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Negroponte's Talk at Emerging Technology Conference
xacting writes "The video of Nicholas Negroponte's talk about MIT's One Laptop per Child (OLPC) research initiative was just posted to MIT World. In it, he discusses the challenges of tripling the world's laptop production, dealing with China's policies towards free speech and the problems of grey markets." From the article: "The key to churning out these cheap educational devices is volume -- and the more countries that join the bandwagon, the sleeker and less expensive the computers are likely to be. Negroponte casts a wary eye on the potential grey market appeal of the machines, and is determined to make them so distinctive as a government-distributed, educational tool that taking one would 'be like stealing a post office truck.' Negroponte concludes, 'Changing education on the planet is a monumental challenge,' taking decades. But OLPC will 'seed the change,' and help 'invent the future.'"
Why is everyone so sure that putting a laptop in a kids hand will help them that much? I'm sure it's a great idea on some level but what about starving illiterate kids, wouldn't food and teachers be a better investment?
I'll happily pay for at least one 3rd world child's $100 laptop if I can buy another one for MY kids!
Time and time again, we have been shown that trying to deny people access to things they want leads to one thing only: black market, with all the niceties that usually follow it.
So why is Negroponte so keen on preventing everybody who's not a starving child from getting the 100$-laptop? Especially since he seems so worried that they might not be in enough demand to grant them the best prices for components etc.
I say, why limit distribution and *force* this to be a government-sponsored program?
Global warming is a cube.
Wouldn't it be a whole lot better to first develop and distribute a "thin client" laptop that is not much more than a browser, screen, keyboard, and Wifi connection, along with substantial enough (and presumably pricier) servers that act as access portals, and then second, a more advanced laptop that can store useful data and other programs usable by more advanced students that qualify for them?
Secondarily, I would think that the first and/or second laptops could be sold as an entry level laptop in the first world countries with a sufficient profit margin (and the ability of educational systems like rural school districts, etc. to purchase a limited number of machines without the profit margin built in) to underwrite the distribution of many more machines to the third world? After all, if the whole thing is done under a non-profit framework, there isn't shareholder bottom line to worry about. What think ye all?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This is the problem--that there is not really much useful media to put on these machines.
For the most part, "the Internet" in itself is not directly useful in a lower-grade classroom, unless you want to teach kids about porn. What electronic media is available is usually only optional, and designed to complement the printed books.
What really needs to be created is MEDIA, electronic versions of suitable textbooks. And a database of quiz and test questions, organized by book sections, and a program to automatically check those answers. If the hardware had a way to do very-short-range networking (I'm thinking IR here, it only needs to work inside one room and not cause interference in adjoining rooms) then the ability to push file content over it and a way to check quiz answers in real-time would be a good thing too.
But you really don't need a whole laptop to do this. A laptop is really just adding a whole bunch more problems. A simnple e-book type device with a few input buttons would work. You wouldn't even really need a multi-tasking OS; this greatly cuts down on the speed and memory requirements of the hardware.
And finally, the thing's got to be drop-proof, water-proof, crayon-proof, ect. It needs to run off of regular disposeable (or possibly rechargeable) batteries, not $150 li-ion jobs. A laptop is NOT what will work for this.
And really--e-textbooks would/should be priced far lower than printed copies. There's no incentive for any school to even consider going to e-book use, if they are going to have to pay a bunch of money for hardware, and then pay a bunch more for "e-book licenses". If they just go with the printed books, they only pay a bunch once.
~
I'm guessing there are a couple billion people in the world that would rather have clean drinking water instead of a goddamn $100 laptop.
Particularly since $100 is probably a half to a third of their yearly income...
There's nothing like connectivity to information, and there's nothing like getting accurate information, and there's nothing in the world that can provide this link between people and data like the internet. Kids learning languages and merging languages. Kids learning about cultures and merging them. Kids identifying problems and solving them. Kids exploring their world with the wisdom of others at thier fingertips. These laptops could be a major step!
Why put any artificial barrier at all in front of your product? If your goal is to make them ubiquitous, then let nothing get in the way.
He recognizes capitalism's inexorable hand, but refuses to accept it. He'd be much better off working with it. Accept that there is going to be a market for the things, and sell into the market. Someone's going to.
For instance, he could make a bare-bones, fully-functional version of the product available to schools, but sell a more elaborate model to consumers, a similar but higher priced one to business, and a milspec one to the US DOD.
