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‘$100 laptop is not a pencil’: Anti-OLPC commentary from Umoja blog
August 7, 2006 | 1:06 am
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By David Rothman
Here, from Umoja blog. Anti-OLPC. More positive mention of OLPC project and related initiatives appears in a BizWeek article out of Brazil. Wish I had time right now to comment on both items. Go ahead! Read and share your own opinions. Excerpt from Umoja:
…Why are these products only for sale to governments? Are they really only concerned with production? Other questions that spring to mind are:
1. How likely is it that governments in developing countries will pre-order 5 million unproven pieces of technology? (5 million is the minimum pre-paid orders needed for the initiative to go ahead)
2. Why are already poor countries being asked to take such a huge risk in such an important area as education?
3. How will the governments get the money to pay for these items, given that many cannot afford textbooks?
4. How will laptop distribution be monitored once they are received by each government?
5. What’s to stop a government buying this subsidised equipment and charging institutions for usage or selling even selling them on at a profit?
6. What’s to stop the cost being passed on from the school to the user?
7. What’s to stop large scale theft of items from schools?
8. What happens if a child loses or is robbed of their equipment?Some of these questions being asked in this Wiki page, but they are not really being answered thoroughly.
I’m also struck by the profound stupidity of the following statement in the Laptop FAQ under the question about why they are looking exclusively at laptops, not community access centres:
One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful.
This look like wishful thinking to me, a noble abstraction perhaps, but not joined up thinking. Not all kids have pencils. A kid who has a pencil of its own may well create, but an art class has lots of different pencils and people there can help them to develop… If a kid breaks his pencil, s/he will probably be in a position to repair it… If a kid loses his/her pencil, replacing it may be difficult, but not as difficult as replacing a whole computer… Many people sell pencils, none sells the $100 laptop…
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[...] $100 laptop is not a pencil: Anti-OLPC commentary from Umoja blogHere, from Umoja blog. Anti-OLPC. More positive mention of OLPC project and related initiatives appears in a BizWeek article out of Brazil. Wish I had… [...]
[Moderator: Our anti-spam Dobermans ate Dave Scannell's post. Dave, author of the Umoja blog, was kind enough to contact me, and I'm putting the post up again. Always email me if you're a legit commenter, and the Dobermans attack. - David Rohman.]
You have pulled out from my post a section where I put forward my OLPC concerns (the text you’ve quoted actually dates back to a 29th June post on metafilter) and have framed me as being anti-OPLC (you have also emphasised the anti bit). I do go on to state that I would like to be proved wrong; that I would like to see the project succeed. Clearly, however, I am not convinced by the OLPC in its current form. I believe that it has distracted from other initiatives and that it suffers not from a lack of vision; but from a coherent implementation strategy.
Moreover, to me it seems the ethos behind OLPC casually dismisses the notion of community computing, classrooms and even, dare I say it, accepted teaching practice. If you add to this the fact that nearly every aspect of the OLPC technology is untested on a large scale – the screen, the mesh network, the “pull string” charger, the OS, the content – then perhaps you can see where my concerns lie.
The OLPC project is very risky and the risk is being borne by economies that are not necessarily strong enough to absorb the weight of it should the project fail to take off.
I would like to point out that I am not a Luddite and that I am interested in other ICT for development projects, notably, Sun Microsystem’s “Ray Bus”, Ndiyo’s Ultra Thin Clients and a 1999 initiative by the Malaysian government that created a mobile internet suite for rural school children. Ideally, I would like to see a project that combines aspects of these projects to provide real ICT access for rural schoolchildren in developing countries.
I live in Kisumu, Kenya. On Saturday, I went to a party organised by a friend who works at the British Council, where he runs partnering program for UK and Kenyan schools. At the party there were many school teachers. I talked to them about the computing facilities they currently have. None of the teachers I spoke to had computer labs at their school, although a few had the odd computer which tended to be used by the senior staff or the school administrators. I asked them if they were aware of the ICT in education paper recently published by the Kenyan Government which tables a plan to have a computer lab in every school by 2015. At least two of the teachers I spoke to said that they need to be connected to mains electricity first. One teacher told me that this will cost KSh1.8 million (US$24,000) for his school.
I went on to ask if anyone had heard of OLPC. They hadn’t. Not one person at the party that I spoke to had a clue what it was. Why is this? These people are teachers in a country which the OLPC is no doubt supposed to be heading. Why has no one talked to the teachers about it? Surely a successful technology project needs to talk to all stakeholders as it is developed?
As I go on to venture on the blog post you have quoted; once the following four words were seized upon, ‘One Laptop Per Child’ and the project named accordingly, the developers backed themselves into a corner ideologically. After all, with that name, they aren’t going to develop something that isn’t a laptop or that isn’t on a per person basis, no matter what critical problems they hit, are they?
Many thanks for your comments, Dave. I’m planning a post to address at least one of the issues you’re raising–absorption of the technology. While I’m in favor of the OLCP project I think it will be folly to implement OLCP without careful preparation of teachers so they both feel and are better informed about the technology. Furthermore, I think that project should not be linked to closely to a particular teaching philosophy–local people should have a say in the matter. Software choices should allow this. Meanwhile I thank you for the specific examples you’ve given of lack of preparation for various kinds of technology, and most likely will cite them in my post. David R
I couldn’t agree with both of you more. I too hope the OLPC program is an amazing success, I am very pro-ICT in the developing world. I just have serious reservations that this specific implementation will work. Mainly because I do not see an implementation plan. I don’t even see a spare parts plan! http://www.olpcnews.com/support/maintenance/no_spare_parts_distr.html