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Why isn’t the $100 laptop going to U.S. schools, too?
November 16, 2006 | 10:22 am
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By David Rothman
The $100 laptop is on-track to reach many thousands of schoolchildren in Third World jungles and deserts next year.
I haven’t the slightest doubt that the machines will find enough government purchasers overseas despite Thailand’s dropping out for internal political reasons. The expected price is about $140 now, but you can bet that volume will drive it down. Photo shows one of the early prototypes, and the latest specs are here. Hypeware not!
America slighted by OLPC
A nagging question remains, however. Why won’t One Laptop Per Child, the group behind the phenomenon, market the same machine to schools and libraries all over the United States, where, in fact, at least two states, Maine and Massachusetts, have shown interest? As a teacher keeps reminding me, we have our own Third Worlds, even in Silicon Valley; consider the huge number of the Valley’s immigrant students who qualify for school lunch programs. Should they have to live outside our borders for the OLPC to care about them? What’s going on? A Brand Strategy? Fear of riling parts suppliers and the rest of the U.S. computer industry?
Consider the boost for e-books that the laptop project’s high resolution screen could bring here in the United Sates. And yet, in a multi-part series in MIT’s Technology Review (I, II and III), New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki does not once broach the issue of, “Why not the U.S., too—and promptly?” Weird. I hope he’ll pay attention to the election returns in considering the callousness that America’s domestic needs have suffered in recent years, complete with the White House ideologues’ underfund-and-destroy strategy toward public education. No, I won’t confuse OLPC with the White House, and in fact, I think the U.S. should offer more foreign aid, not less (and I don’t mean the corrupt, contractor-enriching form of “aid” we’ve given Iraq). But Americans are sick, sick, sick of neglect from Washington while George B flops as an empire builder, diverting resources from home. Same concept applies in Laptop Land. Better to spend the money well on both domestic and foreign needs that appropriate and well-used technology could address.
Myopia
Simply put, I cannot believe the myopia that the U.S. political and technology elites—Republicans and Democrats alike—have shown toward the edtech needs of our domestic Third Worlds. In Computerworld and elsewhere in the 1990s, I proposed TeleRead, which would include not just well-stocked national digital library systems here in the States and elsewhere, but also a focused, multivendor procurement program to buy up the right hardware. Instead it looks as if kids in Libya will get the $100 laptops before children in San Jose do, if ever.
Furthermore, I continue to wonder if the $100 laptop project will adequately prepare teachers for the technology or take full advantage of the better aspects of education in Third World countries. Will the LOGO-centric approach work? How unfortunate it would be if the OLPC triumphed technologically but flopped pedagogically. In the Third World, educators have yet to be comfortable with constructivism, the educational philosophy behind LOGO. Will OLPC be up to the task of helping them make the change? And is LOGO best for all Third or First World Children in the first place? How much respect does LOGO have for different learning styles? Should LOGO-related abilities be the main criteria by which schools should rate children? Might the humanities suffer? I’m simply raising questions; I’d love to hear the answers from both the “pro” and “con” factions.
Worth the debate
We’re talking about real issues here, a genuinely promising machine. In OLPC News, an independent blog, which has not in the least hesitated to criticize the project, Wayan now says that he’s “lining up to buy a OX2 and so are you. Popular Science is right, the Children’s Machine XO technology is the Best of What’s New.” I wonder what this could mean for Sony. Here it’s built support for the Reader around the paperlike E Ink screen, and yet OLPC-style display technology just might be able to provide a much better cost-benefit ratio for the moment. Best of all, the OLPC machine won’t be as obnoxiously proprietary as the Sony Reader is.
Like Wyan, I’ll continue to criticize the $100 laptop project’s shortcomings. But I remain excited about its potential. So much for the close-minded critics who said OLPC could never succeed even technologically, even when there was ample evidence to the contrary. Now let’s hope that the $100 laptop can work out pedagogically, still an iffy issue.
Other links: Engadget on the first ten prototypes and also the unboxing of them. Also see One Laptop Per Child News on What is the Real Cost of the OLPC?, OLPC’s Goal: A $30 Billion Dollar Company! and Dual-Mode Screen Up Close and Revolutionary.
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Comments:
OLPC does expect to license the design for retail sale by commercial companies to individuals, probably in 2008.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Retail
Many thanks for sharing the useful link. Of course, I’d still feel better if OLPC had special arrangements with U.S. libraries and schools to drive down their costs. – David
David,
I believe the real reason that OLPC is not stateside is Negroponte’s constructivist learning process he wants implemented with the laptops. He seems to say that the child-centric learning process will relegate teachers to over-glorified hall monitors.
