One Laptop Per Child News

While we salivate at the idea of Christmas OLPC XO sales, other countries might not have the same One Laptop Per (Adult) Child dreams as your standard American geek. For example, China, an early OLPC dream gone sour, may still be ambivalent about XO technology if Shanghiist is right.

Starting off with the obvious need for cheap laptop options in a nation of rich coastal province, yet poor hinterlands where two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day, Mathew Seigal goes on to list a familiar reason behind OLPC resistance:

We're totally behind the charitable aims of Negroponte's project, but we're not sure you can turn children into geniuses just by throwing computer equipment at them. If that was the case then UK state-run schools would be teaming with little Einsteins. The UK spent billions on IT investment before they started to realise that they had to retrain teachers and reinvent learning methods.

He then goes on to list the many options that Chinese parents (and kids at heart) have in the affordable computing space. Options like:

Yellow Sheep River's Municator
Why should China rely on American do gooders when they can build their own cheap laptops? Yellow Sheep River has come up with a spec for a $150 Chinese Linux laptop with a 40 GB hard drive. It has Chinese Godson chips that offer similar performance to Pentium III chips that were around in the late nineties. This device also plugs into televisions. Read more here.

Dream Dragon
We don't know much about this product except what we read on this website: The "Dream Dragon" computer, being developed as a joint venture by the Jiangsu Menglan Group and China's Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), is currently set to cost about US$131. It utilizes a line of low cost central processing units (CPUs) named "Loongson" being developed by the ICT and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Like the Classmate and XO-1, it runs on Linux, though it is aimed at low income and rural Chinese students. See: this Speroforum post.

Sinomanic
Sinomanic is a Chinese branded laptop that will go on the market for $129 to $392.

As of this weekend, there is yet another cheap laptop competitor in the Chinese market - none other than Lenovo, arguably the original cheap Chinese PC computer manufacturer. The New York Times reports:

Lenovo Group Ltd. said Friday it will sell a basic personal computer aimed at China's vast but poor rural market and priced as low as $199.

Lenovo's announcement follows rival Dell Inc.'s bid to boost its presence in China's booming market with the unveiling in March of a low-cost personal computer meant for novice Chinese users.

So if China is awash in low-cost laptop options, is there room for an OLPC XO or even Intel's Classmate PC? After almost a year of living in China, I think so. For as Mathew concludes:

China may have 140 million Internet users, but it's going to take a few years and plenty of low cost initiatives to make communication technologies accessible to everyone in China.

And what better communication technology than everyone's favorite "$100 laptop" even is its upwards of $280 per laptop to deploy?

Tags: $100 Laptop | Chinese PC | Lenovo | Mathew Seigal | Municator | OLPC China | OLPC Sales | Sinomanic |

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I am Roland, from Switzerland, and I think that the officials of India, China and of other countries turning down OLPC started a discussion on the appropriateness of OLPC XO laptops and other technologies for children's education. What concerns me is that the opinions of subsequent discussions were on both sides rather superficial. Even though I am not an expert on education in developing countries, I would like to take up this discussion again hoping for better informed and more differentiating opinions on the Children's Machine XO.

I think it is necessary to distinguish different groups of countries with different situations of their education systems:

1. countries where the majority of kids have no access to schools because there are by far not enough of them.
2. countries where some (urban?) regions have almost sufficient number of schools (maybe with bad quality of education due to lack of teachers or lack of school material) and some other (rural?) regions have absolutely insufficient number of schools resulting in almost no education.
3. countries with sufficient number of schools almost everywhere but insufficient quality of education due to lack of teachers or school material.
4. countries with sufficient quality of general education everywhere but lacking computer education.

A) fits the pattern of really poor 3rd world countries C) and D) fit the pattern of the wealthier part of developing countries with emerging markets like some of the G20 developing countries. D) might also fit 1st world countries. B) can fit either 3rd world countries or emerging markets.

Then I set up the following Theory:

"In order to achieve a satisfactory, general and IT education by using OLPC infrastructure kids need not only XO's but also schools (buildings with rooms, servers, electricity etc) and tutoring by trained teachers. "

(The role of the teachers may change considerably but they will still be necessary to give direction, motivation and support.) While giving XO's to kids without schools and teachers is still much better than nothing, it will not allow to achieve a sufficient education that way because most kids left alone miss support, direction and dedication.

