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So why the huge popularity of the $100 laptop project -- which is heralded everywhere, from NPR to ABC? For one, economics still favor the laptop. Most cell phones that could rival the power of a PC are still high-end products. More importantly, though, the laptop is a better tool for engaging youths in educational material.
"Cell phones make a lot of sense from a certain standpoint," says John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation advocacy group. "They're great for calling and for a certain kind of e-mail. But if you want to experience cyberspace in any meaningful way you can't do it with a cell phone."
Seymour Papert, professor emeritus at MIT and a $100 laptop team member who's developing educational initiatives for the machine, balks at the idea of using cell phones. "If we think of technology as purely access to information, and education as access to information, you might start making a case for the cell phone," he says. "But education is not just access to information. It's doing things, making things. You can't program on a cell phone."
Furthermore, says Papert, once children become familiar with the laptop, there's so much they can do -- even if a functioning network isn't in place and the device isn't hooked up to the Internet. "A non-connected computer is more valuable than a connected cell phone," he says.
Raul Zambrano, a policy advisor with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) -- an organization that announced its partnership with the $100 laptop program at Davos -- says that focusing on the device itself is missing the mark. "What's important is how much it costs to connect to the network," he says. In Africa, cell phone users don't have to pay for incoming calls. Certainly, with a cell phone-based outreach program, Zambrano argues, users would have to pay to connect to the Internet. "That's a big challenge."
Zambrano and the UNDP aren't opposed to players such as Microsoft getting involved -- as long as their primary goal is to foster education. Indeed, Zambrano says he would support a Microsoft-led initiative if it involved a tablet PC, for example, because it would be easier for children to read text on its screen versus a cell phone. "But they're too expensive right now," he says.
Whichever device ends up being most useful in third-world cultures as a conduit for information and education, the entire world will benefit, as millions of minds are stimulated. "The human brain is just as subtle and sophisticated in Africa as anywhere else," says EFF's Barlow. "They're just not hooked in."
Home page image courtesy of MIT's Media Lab and Design Continuum.
Guest (Robert Vaessen)
This proposal of using the Cell-phone as an educational tool doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As a matter of fact, it actually smells like something else. It smells like a revenue generating scheme. Distributing these education cell phones (for free or at a reduced cost) to a wide base of students, would create a wide audience for fee based services based on the cell-phone. Is Microsoft trying to convert an educational initiative into a revenue generating opportunity?
Guest (msdemott@mit.edu)
Guest (Leila)
technology & education &networking
Students that have some "purchase power"are using cell phones to communicate to each other while in classes, walking, and doint many other things.
There is also a reference in one of Domenico de Masi's book about education in Athenas: education means also to have fun.
How interesting is to see that children (and adults) could have access to education with mobility, and probably with fun.
On the other hand, it is also inspiring to follow up a multi cultural team working to give access to education to low income groups.
Guest (Vijay Thombre)
the main question is for whom it is done and how will it help in improving quality of life. the 'what can be done' many a times overshadows why it is to be done.
The quilty of life will be in the business world on the road or in their own personal home. I once went to the dentist office with my step daughter, and their in the waiting area was a woman, who has connected your cell-phone to her laptop, and was working. I asked her that was neat, she said it is great for her to continue being on the work and take her child to the dentist office. She just interact the web on her cell and plug in her laptop, and wa-la she able to communicate her employee or customer. She was some kind of communication sale personal and she able to download customers order to her work-place. It is easy and funtcional for her. She hardly ever at the office, unless theres a manitory meeting or monthly report meeting.
I believe not only cell phones will be around the socity, but will anvancying to laptops in 10-20 years or so.
Guest (Julio Velasco)
Microsoft's solution is self-serving
Let's compare:
The $100 laptop is self-powered, runs open source freeware, provides adhoc networking, has a large viewing area and a built-in keyboard.
The cell phone needs electricity to recharge, requires separate components for viewing and typing, can only connect to proprietary networks and will use a proprietary OS and applications.
Who is Gates kidding? My kudos to Negraponte and MIT!
