schools he users than the Maine schools. The California schools also have much higher diversity and language challenges ("Maine is 99% White and English speaking, California is a majority-minority state ... [and] has poorly funded schools with large class sizes" (p.30)). The California 1:1 programs are individual school projects, often with the financial support of the parents, ending in both laptop- and non-laptop classes of the same material.

One to One Computing Results

Maine test scores have remained flat through their 1:1 laptop program, and there has been no evidence that laptop program improve reading or writing skills (or harm them). This can be interpreted as technology not adding anything to education, or as standardized tests failing to measure the skills learned using technology.

Laptop programs do improve students' abilities to deal with information and to collaborate, but fail to fulfill their promise of increased equality between high- and low-SES schools:

Simply put, low-SES students and school that served them were often less prepared than higher-SES students and schools to take advantage of the full capability of laptops. Students in these schools tended to have fewer language and literacy skills, and this limited what they could accomplish with laptops. [...]

For all these reasons, the implementation of laptop programs at the low-SES schools was more challenging, and the outcomes more mixed.[...] These differences between low- and high-SES schools run against one of the common rationales of laptop programs, repeated to us many times by teachers and administrators in this study: Laptop programs help overcome educational inequality.

Yet such differences are consistent with what has occurred following other reforms involving technology or media, which though targeted at low-income populations are often best exploited by the more privileged sectors that can leverage their preexisting educational, social and cultural resources. This outcome became famous in connection with the Sesame Street educational television show (Cook et al., 1975) and since has come to be known as the Sesame Street effect" (Attewell & Battle, 1999 p. 1).

Warschauer stops short of concluding that laptops increase the inequalities between low- and high-SES schools from a lack of quantitative and solid outcome data. He makes it clear that he believes computers will play a near-ubiquitous role in education in the future, unlike previous attempts to inject media technology into education, which have remained at the edges (TV, radio, and film for example). This inclusion of computers will not cause education reform by itself; "Laptops are not a magic bullet to solve our educational challenges" (p. 153).

Laptops as "Amplifying" tools

The examples and case studies woven throughout the book remind us that the laptops are tool, very powerful, incredible, "amplifying" tools, embedded into curricula and used in conjunction with other resources by a teacher to improve their student's education.

Laptops are not by themselves a full education system, and their usage depends heavily on engaged teachers, school administration, and sufficient support structures;

"In one case, at Freedom Middle School in California, a number of the laptops were stolen or damaged; and lacking replacement funds, the one-to-one program ended." (p.150 ).

Another example from California, Mr. Molina's laptop-enabled classes at River Elementary discussed at length for its innovation (p 43-48) fell apart when Mr. Molina moved to another school; after a year of unuse, they were redistributed by the school district to his new school for him to resume using.

I also posted on this over at my blog, JonCamfield.com

Tags: 1:1 | Intel Classmate | Laptops and Literacy | Maine | Mark Warschauer | OLPC America | One to One Computing |

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I am Edward Cherlin and I think the OLPC program is astonishing in its goals, even if some doubt its ability to perform. It proposes to educate up to a billion children with the latest in technology and information, and to some degree their families as well.

OLPC aims to add several percent to annual economic growth in the developing countries, with spillovers to the developed countries that will have the opportunity to supply technology and we don't even know what else. (This is not officially stated, but I infer it from the goal of ending poverty. If anybody wants, I can run the numbers in a future article.)

The XO will provide more access to health information than we could dream of a few years ago. Of course, we don't yet know who will make that information available in local languages, nor who will access what parts of it and put it to use. The XO will let the children and their communities talk together all over the world, if they want to, and who knows what that might lead to?

XO Collaboration

But today, I am voting for a different aspect of the program as potentially the most astonishing. The XO laptop software is set up for collaboration. Several children can sign on to the same instance of a Sugar activity, including paint, music, write, browse, and program. In some cases, many children--entire classrooms or entire schools. And there are games, of course. There have been several two-player games in various XO software builds, including a Tetris clone. Whenever you complete a line of blocks, so that it disappears from your screen, your opponent's game speeds up.

