The $100 laptop: A well intentioned waste of time?
Published: 22 Nov 2005 11:55 GMT
...five and 15 million have been ordered and paid for in advance.
As for OLPC, this is being 75 percent funded by MIT and 25 percent by its founding members, AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corp and Red Hat, which are each believed to have put in $2m so far.
Meanwhile, the devices themselves will come with a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory, four USB ports and a 10-inch dual-mode display that provides a full colour or black-and-white option if sunlight is strong to make it more readable and consume less power.
Hermetically sealed
Linux will be the operating system of choice with applications developed in-house by MIT. To protect the machine from damage, it will be covered with a rubber casing and will hermetically seal when the lid is closed.
To cater to children in areas where electricity is in limited supply, it will be possible to power the machines using a crank that operates on a "ten to one ratio – you crank for one minute and get 10 minutes of power", according to Negroponte.
Moreover, the laptops will be Wi-Fi-enabled and connect together using mesh networking technology. This will not only cut potential costs for networking infrastructure, but also of Internet connections for the devices.
"When you open each laptop, it becomes a node in a mesh. This means that only one or two laptops need to go to an Internet backbone and all of the kids are connected, so [a 2Mbps line] can serve 1,000 kids. If you have [a 2Mbps line] for 1,000 kids, you're in great shape, although you're not in such terrific shape if you download video," says Negroponte.
NGOs
But despite its laudable intentions, some NGOs are not convinced that the concept will deliver the results that Negroponte and his team hope. David Grimshaw, international team leader for the new technologies programme at charity Practical Action, believes that there are three key aspects to this type of project and providing access to computers addresses only one of them. Practical Action focuses on helping people in the developing world to use technology in the fight against poverty.
"MIT potentially have an excellent idea here. But to make it really work in developing countries, it needs to be well thought through in partnership with content providers, perhaps in education, and also NGOs and civil societies that are in touch with grass-roots community-level organisations," he says. "It's about working in a participative way to allow people to develop their own solutions rather than have them imposed on them."
While Negroponte claims that content is being developed by Seymour Papert, also a member of OLTP and considered a leading theorist on child learning, Grimshaw believes...
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