By working with capitalists, instead of fighting them, the project would stand a much better chance of actually succeeding.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
What to do? Use this "machine" for an undefined incomprehensible goal, I mean even the makers don't really know exactly how this laptop thingamagig will actually be beneficial in REAL terms (ignore the use of buzzwords such as explore, interact and create, they don't mean anything). OR, they could flog it in the closest market for the highest they can, giving them REAL benefits, such as cash, to buy that tin pot they'll use to boil water, or whatever it is they need.
The first thing they need to realize is the importance of education. The second thing will be for them to actually do something about it. The third and last component will be to give them the tools they need to achieve their educational goals.
Both my grandfathers were refugees from the Armenian Genocide and arrived in France/Syria with nothing at all with them, they were orphans 5/7 years old and couldn't read or write. One of them went to a French school, got the education he needed. The other one didn't have the same privilege, he taught himself everything. Guess which one actually was the more educated person at the end? Yep, the one who taught himself.
The point? Education is not only about the tools you have at your disposal, it's also the willingness and dedication to learn.
"like stealing a post office truck"
It's not stealing. Isn't this more like BUYING a used, surplus truck from the postal service? You give someone a laptop-- what's wrong with them selling the laptop?
What would be the disadvantage in selling these laptops to people in wealthy nations as a commodity? That is precisely what the Freeplay Foundation does with their "Lifeline Radio", which is a robust, windup/solar powered, AM/FM/SW radio designed for people who live in areas without power. You can buy one radio through CCrane and they'll donate a second one to someone in need.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Why not? If they are starving (and most africans aren't, you know) they can look up what is edible in their area. (Or how to prepare what they have to make it last.) If they are farmers, they can look up farming techniques. (A lot of africa is at the subsitance level: a little better farming techniques would be all they need to start generating wealth.)
As for AIDs... A large portion of the problem with AID/HIV in africa is education. People don't know what to do to protect themselves from it, how they can get it, etc. With an internet connection they can look all that up.
This is the 'teach a man to fish' principle: If they are starving today, they need a fish. If they are likely to be starving soon, they need fishing lessons. A cheap internet connected laptop would allow them to look up the best way to fish. Or whatever else they need.
(Also: cheap laptops mean cheap teaching of basic computer skills. Which means the students are more employable, in more jobs, with less on-the-job training. Which is better for the economies of the countries.)
These can help. Don't doubt it. Don't assume Africa is in the stone age.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
That's all well and good... but that has nothing to do with the man behind the $100 laptop.
The $100 laptop guy is Nicholas Negroponte.
The former abasador to Honduras is John Negroponte.
They are different people.
The modern world throws away thousands, if not millions of books ever year. Some of them are reference materials, spanning every education level. If the thrid world was given these books instead of a connection to the internet, I think it'd be vastly more useable, longer lasting, and cheaper.
This removes the need for electricity, connectivity, and familiarity with technology. Books are what the entire world has used for much much longer than the internet as a source of knowledge. it's a shame to skip this.
A: They're not. Quantas, their manufacturer, is free to sell the same item to anyone. However those commercial versions cost will be closer to US$200.
A: It's not, the State of Massachusetts and others are already committed to large purchases. Why not get your community involved?
A: Because all the research shows that 'seeding' 1 per 5 kids or whatever doesn't have the same network effect (figuratively & literally) that ubiquitous use in an area does.
A: They need all of those, and those are vital things to see they get. But once those immediate needs are met the long term goal of providing an education is what will help these kids and their communities be self-sufficient, indeed able to assist other neighboring communities.
A: It's Redhat Linux, this is
A: First the local communities will likely look down on this theft of their resources pretty intensely. Second the goal is to make any trade in these universally unsavory. Will it be 100% effective? No. But this is an easy issue to rally behind and the $100 models will be distinctive from their commercial kin.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
14 years ago, I was given a used x86 machine with no hard drive, and floppies for DOS, MS Word, and two computer games. I had never touched a computer or typewriter before. No one taught me how to use it, I just started playing around with it, and two years later graduated to a 486, and so on and so forth. Now, I run IT for a small company.
Much of the negative feedback for this project seems misplaced to me. I suspect that just because we don't know how these laptops will be used doesn't mean that they won't be used. I don't believe that there is "alot more that could be done with this money." I think this is similar to the argument against desktop computers back in the day - no one could imagine how they would be used, so it seemed like a big waste of time.
Here's my simple formulation of an argument: every little bit helps.
These are NOT thin clients, they are fully stand-alone devices. The mesh part only comes into play for communications, not for operations. There is no central server, no must-be-in-range-to-work, etc.
Think about it, the goal is these kids can sit with these after dinner and be the first first in their family able to read a story, in their local language, to their siblings before bed, to do their homework, to learn about the world beyond their village. Do you really think that a thin client that only works within 100 meters of the district school is something folks who actually do put time & energy into these ideas would go for?
