It is a merry Christmas, this, the year that OLPC got rolling. I think this is the most significant effort in the history of our industry, when ingenuity turns from pleasing the requirements of the affluent 15% (or whatever percent) to reaching out to every soul by making difficult choices and asking the difficult questions.
I have been amazed by the resistance to OLPC. Even if you expect a lot of trash talk from Bill Gates, Intel and the entrenched interests in the PC field who are threatened by a well-designed $100 machine, the fancy & false logic from all sectors has been a surprise. There are sites -- more than one -- gloating on every piece of negative news, as well as fudging numbers in every possible way to put the project in a gloomy light.
One post coming on OLPC News this week from a source closer to the project really contrasted nicely with this river of weak arm-chair punditry.
"A Holiday Wish: One Laptop Per Nepali Child"
by Shankar Pokharel
President, One Laptop Per Child Nepal
M. Pokharel makes a useful argument using the criticisms of OLPC's detractors to make his simple case. Countries need to provide their people basic education -- which includes basic literacy. They do not provide effective education today and in some cases more than half of some national populations remain untouched by the educational system. Nepal, for one, misses 20% of its people in remote areas.
Many do not recognize that a connected laptop is a replacement for text-books, which are expensive, hard to ship, and become rapidly obsolete. Moreover, a text-book based curriculum is limited by comparison to learning activities driven by the vast content possibilities of the Web.
Critics often transfer their own circumstances to the environment being discussed. They have no feeling for the challenges of education in poor and remote places and seem not particularly curious. That's why it is impossible for some people to look past the difficulties to see the brilliance behind simply placing this device ubiquitously.
It would be enough to have no curriculum concepts or plans. It would be enough to have not thought about the design of the interface. It would be enough to let locals figure out how the networking is going to work itself out. But OLPC addresses all of these and in addition has enough respect for children and local teachers to trust them to be brilliant -- as people tend to be.
M. Pokharel says it clearly:
Some people argue that it is arrogant for the OLPC organization to assume that poor kids want laptops. I think it is arrogant to assume that we don't want them and that we can't figure them out. Those kids are poor, but they're not dumb. They will figure out how to use the laptops and support them, even if their parents and teachers are dumbfounded by them.
It boggles my mind that some people would deny this. The status quo is, indeed, a powerful intoxicant.
And there is a habit of number-crunching -- in defiance of useful context -- that argues why these countries cannot afford OLPC.
We might as well give up on this whole laptop thing and revert to our current strategy which is succeeding fabulously at not educating our people. Hey, 45% literacy doesn't look too bad after all! We can always send our literate citizens to earn hard currency in the Persian Gulf as security guards and maids!
The poverty card is a fascist argument to keep the poor out of the way.
I think OLPC is the best economic development program since clean water. And we'd do well to trust sources close to the project for clean information.
Sam,
Wanted to wish you and your readers a very happy holidays and New Year!
I also wanted to echo your thoughts on the unassailable value of OLPC. I suspect that most critics have never seen firsthand the joy of a child in a poor country experiencing a computer for the first time.
I have, in a small orphanage in Cambodia. The curiosity, sense of wonder and sheer happiness of kids using a computer for the first time is truly awe-inspiring. It's what caused me to focus my work on technology and its transformative power. I had witnessed transformation in the flesh, and it was unforgetable.
Posted by: Jeff Kaplan | December 24, 2006 at 02:24 PM