But the problems continued to cascade. The solid-state storage system of the computer was sturdy, but could only handle a gigabyte of data. Nor could the XO-1 be connected with the Internet. While the machine was sturdy, the idea that it could be casually dropped was a fantasy. These were the first netbooks, which were both profitable and something consumers in the Third World wanted and could afford. OLPC did manage to sell , laptops by the end of But the Great Recession stalled plans for the XO Negroponte occasionally came up with bold plans, including one in where he declared he would drop tablets out of helicopters loaded with books as a way to encourage children to read.
Sugar Labs continues as a nonprofit and continues to develop inexpensive software that can be bundled into computers.
Moreover, the evidence that the computers OLPC provided helped children do better in school is, at best, ambiguous. The lesson the One Laptop Per Child story offers donors is that flashy solutions are often not the best ones.
Far better to give the poor things they need and want—including clean water and good schools—than invest in technology that may not work and may not help the poor advance in school and in life. Martin, Glad to see this update. So weird I was just wondering about this product the other day. Anyway yes fund a local teacher, build a well with local labor, buy toilets. While the overall message of this piece, that imposed tech philanthropy often gets it wrong, The Verge article, and this piece, have some errors of fact and understanding of the program and the tech.
My open source program has taught hundreds of college students to develop educational games on the original hardware and I used one for years as my on-the-road email machine before I got a network. The peer-to-peer networking was tricky to be sure but worked. If I recall correctly, 3 million devices were shipped, Uruguay, Used it country-wide. My students software got , downloads for some of their work, and due to the sneaker net effect of peer to peer and pass along sharing, which is how much of the SW was distributed actually occurred, was probably used by many more.
The intent of the laptops was to provide a platform that could help fill the role of library, science lab, art and music room etc, that one room school houses lacked. As one of the first, if not the first, attempts of its kind, there are ripple effects as well. The hardware and software being open source influenced many such programs down the road and the Open Source community as well. Your email address will not be published. Share on Facebook. Share on Twitter. Share via email.
Likewise, debugging a program is the closest one can come to learning learning. Every child of any means in the developed world has access to a computer at home and usually his or her own, with music, DVD, plus interactive and rich media to do anything from learning languages to play games. Making these same resources available to the roughly one-billion other children, who do not have such access, has seemed ridiculously daunting, but is no longer.
This is simply because the high costs of laptops has been artificial and perpetuated, not innate. The intransigence of the problems of formal education in the face of conventional solutions, combined with pervasive poverty and the need for high-quality lifelong learning for inclusion in the global knowledge-based economy, warrants new thinking.
The same digital technology that has enabled an unparalleled growth of knowledge, when combined with new methodologies for learning, can unleash the latent learning potential of the children of world. Poor children lack opportunity, not capacity for learning. By providing laptops to every child without cost to the child, we bring the poor child the same opportunities for learning that wealthy families bring to their children.
Consider immunization by analogy. Inoculating a few people here and there has no meaning. Scale is needed. Likewise with laptops. And furthermore, each child has to own his or her own machine and view it not as government property, but as a personal medium, cherished like a bicycle. The child is more confident, has greater self-esteem, and is more entrepreneurial than children without this tool. Building computer labs in schools was an earlier approach—and perhaps the only one possible in the past.
Such labs cater to a formal classroom setting. Today, additional approaches are possible. A laptop program can reach every child within the context of informal settings, which are the only ones available to many children. A nationwide roll out of personal machines can capture many more hours per day than school itself, not to mention night time, weekends and holidays. This will mobilize children. In addition it has significant spill-over effect on the entire family where a child has the OLPC.
Of the many values of scale, the foremost is the child as teacher. Peer-to-peer learning is one of the best ways to leverage children.
The reach of such collaboration can go far beyond national borders and, in the longer term, lead to the bigger goals of world peace and understanding. To this end, OLPC is launching on three continents and in at least six countries.
Any parent whose child has a laptop at home has almost undoubtedly asked that child for help. This by no means destroys the parent-child relationship. On the contrary, it enhances it. A bond to learning is formed between the child and parent at home. The teacher-child relationship can and will likewise benefit. With sufficient self-confidence, teachers can learn from children without risk of unraveling the fabric of education—quite the contrary, improving it.
Children must not only own the laptop, but take it home. In so doing the whole family will benefit. The role of the child in society changes; it is a more productive role. The child is not the object of change but the agent of change. Children need more—not fewer—features than high-end laptops. Notably, they need three things unique to their condition: low power, sunlight readability, and automatic connectivity.
Low power is key. Most children do not have electricity at home. Therefore, a laptop needs to run on both human power and long-life batteries. Human power, whether cranking or other gestures, must run a laptop at least 1-to one minute of cranking provides ten minutes of use. In the case of batteries, a hour life is need. Laptops cannot be plugged in at desks in classrooms.
Even the richest school does not provide power to each desk. Sunlight-readable displays are important for outdoor use as well as power conservation. This should be achieved as an option to traditional backlighting, not as a replacement to it. Both are needed. Furthermore, during night-time use, the laptop itself needs to be the light source for the surrounding area.
Instead, the laptops collectively have to make a network automatically, without child or teacher intervention. Roughly children should be able to share a single point of back haul to the Internet. While this may be modest bandwidth, among themselves and with a school server they must have very broadband connections.
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