Field reports tell how smart kids were by putting computers to use without any tutoring. Although these kids astonishingly learned to find things in the internet without knowing English this will not allow them to gain a well rounded basic education on their own. If the above theory is true the following conclusions can be made:

1. countries in groups C) and D) can directly increase the quality of their education using the OLPC infrastructure. They have the least additional costs on top of it since they do not need to build more schools. These countries are also the most likely to be able to afford the purchase of OLPC infrastructure.
2. countries in group A) first need to build schools and employ teachers before they can make use of OLPC infrastructure. This group could so far not afford to build just those schools and therefore will be even less able to purchase OLPC equipment in addition to schools.
   
3. countries in group B) have still limited education budgets that do not allow to solve all education problems at once. So they have to choose the best option to spend their money on: 3a) they purchase OLPC equipment for the existing schools at the cost of not building more schools in undeveloped (rural) areas. This increases the quality of education in urban areas but not the number of educated kids in rural areas. 3b) they build schools in undeveloped areas at the cost of not having OLPC in either area. This does not increase the quality of education but the number of educated kids.

Summary: Under these circumstances it now looks understandable that countries in group B) see themselves forced to choose option 3b) i.e. to build schools rather than to buy XO's.

Now it comes also as no surprise that mainly emerging market countries [group C) and D)] are among the first to sign MOU's with OLPC. And it also explains the high interest of 1st world countries (group D) that could improve mainly their IT education at lowest possible cost compared to the purchase of commercial IT hardware.

In case of India and China their interest to finally develop and build their own school laptops rather than being dependent on foreign technology might be a further reason for their refusal of One Laptop Per Child.

Tags: Libya MOU | OLPC China | OLPC India | OLPC Infrastructure | Quality Education | Smart Kids | Trained Teachers |

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Skipping over the OLPC implementation plan realities for a moment, imagine a world where many students have a Children's Machine XO. A world described by Eben Moglen in his Plone Conference Keynote Address and transcribed by The NewsCloud Blog:

"What is journalism like when every village has a video camera and is on the net? …

What does it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide in some little corner of the Earth the United States government would prefer to ignore, that there's video all over the place all the time in every living room?

What does it mean when children around the world are networking with one another over the issues that concern them directly without intermediation, everybody to everybody?"

As part of the OLPC-enabled content overload, there would be an amazing opportunity to reshape the public discourse with an unprecedented level of inclusion.

Opportunity because One Laptop Per Child cannot guarantee such openness. As China proves with its successful censorship, yet denial of that very censorship, open technology does not equate to actual openness of expression.

Still, a solid OLPC cultural integration plan could go a long way to enabling such citizen journalism revolution. The ultimate crowd sourced CNN.

Imagining that CNN, what would you want to watch? What would you want to know? Why would you tune in to OLPC Nightly News?

Tags: Citizen Journalism | Crowd Sourcing | Eben Moglen | NewsCloud | OLPC Nightly News | Plone |

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From the very beginning, Nicholas Negroponte has put forth the idea that developing world governments would by the One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop CM1 2B1 XO Children's Machine. That the now $208 laptop purchase price would replace school book outlays in national budgets.

Our crunching of the education budget for Argentina and the whole national budget of Nigeria, two of the richer OLPC target countries disproves that notion quite easily - a one laptop per child computer purchase would bankrupt most of the populous developing world countries.

Tags: CIDA | China-Africa Cooperation Summit | OLPC Purchase | OLPC4Libya | One Laptop Per Child | USAID | United Nations | World Bank |

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Did you know that the One Laptop Per Child leadership believes that the OLPC laptop (CM1, maybe) is:

"not a cost reduced version of today's laptop, it's an entirely new approach to laptops"?

In her interview with BBC News' Digital Planet, One Laptop Per Child, Chief Technical Officer, Mary Lou Jepsen said that and more.

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Mary Lou Jepsen on BBC News Digital Planet | Digg This | Add to del.ico.us | Slashdot It