Web Chappell
Walter Bender of One Laptop per Child says that reports of the program's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
In January 2005, MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte announced the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, a utopian attempt to improve education in poor communities through the design and global distribution of cheap, low-power laptops. Eventually, Negroponte said, the laptop would sell for a hundred dollars. The program was conceived on a grand scale: Negroponte initially claimed that the laptop would not go into production until governments worldwide had placed a total of five million orders.
But the million-unit orders never materialized. To date, Peru is the program's largest customer by a large margin, having ordered about 270,000 laptops. So in November 2007, the laptop, dubbed the XO, went into production anyway, at a cost of roughly $188 a unit. At about the same time, OLPC began its holiday-season Give 1 Get 1 drive: any donor who contributed $399 to the project would receive a complimentary XO, and a second XO would be sent to a poor community.
Some observers considered the drive a desperate attempt to inject cash into a floundering endeavor. Then, last week, Intel walked away from a tempestuous six-month partnership with OLPC, scotching the planned unveiling of an Intel version of the XO at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The main point of contention appears to have been Intel's attempts to sell its own cheap laptop, the Classmate PC, to governments that had already made provisional commitments to OLPC. OLPC claims that Intel violated a nondisparagement clause in its contract; Intel claims that the clause bound only the company's officers, not its sales force. The New York Times greeted the news with a headline announcing "The Demise of One Laptop per Child."
Earlier this week, Technology Review senior editor Larry Hardesty sat down with Walter Bender, OLPC's president for software and content, to discuss both Intel's withdrawal and the overall health of the initiative.
Technology Review: What effect does Intel's departure have on the program?
Walter Bender: Zero. Intel had contributed nothing. They contributed nothing to our current product, the XO. They contributed nothing to our learning models. They contributed nothing to the software. So their going away, so far, is a wash for us.
TR: Isn't this just the latest blow to the program?
WB: After what?
TR: After large contracts not materializing. Originally, wasn't there a minimum requirement for a government order?
WB: Originally, there was. We certainly made some mistakes along the way. And one mistake was to be a little bit too rigid in our model. Part of it was just based on some false assumptions on our part in terms of what kind of volume we needed to get things launched. And we thought that going to a few large orders was the best way to jump-start things, to prime the pump.
Some of us, our instinct was quite different. And that was to try to get a broad base and try to make this a grassroots, bottom-up launch instead of a top-down launch. Now, it turns out that we have both. And really, what we're after is any good idea. So on the one hand, we actually do have some large orders. Maybe not as large as we had originally hoped for, but we're going to do a quarter of a million laptops just in Peru. And we're doing something on a similar scale in Uruguay.
Those are examples of top-down. But then there's a lot of bottom-up. We just did about 100,000 bottom-up machines that we're going to be distributing through the "give" part of the Give 1 Get 1 program.
Charles Kane thinks industry partnerships will boost the laptop's marketability.
The philanthropic effort dubbed the $100 Laptop has not met its grand initial goals. But its first deployment, in Peru, may turn skeptics into believers.
The cofounder of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to make $100 laptops available to poor children throughout the world. The next few months will be critical in determining whether the One Laptop per Child project succeeds.
Education is the key for everything
The one laptop project is great. I hope I can donate English training software, currently I am working on a one million computers for one million children of western China project. Any thing I make that benefits the world is free. Intel needs more corporate social responsibility training at the highest levels, directors and share holders.
The OLPC program just suffered another major set back here in Brazil. Intel's local partner was able to offer educational laptops as low as US$ 300,00 to the federal educational program. What's really wrong in this OLPC is the Betamax marketing strategy they're failing to implement. This won't be a world standard for anything, unless they allow it to be something good for the world. No matter what. Poor business men in Africa need laptops as much as sailors in Amazonia. Why digital educate only the children? Let people build the laptop paying a small royalty. And wait for the upgrades.
Mr. Bender mentions, “We need an economist to help us figure this one out.”
Several such experts on the economics of the poor on the OLPC board may help. One such resource could be 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus (microloans). His new book out on social business, “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism” was recently featured on public TV.
See the Charlie Rose PBS interview: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1986204406774837194
"Technology will solve problems" = Utopian thinking
For about a century now, naive 1st world idealists have been trying to help 3rd world countries by bringing them technology.
The thinking always went along the lines of "If we can only bring them some 'railways', many of their problems will be solved, and then they will be able to take care of themselves."
As time has gone by, the 'railways' in this scheme have been changed to 'telephone lines', 'highways', 'schools', 'hospitals'...and lately to the 'Internet', 'cell phones'...and now to 'laptops'.
What people miss is this: most Americans in the 1950s had a much better quality of life, than most 3rd worlders have today. And the America of the '50s had a lot less technology than the 3rd world has today.
The idealists are missing the 'cause and effect' connection here. It is not the technology that makes a society advanced. It is its values. The technology development is only the result, or the effect, of good civilizational values.
And if you put this in reverse: you can deliver a lot of technology to a bantustan...it will still remain a bantustan.
OLPC should show us the vision
The most important point of the OLPC project should be to provide the world with a method of learning using exclusively XO computers. Although the word "$100 laptop" has some impact to our computer industry, the cost itself is a secondary issue. Now the time for Prof. Seymour Papert and his successors to show their vision to push OLPC up to the next stage.
Intel do themselves no favours
by trying to be too clever legally - the 'sales people aren't company officers defence' is too shabby for words.
Whatever your views on the OLPC one cannot question the organisations motivation and vision; more than can be said of the likes of Intel and others involved in spoiling manoeuvres.
I have work with communication development and served as president of Panaftel. I would like to discuss method and criterion for selecting countries to participate in the one laptop for child. A country Liberia in its progressive development would welcome this project one lap top.Please contact me for more input and contact information.
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Wildgorilla
4 Comments
N. Negroponte & OLPC team are the greatest educators in history
N. Negroponte and his OLPC team will go down in history as the greatest educators of all time. My suggestion to the OLPC is to get out of the computer business and run it as an educational organization managing licenses, because the creative part of the OLPC is almost done: creating a new market and profit center that giant corporations can fight over, drop prices, & improve the OLPC using the country model OLPC has created.
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gabrielg01
450 Comments
Re: N. Negroponte & OLPC team are the greatest educators in history
..."the greatest educators of all time"...aren't you exaggerating a little bit? :))
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