C'mon, for the time it took you to post you could've answered your (wrong) guess for yourself.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Sponsored at least one laptop .. how many more laptops could be paid for ?
I wrote to them asking where I could send $100 to sponsor the creation of the laptop.. I was automailed a response.
im still waiting for a real person from their group to answer my question .
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
tell them that they are cynical asshole who would let a child continue to be dependant on handout becasue someone might abuse a tools they could use to learn how to take care of themselves?
There are many, many cases where rich people, large corporation and companies have done something becasue they thoughyt it was right?
However, you could tell them that it is in the corporation best interest to have an educated self-suffciant population. You need to to have a strong market base to sell things to.
I guess you could say "It's better to have people be fed and educated with disposable income that companies will try to get, then it is to have people starving to death with no way to help themselves that companies don't care about"
Your friends would rather give a man a fish, instead of the fishing pole.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
These are crayon & water proof.
These don't require a $150 LiOn battery, they use a hand-crank.
They're not just intended to be dumb reader devices but links to the larger world. Online encyclopedias, newspapers, updated textbooks, communicate with other kids in their native languages (IM shorthand in Urdu), get their assignments from the regional school, etc.
Lots of kids schools aren't like your wealthy western ones. They're shorter days, breaks for plantings & harvests, don't have libraries, indeed lots of these kids don't have electricity in their homes (why these laptops are often the brightest thing at night in their houses.) They have to be able to take them home, use them at night, etc.
Govt's like China allocate the equivalent of US$20/year for each kid's printed school books. With these laptops they can offer those gov't text supplied texts, a coupla thousand others, the latest news, access to encyclopedias, etc. all for negligible cost over the laptops.
Oh, and media? With a standard cheap platform lots of that can be developed quickly, by interested individuals, by non-profits, by governments, by the communities themselves. Once the 1st batches are out there the next set will find a set of tools to build further on, etc.
But, you'd know all this if you watched the videos or read any of the articles on this before rushing to post your under-informed argument against what you (incorrectly) assumed it was...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) hand crank.
Surly it would have been better to have a usb foot operated pedal for the wind-up power so you don't have to remove a hand to charge it back up, this will end up being a job for little brothers/sisters.
Love it.
Oh wait, you didn't bother to actually watch or look up any of this before posting, huh?
'Cause if you did you'd know that they're actually pretty attractive little boxes. Their 'unattractiveness' will be in the sense of "You're using a device my community paid for, you're not a kid, not a school-teacher, what kind of jerk are you and have you met the business end of my hoe?!" unattractive.
Regarding capitalism, yes Quantas, Nortel, Intel, Redhat, etc. are all in this entirely for altruism... NOT.
Quentas gets to sell the design commercially (they guesstimate that model will cost around US$200.) Nortel gets real-world experience in mesh networking. Redhat gets their name and OS out on hundreds of millions of devices. Intel gets to expand their market with all of those Intel-friendly applications and follow-on laptop versions.
If that's not "taking advantage of capitalism" then I dunno what is.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'm not sure I agree with you here. In fact, books are exceedingly efficient ways of distributing valuable information that everyone wants. Thing is, the marginal cost for printing and distributing a book is very low, not much more than a few dollars. Plus they're sturdier and more portable and accessible than a laptop can ever be. All you need to boot them up is some decent light source. The only skill you need is to be able to read.
The Internet by contrast is superior at distributing actual applications, like software, or fast-changing information (like news, or the latest tech innovation, or Fedora Core X, or odd bits of information that are only of rare use. (For example, in your example, the reason you go to Google to find out how to purify water is that in your Western life you are very unlikely to need to do it. But you don't go to Google to learn the rules for driving a car, or how to add, because that's a ubiquitous skill that you learned long before you learned about Google. In a country where purifying water is a top and general priority, people are going to learn about it from their parents and neighbors, not Google.)
None of these seem especially relevant to folks in poor countries. What they really need is access to basic information that is already well understood (how to dig a safe well, how to prevent AIDS transmission, reliable accounting and credit practises, basic nutrition). These things are actually very well conveyed by book.
The one exception I can see is that the Internet is also good for two-way communication between people well-seperated, and places like Africa are often short of experts of one stripe or another. I can see how it might do some good if you could have interactive, or semi-interactive software, that might let a back-and-forth go on to teach people stuff better. Say, an adaptive teaching program that could teach a range of students, from the barely getting started to the most sophisticated. A book tends to be a one-size-fits-all solution, which does not serve the spectrum of students in the real world. That's why you need a teacher, too, to customize the learning. But software could, in part, replace the teacher at lower cost. Or serve as some kind of faux triage nurse that could ask some questions about your symptoms and find out whether you should just rest up and drink more fluids -- or whether you really should make that 2 day trip to the clinic. These things would be good.