Anyway, we have seen other collaborative applications here and there, such as Google Documents. Several people can edit a spreadsheet or other document online at the same time. Before that, we had features such as Track Changes and Merge Changes in Microsoft Word and other ways to share edits in other software. The idea has been in the air for a long time, and there is no doubt that we will see much more of it.

Collaboration as Cheating

The problem for collaboration on the XO in schools is that in many educational systems, "collaboration" is defined as "cheating". Children do it anyway, at every level from that defined as innocuous, like asking for help understanding the textbook, to getting someone else to write your papers, or in the worst case buying papers from the Internet.

See the Harry Potter books for examples of British schoolchildren's point of view on the issue. Harry and Ron write horrible drafts for their assignments, and Hermione cleans them up, substantially rewriting a lot of what they give her. But she won't write papers for them from scratch.

The problem with treating collaboration as cheating is that collaboration is precisely what children need to learn in order to succeed in business, science, government or anything else when they grow up and leave school.

Many people in the visual arts, music, and literature can create solo, but they need partners to handle many other functions, including the business side of arranging concerts, selling original works, or publishing. In fact, just about everybody needs a vast multitude of people doing interconnected parts of the work of the world. This is why Adam Smith began his classic work, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" with an account of the division of labor in a pin factory, and made the claim that the division of labor is the foundation of all wealth in civilized societies.

Collaboration Discussion

So what are we going to do about collaboration as cheating? Not a lot, actually, other than perhaps facilitating the discussion. This is going to be an issue between students, teachers, families, and society in many countries. We can't tell them what they want to do. Those of us who have factual information about what works, including historical insight, will be able to make a few useful suggestions (like reading Adam Smith rather than what lesser thinkers say about him), while the usual armchair analysts will pontificate as always.

As H. L. Mencken observed, "For every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious--and wrong." My money is on the children. Where's yours?

Tags: Adam Smith | Edward Cherlin | Harry Potter | OLPC Collaboration | Sugar Activity | Track Changes |

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I am Roxana Bassi, an ICT Specialist at the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI).

At GeSCI, we have developed some guidelines as a reference guide for Ministries of Education (MoE) when considering the selection and purchase of low cost computing devices (hardware), as one of a number of solutions intended to meet educational (i.e. teaching and learning) and/or e-administration objectives.

Given the drive by many Ministries to effectively deploy appropriate information and communication technologies (ICT) tools/devices into the educational sector, careful consideration has to be given to the choice of device deployed, as an inappropriate choice can limit the educational possibilities.

Furthermore, many of these devices have only been developed and tested in the past couple of years and in some cases still need to prove their "value-add" in terms of their ability to support the sector in meeting educational objectives. As the investment costs are substantial, a careful analysis of the options must be undertaken, to determine, in particular, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for such an investment.

Tags: Decision Toolkit | Educational Tool | GeSCI | Low Cost Computing Devices | MoE | Roxana Bassi | TCO | Value Add |

Low-cost Computing Comparison Toolkit for Ministers of Education | Comment (2) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Steve Cisler, and in 2005 I wrote the following piece which was published in the Journal of Community Informatics.

It reflected some of my own experiences in the life cycles of ICT projects in developing countries (and some in places like Silicon Valley, too). As the pressures on the One Laptop Per Child project increase and sales projections are reduced, I hope the XO-1 computer won't follow the path of the Simputer.

I'd hope a well-balanced movie about the One Laptop Per Child project would not end as this one does.

