The $100 laptop: A well intentioned waste of time?
Published: 22 Nov 2005 11:55 GMT
While the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative from the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is laudable, it is unlikely to succeed without suitable support mechanisms to help the developing world exploit the technology.
That's the opinion of a range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that deem the scheme well-intentioned but doomed to failure if the right infrastructure is not put in place.
Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, announced the $100 PC project and the formation of the One Laptop Per Child not-for-profit organisation to great euphoria at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2005.
More details emerged on the 16 November at the International Telecommunication Union's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, when Negroponte announced that his group was working closely with manufacturers and should have an order placed by February or March 2006.
The $115 laptop?
However he admitted that the price may rise to more than the magic
$100. "We're not even going to promise they're $100," he said. "They
may be $115. What we're promising is that the price will float down."
The aim of the $100 laptop initiative is to provide each child in the developing world with a laptop that can also act as an e-book, a tablet PC and a TV in a bid to help bridge the digital divide.
The benefit of such devices over more traditional educational materials, Negroponte believes, is that they can become "both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to 'learn learning' through independent interaction and exploration."
Nonetheless, he is adamant that this is not a technology-based project, but an education-based one, although "not teaching or education as we know it".
"Only a part of learning comes from teaching. A lot of it comes from exploration and interaction due to curiosity. That's how we learned to walk and talk and it's the kind of learning that kids do very well so this is a tool to make it more continuous and seamless. At age six, we say 'learning that way, learn via books and teachers', but there's another piece that's very important," he says.
Free textbooks
The intention is for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation to
sell the machines directly in consignments of a million or more to
ministries of education, which will distribute them for free. Initial
orders, however, will be limited to one million each for the five pilot
countries — China, Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa.
The preliminary goal is to have initial units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007, but manufacturing will not begin until between ...
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