Negroponte’s $100 laptop in Orange

[jason]

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Slimmer Linux needed for $100 laptop:

The One Laptop Per Child organization… hopes to distribute 5 million to 10 million of the systems to children in India, China, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Egypt, and Nigeria in the first quarter of 2007…. He hopes the project will help supply the world’s billion children with an education that undertrained teachers often can’t supply. “At least 50 percent of those children don’t get anything that even approximates what you and I would call an education,” he said.

That’s all well and good, but it is Orange.

(click for fullsize)

Comments

Re: I hope they( lab Computers) reach the Children!

[jumpinjulia.livejournal.com]

Hey Dr. J,

Certainly it is true that there is plenty of corruption in the developing world at all levels, including the community level. One of the reasons the OLPC is *orange* (initial prototype was green) is to make it stand out and, they hope, discourage people trying to sell it. Frankly, just giving something directly to kids only works part of the time. giving stationery supplies and textbooks directly to them usually works. But giving food aid to kids/women, or micro-credit for that matter, often results in the aid being sold on the open market or in the money being used in manners which don't generate income. It will be interesting to see what happens to the OLPC. Certainly I don't think anything will ever be 100%. There will never be an aid programme which involves "tools" (be that money, food, or things) in which one cannot find some kind of skimming off at the community level.

Also, if the OLPC is given only to the children, how will monitoring & evaluating their learning be done? Some adult, somewhere, somehow surely needs to be involved if the work the learners do on the OLPC is going to be given meaningful credit in the learning system. While we might have issues -- in constructivist theories -- with the idea that monitoring or mentoring or adult involvement is needed, few would agree with this -- particularly in less developed nations which are often more rigidly hierarchical and traditional. Circumventing the adult community entirely will quickly lead to the failure of the OLPC implementation.

Finally, the entire project runs the risk in certain cultures -- South/central asia especially -- of being problematic because often when schools/children/communities are given supplies (from maps to microscopes to computers), the teachers/children/schools/communities are afraid of breaking the item so they put it out of reach.

Either way, there is a big danger that they will reach the children, but then will be taken away or unused without significant input from outside support coming into the community and pushing their use. It's not exactly what development theory espouses, but I believe this will be the reality of implementation.

JJ.

Re: I hope they( lab Computers) reach the Children!

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

Don't worry about me not agreeing with you on all that. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. And will be grist for our own research!