And while Negroponte’s ego is impressive, he knows better that to take on the domestic teacher’s unions.
You could well be right, Wayan. No ESP here, but I find your theory credible. It’s a shame that a certain learning style mandated from OLOPC will come bundled with the laptops.
My own philosophy would be for schools to be able to adjust to a variety of learning styles—depending on the child. But that aside, the reality is that in many Third World countries the teacher is king, queen, whatever, and the OLPC laptop might be massively disruptive, and not always in the best of ways. Some kids may thrive with a constructivist approach, but others may find it an abomination or lack the requisite curiosity. And what to do about the kids who are put off by LOGO? Do we really want education systems to rely so heavily on it? In short, while I’m supportive of the technology, I have serious questions about the pedagogy, and I know you do as well. So keep posting here!
Please note that I am not anti-LOGO or anti-constuctivist. Especially I love the idea of blogs as learning tools—as ways to bring out shy learners, for example, and teach children from the start to live with candid reviews by peers, not just teachers. The use of blogs and wikis is the antithesis of rote learning.
But are these solutions in heavy doses always best for all? What about the children who are more verbally than spacially and mathematically oriented? Will literature and other language-related areas suffer if too much of the constructivism is focused on LOGO? And while I love certain aspects of constructivism, isn’t there some place for rote learning? What about systematic learning of new words to grow a child’s vocabulary, for example? Young children can be the best memorizers; will too much constructivism waste valuable memorization time? Mightn’t the best approach would be a balanced one—between rote learning and constructivism–along with respect for learning-style variations among children?
Meanwhile I’d love to get further thoughts from teachers and parents. In fact, the TeleBlog will soon post a poll.
Thanks,
David
P.S. Highly recommended: Constructivism: Research and Ideology Revisited (Again), in Textbook Evaluator.
As of yesterday when I heard the latest updates on OLPC, the problem was not demand, it was supply. They are not producing them fast enough (yet).
Also, if you rank countries that needs OLPC most, America is not in the top ten. How many of those states actually don’t have electricity at students’ homes? How many of them have no access to any kind of phones? Because OLPC is trying to bring solution to places with those kinds of constraints.
Intel’s cheap computer might be a better fit for the USA domestic market.
Well, it might be fear of offending the US computer industry. And it might be reluctance to take on the teaching unions here. And it might be that Negroponte wants to be the great white father who educated the unwashed brown and yellow masses.
But we do have to remember that he set everything up to sell these things in blocks of 1,000,000 … and I don’t think Maine is set to order up a million laptops quite yet.
There are a lot of wrinkles to this project that are quite separate from the notion of a cheap, rugged laptop to help schoolage kids learn by. At times I find it rather mysterious.
It could simply be that the leaders of the project went into it with a certain notion of what they intended to do … and have been unable to think outside that self-imposed box ever since.
Alexandre: With more countries involved, including First World countries such as the States, it would be easier to scale up. Then investments would be made to produce the units fast enough and at a lower price. The interest of First and Third Worlds could actually converge. As for the Intel vs. the OLPC machine, keep in mind that the latter is a great deal cheaper—a factor that U.S. schools will consider.
Pond: Yes, there could be purchases in blocks of a million if the states got together.
Thanks,
David
Pond:
And it might be that Negroponte wants to be the great white father who educated the unwashed brown and yellow masses.
Negroponte actually spent some time helping those ‘masses’ on the ground, so I would say his desires are starting from practical needs, rather than from armchair-scientist thinking as your somewhat derogative sentence seem to imply.
As to the wrinkles in the project, the more I look into it, the more I feel that they are there because I haven’t thought about the project as much as they did. That is to say, we are the ones in the box that we are not able to escape.
One interesting example is the fact that e-book reader is a WIKI reader, which means any content is theoretically up for change and update. Just that single decision combined with the WiFi substrata has consequences many people have not yet thought through.
I have started being a sceptic about the project, but the more I read/listen about it, the more sense it makes to me. But it took a lot of reading/listening to get there.
David, I think they are currently in the production bottleneck that is not directly money related. They need to make sure the hardware/software is viable. They need to make sure it is usable. They need to make sure it is durable.
Once that is all solidified, they probably can take advantage of scale. But until then, it still has to go through a small number of people deeply involved with the project and those people are not scalable.
And if First World companies really wanted to contribute, they could have sponsored programmers that work on the OLPC’s software. That does not require any special agreements.