A short movie about ICT

Tags: Community Informatics | Information and Communication Technologies | OLPC XO | Simputer | Steve Cisler |

Short Movie About Information & Communication Technologies | Comment (7) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Recently, Fake Steve Jobs had a blistering commentary on One laptop Per Child. He encapsulated the reality of an entire year's worth of OLPC fantasy in 675 concise words of biting satire. Starting with over-the-top sarcasm, he pointed out the major flaws of the OLPC leadership in developing the XO-1 laptop:

Frankly I'm shocked to see these guys having problems. I mean, a brand new hardware design, a new screen technology, a customized Linux operating system, a one-off user interface, and the customers are the poorest nations in the world, …and the whole project will be run by woolly academics who have never even worked in a real company let alone run one. What could possibly go wrong?

But FSJ saved his most stinging critique for the press corps that fawned all over Nicholas Negroponte and his band of merry men. The very people the public trusts to do the due diligence on new ideas and new initiatives.

Tags: Dr. Negroponte | Fake Steve Jobs | Freetards | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC News | One Laptop Per Child Dream |

One Fake Steve Jobs Sarcasm Per Academia Laptop Project | Comment (25) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I have been critical of OLPC in this column previously but I want to express now that I support the ultimate goal of the program. And while I do not believe that One Laptop Per Child is appropriate for all countries and I have serious reservations about their implementation model, I would like to provide some recommendations to policy makers, based on research and my own consulting experience around the world, that I believe will help make OLPC a success in those countries that choose to adopt it. First, I believe along with the OLPC program that all students, as well as a nation's society and economy more generally, can benefit from an educational system that prepares students to be problem solvers, knowledge creators, and self-learners.

This is a profoundly different educational goal from that of most of the world's education systems that aspire (if that is the appropriate word) to produce students who are proficient at recalling established facts and accurately applying standard procedures.

While such a goal may have been sufficient (if that, too, is the appropriate word) for simpler times and for a manufacture-based economy built on standard procedures and unskilled or semi-skilled labor, the world today is a much different place that calls for a fundamental transformation in educational systems.

The set of social, economic, and environmental challenges that confront us today are significantly more complex than in previous decades and requires an education system that can develop a nation's citizenry and workforce to its full creative and productive capacity.

While I share the goal of the OLPC, it is not at all clear to me that giving each child a computer is the only or even best way of accomplishing this goal. Indeed, there is significant evidence that merely distributing computers in schools will have little effect on education.

Tags: Constructionist Learning | OLPC Implementation | OLPC Policy | Robert Kozma | School Pedagogy | XO Hardware |

OLPC and Policy Recommendations | Comment (8) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I've been thinking about this question for a while, and have been working on a draft for an article (aiming for an academic journal) for the last few months - in fact, since November of 2006, shortly after Walter Bender presented at the "Silicon Valley Challenge Summit" I helped organize at Santa Clara University where he showed us an early production unit fresh off the assembly plant.

In the comments thread to one of Bob Kozma's postings here ("OLPC and Economic Development"), Julio Cartaya argued that OLPC deserved recognition for bringing the world's attention to the plight of hundreds of millions of poor people around the world (I'm paraphrasing).

I agree with the sentiment, but what I'd like to do in this posting is present an excerpt where I state one reason from an educational technology perspective in support of why OLPC should succeed. (In subsequent postings I will offer more reasons, before switching to arguments about why it may (or should) fail.

Tags: AlphaSmart | Constructivism | Julio Cartaya | OLPC Success | Pedro Hernández Ramos | eMate |

Why Should OLPC Succeed? | Comment (18) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Nicholas Negroponte likes to point out that the OLPC project is "about learning, not about laptops."

So the Harvard International Review and OLPC News take a close look at that value proposition. It is a point worth pondering, for the OLPC is drawing serious money, most famously with Libya committing USD 250 million for 1.2 million computers.

Michael Diodato, writing for the HIR finds the OLPC technology disappointing - the much touted "mesh network" is unlikely to be useful in rural settings where people may not be within range of each other, and certainly not within range of an internet connection; the crank is unlikely to provide sufficient power for ordinary use, including use of the wireless network; and the restricted configuration requires proprietary software with limited applicability elsewhere.