Guest (Gabe)
These 2 technologies will merge anyway
The new generation laptops have built in cellular network connectivity (GPRS, EDGE 3G)...see the latest Lenovo laptops. Within 5 years, this cutting edge stuff will become commonplace. Also, the computing power of phones will increase too...so this is a useless debate. Move on!
Guest (Shiva Hanumanahally)
Cell phone computers are on different paths
One day when computing power can be accomodated on a cell phone,
(just dock it in to use a usual keyboard and monitor with optical bus) it would still be different
from whats been envisioned for developing countries through the $100 laptop. Dont mix both.
Guest (Ian Parker)
The Laptop vs. Cell Phone Debate
Isn't part of the objection to the $100 laptop the fact that it uses Linux and is therefore a threat to Microsoft and its hegenomy
Guest (TheTónster)
The Laptop vs. Cell Phone Debate
Jesus once said, ‘You’ll always have poor folks among you,’ has an unspoken corollary, to wit: ’You’ll always have the rich folk trying to make a buck off the poor folk.’ Some things never change, do they?
the Hundred-Dollar Laptop should be the way to go. Self-powered. One can get flashlights now that need only to be squeezed a few times to light a path through the darkness. The Africans will power their laptops with a treadle. Let us here praise Science & Technology for good service to God!
Envisioning a scalable, lasting solution
Hello All,
This is my first time writing, and no one will probably pick this up since it's already mid-September! Anyway, I'm glad to see that we're all debating on something positive. To this, I'd like to add my thoughts. There's a couple of things that I think needs to be considered: 1) Efficient flow and access to information is critical, and 2) Hardware must be minimized. To my first point, I would argue that efficient flow of information is more critical than putting an entire encyclopedia into a laptop that cannot be connected. Lasting positive change is not a one year, two year or three year solution or a hundred volumes-worth of encyclopedias. Lasting change is about creating conducive environments for learning and business. Great business and education environments need efficient structures first, where they can access an infinite pool of information that no encyclopedia could ever hold. The internet is the largest encyclopedia there is, and I would argue that access to the internet should take precedence over anything else. Now, to my second point...minimizing hardware. This is pretty obvious...the more hardware you have, the more expensive it's likely to be to replace. This may not be the case now, but let's look back at the cell phone, which once was a clunker and expensive. Now, cell phones have gotten extremely small and cheaper. Eventually, the majority of the cost of a cell phone will lie in the raw material itself.
Now aside from my 2 main arguments above, there are still several issues that cell phones need to overcome:
First is lack of a power source.
Second is poor input devices.
Third is the lack of good visual displays.
And fourth is lack of processing power.
To answer all these points, I'd like to give a little tidbit about myself. I've recently in the past couple of years caught the travelling bug and love to travel. And my favorite places to travel are the places least travelled such as third world countries (I live in NY so going to another developed city is not that exciting to me). And one of the places I'm attached to and frequent very often is Panama. In Panama, I've noticed a few interesting observations: 1) Almost everyone has a cell phone including some people in very distant parts (I've seen native Indians with cell phones!), and 2) There's an awful lot of internet cafes in Panama City. To my first point, it should come as no shock that many 3rd world people have cell phones. Prices have gone down so much and there have been pay as you go plans that the value proposition for cell phones in Panama is very high...high enough for an Indian to get and be able to contact his fellow brother on another island. To my second point, it appears that Panamanians are people like us who want to interact with others and find what they need on the internet. In addition, it would also signal to me that Panamanians don't have computers of their own...why go to an internet cafe when you can do what you need at home? This is because the barrier to entry is so high that it's simply not worth it (at least they believe this to be so) and that $0.25/30 minutes at the internet cafe is worth it. So to sum up my two points about Panama (a third world country), cell phones are fairly prevalent, and people like the internet and computers, and the barrier is too high for them to get access on their own.
So in the case of Panama, it seems that a cell phone is the better way to go, however, it needs to resolve the four issues I stated above.
To my first issue of power, I don't have a good answer to that currently, however, I'd like to add a few points. First, to build a sustainable economy requires positive phases, not immediate results. What I mean by this is that there are plenty of poor people with electricity in Panama that can benefit. And if we can raise their standard of living, they will most likely move up the chain and a new fringe group will be developed. This is similar to the real estate market in NY where parts of Brooklyn now are somewhat comparable to many parts of Manhattan. Second, on one of my trips to a few of the villages way out on the Caribean coast (no road access...it was pretty rough), all the villages had at lest one generator from someone. It's possible that these generators could provide the necessary recharging power for the cell phones (a little government creativity would probably help here too).
