One Laptop Per Child – Revolution in Learning
by Dorota KlosWhen I stated learning how to write and read in 1989, back in Warsaw, Poland still under the communist regime there was no mention of computers at all. Basic numerical machines were used only in accounting and banking, but rarely available to the public. We have started by gathering our knowledge about the world from quite battered books, passed to us by older generations of pupils. Nobody then even dreamed that our life will be accompanied by the laptops and mobile phones, which now are an absolute requirement if one wants to exist in the current career and social world. Since my childhood I needed to undertake number of expensive private lessons to be proficient in operating those means, but that was a different reality then.
Only recently I have read about the Nicholas Negroponte of Media Lab MIT and their initiative to make sure that none of those technological and educational mistakes would be repeated in the future - it surprised me that this issue can be addressed quite easily if there is simply a will to do it.
One Laptop Per Child is a non-profit association dedicated to research to develop a low-cost, connected laptop. Its mission is to ensure that all school-aged children in the developing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning.
It has been initially presented to the wider community in November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis. Negroponte unveiled then a $100 laptop computer, The Children's Machine, designed for students in the developing world.
The program pilot has been run in 2001 in remote Cambodian village school. After succeeding that many other countries expressed their interest. In October 2007, Uruguay placed an order for 100,000 laptops, making Uruguay the first country to purchase a full order of laptops. An additional 200,000 more laptops should be ordered by 2009 to cover all public school children between 6 and 12 years old.
The following countries are currently participating in the project, or are receiving laptops from the Give One Get One program.
- Africa
- Ethiopia (G1G1 pilot + commitment for 50,000 laptops by Romano Prodi)
- Rwanda (G1G1 pilot)
- Americas
- Colombia (65,000 laptops bought by the State of Caldas)
- Haiti (G1G1 pilot)
- Mexico (50,000 laptops bought by billionaire Carlos Slim)
- Peru (270,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)
- United States of America (15,000 laptops bought by Birmingham, Alabama)
- Uruguay (100,000 laptops bought, now receiving laptops)
- Asia
- Afghanistan (G1G1 pilot)
- Cambodia (G1G1 pilot)
- Mongolia (G1G1 pilot, now receiving 10,000 laptops)
- Pacific
- Papua New Guinea (Gaire, Dreikikir)
More countries around the world are looking to participate or support the action.
The laptops are sold to governments, to be distributed through the ministries of education with the goal of distributing “one laptop per child”. The laptops will be loaned to students, similar to textbooks, and ultimately remain the property of the issuing local government. The laptops include an anti-theft system which requires laptops to make contact with a country specific server over a network or to a school-level server that was manually loaded with 21 day long cryptographically secured "leases" from a USB key for un-networked schools, or the laptops will be locked until a "lease" is provided to it. The operating system and software is localized to the languages of the participating countries.
OLPC is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat. Each company has donated two million dollars. Intel was amongst them in 2007, but unbelievably, the company has set itself up in competition with OLPC after a brief period of joining up with the project and putting an Intel representative on the OLPC board. Now Intel is trying to sell low-cost laptops into the regions where OLPC operates. It is called Classmate PC, but it is created purely for profit. Negroponte has called Intel's positioning 'shameless'. I am not surprised.
At the moment we are getting flooded with new smaller, cheaper and more mobile laptops, but it looks like so far only OLPC has presented the machine that would be easy to operate by school aged children. Colourful and self-contained is a convenient mixture between a toy, book and communications tool.
The project originally aimed for a price of $100. In May 2006, Negroponte told the Red Hat's annual user summit: “It is a floating price. We are a nonprofit organization. We have a target of $100 by 2008, but probably it will be $135, maybe $140. That is a start price, but what we have to do is with every release make it cheaper and cheaper— we are promising that the price will go down.”
OLPC's current laptop sells for $188, but the new version (XO-2) will cut costs by using a touch sensitive keyboard which can double as a second display.
The new XO-2 will be slimmer and lighter than the original version which has sold 600,000 units. The XO-2 is scheduled to start production in 2010 and is to cost $75. Using a virtual keyboard makes it customisable to any language or alphabet and will generate economies of scale in the manufacturing process. Also, the virtual keyboard allows it to be used for other purposes than as a keyboard. It can be viewed either vertically, as an e-book, or horizontally.
Also recently OLPC has negotiated a price of $3 a copy with Microsoft to put Windows XP in the XO computers. The XO-1 originally came out with Linux running on an AMD processor. The XO-2 will have the option of running Linux or XP.
So now: wouldn’t you want your child to use it? Or maybe you would like to take a look at it yourself? This useful “toy” that catches my eye and I will monitor its development in the future. For sure it is not free of mistakes and organisational problems, but can make a battered textbooks disappear.
Find out more about One Laptop Per Child initiative by following the link http://laptopfoundation.org/index.shtml.
Link to Give One Get One program: http://www.laptopgiving.org.
To listen to Nicholas Negroponte presenting the idea of OLPC at TED conference in 2006, please follow the link: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child.html.
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