It is not technology, however, that kills the OLPC's value proposition - unfortunately for Negroponte, the HIR finds the OLPC short even on learning. Amongst the practical problems mentioned are the challenges of distributing - equitably - 1.2 million computers, and the cost - to families - of keeping the laptop in and their child out of work: "Considering the opportunity cost of keeping the laptop and the option selling it for approximately $100, the family is likely to choose the latter."

Tags: Dweep Chanana | Harvard International Review | Learning Hypothesis | OLPC News | OLPC Testing |

Critical Views on OLPC: Testing the Learning Hypothesis | Comment (19) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Prior to becoming an independent consultant, advising government and non-governmental agencies and corporations on the use of technology to support developing countries, I was a professor and research scientist for thirty years.

I did a considerable amount of research on the impact of technology on teaching and learning. I also developed educational software for the Macintosh. Consequently, I can attest that empirical data are the sin qua non of both scientific research and engineering design.

Scientists posit their theories as testable hypotheses and conduct experiments to validate their propositions. Engineers design artifacts to achieve goals or solve problems. They test out these designs on a small scale and refine them before implementing on a large scale. Collecting test data is a standard practices in both fields.

But apparently Professor Negroponte doesn't follow these standard engineering or scientific practices, at least when it comes to OLPC. Without the benefit of a single study in support of their efficacy, Professor Negroponte feels that developing nations should spend hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase millions of XO computers to hand out to its students.

Tags: $100 Laptop | Andrew Zucker | Macintosh | OLPC Pilot Testing | Professor Negroponte | Robert Kozma |

One Laptop Per Child and Premature Scaling | Comment (44) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Nicolas Negroponte’s claim that One Laptop Per Child is an education project, not a laptop project is well known and often discussed. What is less well known is his claim that OLPC is about eliminating poverty:

"But what One Laptop Per Child is, it's about eliminating poverty. And that's the reason we do it, that's why everybody who's involved in the project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple.

That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the environment, they all involve education. In some cases, it could be just with education and in no case is it ever without education. And we particularly focus on primary education."

As I mentioned in my last posting, OLPC and Education Reform, I am Robert B. Kozma, Ph.D., an international consultant on technology in service of developing countries. I have just returned from Kenya where I had an opportunity to reflect on this claim that OLPC eliminating poverty.

For the past two years, I have been working with the Education Committee in Sauri, a set of rural villages of about 5,500 people in western Kenya. I have served as a pro bono (or should that be pro-Bono) consultant to the Committee members as they formulated their plans for a community learning resource center. I have also supported their efforts by donating a dairy cow to the school lunch program, providing scholarships, and purchasing equipment and supplies for the center, including books, a digital camera, and a laptop.

Tags: Community Radio | Economic Development | Kenya | Robert B. Kozma | Sauri | Telecenters | Uganda |

OLPC and Economic Development | Comment (28) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Social inclusion has been one of the foremost issues in the minds of many ICT4D people. The advantages of using computers and the Internet as a mechanism for making governments and institutions readily available to the citizen, and to enhance the potential of consumers to act together, are always a significant component of the reasons given to invest in technology.

But social inclusion means also some degree of socialization. To include all citizens demands that those that haven't been able to (or haven't been allowed to) exercise their collective citizenship find the means to do that, but first of all, that are aware that they have the rights and duties that come with participation in a polity, in a nation as a whole. This demands a very specific form of socialization.

Historically, the most important resource for this kind of socialization has been the school system. Even more so, in many developing countries with confusing situations of race, ethnicity and class, and with structural limitations to social mobility, schools are the only significant support of the "imagined community" as discussed by Benedict Anderson.

Tags: Benedict Anderson | ICT4D | Imagined Community | OLPC | OLPC Socialization | Social Inclusion |

Building One Laptop Per Socialized Child | Comment (24) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Like your editor, I believe that the OLPC initiative is, quite simply, the greatest philanthropic idea there has ever been. Since I am now about to be highly critical of it, let me make that plain from the outset.