To my second issue on adequate input devices...here I think it just requires a company to be creative and committed to providing a cheap, durable keyboard. Off the top of my head, I'm dreaming of a "rubberized" keyboard that is foldable. I'm not exactly the tech guy here, but I have to imagine that if you put a couple of MIT, Harvard, Yale, etc. students together in a room and a collaboration effort for a week, someone will figure the appropriate solution out.
To my third point, technology has advanced so far and so fast that if we look bak at the last 50 years and compare it with the last 10, we can see where we're headed exponentially. The amount of progress will be overwhelming in the next 5 to 10 years. So for the visuals, there are already companies that are producing some amazing, and potentially cost efficient and durable visual displays. The companies to check out for are http://www.plasticlogic.com/index.php and http://www.eink.com/. I'm sure our concepts of desktops, laptops, tablets, and plain old books and newspapers will be radically changed within 5 to 10 years.
To my last point on processing power...if anyone has worked in the corporate world, they may have stumbled on terminal services. For those not familiar with it, it's a pretty neat concept. I realized the power of it when speaking with one of my developers about programming in some changes to our app for me. He said he'd do it from home through terminal services. The two main benefits are that 1) he has access to internal development tools and files, and 2) the intense processing isn't done by his local machine at home, but by our company machine in the office, which is much more powerful. So what terminal services offers is the ability to control a remote computer (that may be many times more powerful) and receive a visual representation of what the remote computer displays. Pretty revolutionary in my opinion, though this technology has been around for quite some time. So what's the big whoop? Well, the big whoop is about me terminal servicing into my Google/Yahoo/MSN, etc. account via my cell phone and interacting with the services that these companies provide through my portable keyboard and my "paper" monitor. So in my opinion, services is where it's going to be at in the future for developing markets. And why would someone like Google do this? Well, capacity has apparently gotten so cheap that gaining marketshare is now the most important part of many internet businesses with valid business models. This services trend seems already quite obvious.
There are still many things to consider, one of which is the cost of surfing the net via cell phones. To this I don't have a solution, except lobbying cellular service providers to tweak their business models slightly to include a advertisements to cover their costs. Lobbying government to subsidize free internet would also be a potential solution. I can't think of many better investments than this.
And lastly, to the point about Bill Gates being self-serving...I think in the end we have to look at what our main purpose is. Is it to make sure that Bill Gates doesn't take anymore money from someone? Or is it to raise the standard of living for 3rd world people through education? If it turns out that paying Bill Gates raises the standard of living 10 fold in the long run, versus going with a free system that only raises the standard of living 5 fold, then it may be worth it to give Bill our money. I'm not arguing either way, but my point is that it's really a side topic that may skew objective analysis. BTW, I think Bill is the largest philanthropist, but again...a side topic for another forum. Regards!
Many can use cellphone easily without need much learning but without know about education use laptop is very hard
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Guest (Robert Vaessen)
Power source?
This proposal of using the Cell-Phone as an educational tool doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One thing that wasn't addressed in the article, is a power source for this education cell phone. No mention of a powersource sounds to me like the traditional cell phone power source. So what happens when the very expensive battery runs down? I guess you can just plug it into the 'wall' and charge it back up for free right?
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Guest (Robert Vaessen)
Keyboard, printer?
This proposal of using the Cell-phone as an educational tool doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One thing that wasn't addressed in the article, input and output devices. While a computer includes a standard keyboard, a cell phone does not. The numeric keypad is not a satisfactory input device for educational uses. How much extra would a keyboard cost? Also, what about a printer? While computers can be connected to most printers, and the support is relatively universal. Where is cell phone support for printers?
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Guest (Robert Vaessen)
Revenue generating education
This proposal of using the Cell-phone as an educational tool doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As a matter of fact, it smells a lot like a way to generate revenue as opposed to a way to educate. Perhaps the real initiative here is a way to introduce a revenue generating consumer device, disguised as an education initiative.
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