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‘One Laptop Per Child orders surge’
December 2, 2007 | 1:18 pm
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By David Rothman
“Despite slower-than-expected sales and tough competition from commercial rivals, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation of Cambridge is enjoying a surge of new orders,” reports the Boston Globe.
Brazil, for example, has committed to buying 260,000 machines at $188 each. I myself have an XO on the way to me and, in the cosmic scheme of things, regard it as potentially a far more important reading machine than the Kindle.
As reported by OLPC News, the delivery states for first-day participants in the Give One Get One program are now between December 14 and December 24. Deadline for participation in the program is December 31. For $400 you get an e-book-capable laptop for yourself (reminder: no assurance you can read DRMed books) and another for a child in a developing country.
Related: Techmeme roundup and a TeleRead post on Brewster Kahle’s enthusiasm for the OLPC machine: XO laptop e-book video reminds us that the Kindle isn’t the be-all and end-all for every reader.
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Comments:
I’m really pleased with this surge in orders, especialy for the G1G1 initiative with the 190,000 orders announced.
With so many XO reaching individuals, I believe/hope another surge will happen through word of mouth. I guess at this stage the OLPC will be forced to open more widely the distribution.
I also think more and more people will see the potential of the XO as an ebook reader, like here today:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/000305.html
My thoughts exactly, Francois, and I’ll actually reproduce the message in the link–since it’s so encouraging and since I believe the sender would like it spread around. If I have time, I’ll do a quick link from the main TeleBlog. Happy Holidays! David
We’ll be using the XO in villages (Ethiopia and Tanzania) with middle school children. We have selected the XO after evaluating several ebook readers, since our original initiative was to provide ebooks. (We have shipped tens of thousands of recycled U.S. schoolbooks to Africa over the past five years, and decided last year that it’s time to go digital and align the content with each country’s Ministry of Education approved curriculum.) The individual children in these particular village schools do not have schoolbooks. Schoolbooks cost more than the schools, government, and families can afford. The teachers have schoolbooks sometimes), and classrooms sometimes have a few shared books, but there are far from enough schoolbooks for all of the children in the classroom and there are no books to take home. There are no books in the homes of most of these children — the suggestion that parents should read age-appropriate books to their children, etc etc is not relevant in many village situations I have experienced first-hand. There is a wonderful oral tradition of storytelling, and the children learn multiple languages at a very young age, and when the families have not been ravaged by HIV/AIDS there are multiple generations in each family. We are going to augment the children’s education with one laptop for every student in these two middle schools, core and auxiliary educational content pre-loaded on the memory cards, and language study. Perhaps interesting educational dynamics will emerge as these laptops travel home each evening and weekend for use within the family environment.
Yes, we could choose instead to buy a classroom count of core curriculum schoolbooks and encourage the school to allow the children to take the books home. We think that the wide array of auxiliary content we can include with each XO, and the skills the children will develop as they learn to use this computer, are a better investment than a single stack of core-curriculum schoolbooks. I’ll let you know how it goes…
– Donna Auguste, donna at leavealittleroom.org