I have read OLPC News, and its archives, for several months now.. And what I feel is a growing sense of disbelief, as one would-be participant after another arrives on the scene. I am looking, it appears to me, at a school-yard battle over a bag of sweets.

I dare say it was inevitable that this scuffle would develop; we are after all looking at a projected target population of, well, it depends upon which enormous figures you're looking at today, but around five billion potential users? Nobody wants to be left out of the photographs, so we have Mr Gates climbing on board, and Intel, and the Linux Lads, and no doubt Apple any moment now.

Mine is bigger than yours, and all that.

It is all very understandable. But, people, it's not very edifying, is it?

Tags: Constructionism | Lettice | Linux Lads | Martin Woodhouse | OLPC News | OLPC XO | Yo-Yo Generator |

OLPC XO? A Great Idea, But I Have a Better One | Comment (18) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Teachers do tend to entrench themselves through unions. That's one of the truths of life. Not only in the developed world, but even more so in the developing world. Teachers may be underpaid, disrespected and with little if any prospect of getting better conditions. But they all are quite aware of their importance, of the role they play and of the need to keep working together for advancement, professional, financial and personal.

Even more, they tend to be quite radicalized. Being working-class by income but intellectuals by aspiration, teachers tend to have been easily converted to, or at least quite comfortable with, radical, left-wing political movements, with many unions in developing countries dominated even today by Marxist-inspired radical parties, even some of what the Brits call the Loony Left.

So, they are stakeholders. They have a lot to loose, and very little to gain, if a project like the OLPC XO is implemented in their countries. They may be able to shift the emphasis of the project, from a student-centered one, to a teacher-, homework- and structured lessons-centric endeavor.

Tags: Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla | Education is Progress | Loony Left | OLPC Education | Tabaré Vásquez |

Teachers Are One Laptop Per Child Stakeholders | Comment (9) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

I am Edward Cherlin and I have a fairly extensive draft for a book with the tentative title "The MIT $100 Laptop: 101 Uses for a Computer You Can't Get", or possibly "Ending Poverty for Fun and Profit", and I have been talking to a possible publisher.

There are actually a few more than 101 sections, but we can deal with that. I plan to put the profits from the book into my non-profit, Earth Treasury, and use them to support further anti-poverty initiatives.

You don't have to read the book to get the main point: Anybody can join in the OLPC project, whether by contributing to the development of the XO laptop and its content, or by working on the consequences of the project, such as teaching e-commerce skills to the children who will shortly be online, connecting with them via e-mail, chat, VoIP or whatever, or just watching the videos they will soon be uploading to YouTube and telling your friends about the good ones. It's up to you how much you get involved.

Tags: $100 Laptop | Earth Treasury | Ebook | Edward Cherlin | MIT Laptop | OLPC News | OLPC Project |

Edward Cherlin's One Laptop Per Child Book Proposal | Comment (6) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It

Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla Lima, Perú - November 16, 2005

It is one of the ideas that normally catch the attention of a lot of people looking for the next big thing, or sincerely concerned with alleviating world poverty, or indeed both. Why not provide the world children with a really inexpensive laptop?

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, by the Media Lab's resident guru Nicholas Negroponte, will surely become the darling of nerds, geeks and policy wonks around the world, and will turn into the next wonder to illuminate the sincere hopes for development and poverty-busting that the First World cradles.

It will also be a folly, and a very expensive one, that will create more problems than it will solve.

I really don't care about the nitty-gritty: it can be stolen, it can malfunction, it can be forgotten at home. It may or should be replaced by second-hand computers, or perhaps telecenters should be given preference instead of this approach. It certainly may turn into the biggest source of kickbacks many of our poor, corruption-ridden governments of the Third World would see. But those aren't the real issues.

Tags: $100 Laptop | Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla | Googling | IMing | Nicholas Negroponte | OLPC | One Laptop Per Child | Telecenter |

One Laptop Per Child: A Sub-Hundred Dollar Folly | Comment (8) | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It