Not food, definitely not. When the current president of Brazil was elected, one of his campaign themes was the so-called "zero hunger" program, for distributing food to the allegedly starving poor people of Brazil. Much to his embarrassment, after he came to power, the Brazilian federal agency in charge of statistics published the results of a study showing that among the poorest people in Brazil obesity is a much worse problem than hunger. The managers for that agency were severely reprimanded and ordered to not publish anything without checking with the president's office first.
About teachers, you may have a point. Lack of proper education is certainly one of the main cause of poverty in poor countries, after high taxes and excessive government spending. But computers are one very important education aid that's missing in poor countries' schools. In these days, someone who's not able to use a computer is untrained for almost any decent job anywhere in the world.
You all seem to assume they are going to use these laptops for surfing ? ... or electricity.
Getting fast Internet anywhere besides North America, Europe or Far East is almost impossible. Are they going to use one dial-up connection for the whole class ? That is, if school has a phone line
I realize most /.'ers have no training in education, so let me...um...educate you.
.ppt-type aids with every lesson, which can be instantly transfered to the student's laptops, or emailed to absent students. What am I saying...if you can't see how much these would benefit the education process, just put a bullet in your head, you nazi cow...
This is not about creating a utopia, feeding the hungry, etc. Most of the anti-$100-laptop posts here focus on those red herrings.
Bottom line, this is about the digital divide. The internet provides access to more information than has ever been collectd in the history of humankind (wiki, etc). Right now, only those with a certain level of wealth have ready access to the internet. Now, don't you say 'they can go the library' or some other lame counterpoint cabal BS...we all know how important using the internet in your time and space is, and telling poor people to just go to the library or whatever is a joke and lame.
As far as the uses in the classroom...what a joke of a counterpoint! There are inifinite possibilities, use your damned imagination. I am a teacher, adn I envision a classroom with
Thank you Dave Raggett
Sounds like: "and the more countries that join the bandwagon, democracy will provide us a better/sleeker world".
or even...
"and the more countries that join the bandwagon, energy will be cheaper for all".
Same paradigm, obivously hasn't worked to date. Move along Nicholas...
Though last MITEF I attended, he was enteraining with his cynicism on the current politicians.
Yeah, sure, the other old, tired, meme: people in poor countries live in refugee camps. I made a comment on this earlier in this story. What you should realize is that CNN does *not* paint an accurate picture of the world outside of the USA, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe. If there isn't a civil war going on, CNN doesn't send a team to report.
If you want to have an idea on how the poorest people of the world live, think about Inglewood in LA or Brooklyn in NY, only poorer. They have more or less the same "western" culture. They listen to Britney Spears on the radio, they watch Harrison Ford on TV. If they are over 18, most of them can drive a car, they know what a remote control is, many have a TV, maybe a VCR too, but they probably can't afford a DVD yet.
If you can't think of the poorest people other than in refugee camp terms, then you are one of the reasons why some refugee camps exist. It's the absence of alternatives that lead to the civil wars that cause refugees to exist. Give cheap laptops to the poor and there will be no more refugee camps.
This project is just wrong on so many levels.
What I would like to see is Mr. Negroponte going out there to a prototype poor 3rd world village and living there for a few months. That would really be all it takes.
BillG is absolutely right in funding malaria research - that's something that a big global sponsor can actually do for the people. That is helping.
Throwing hardware around and providing - for chrissake! - a crank because there's frequent power outages or no power in these areas is just silly.
It reminds me of a classic true story from my home country: When the Empress of Austria asked her staff why people are unhappy, they replied:
"Your Highness, the people are starving".
"Why are the people starving?"
"Your Highness, because the people have no bread."
To which the Empress famously replied: "Let them eat cake, then."
She didn't mean that as a joke - she was just so far removed from reality that she thought cake around the country was probably just as plentiful as in her palace.
The laptop strikes me as a similar idea.
Let me point out the most obvious flaw: There is no internet in remote villages, and if there were, it would be expensive and no one could afford it. So don't introduce this gadget without making available free internet in the 3rd world at the same time.
The intent - providing a good education to _everyone_ - is certainly noble but the execution, frankly, is retarded. I can't help but thinking this was inspired by Diamond Age's learning book - the little computer AI that can teach kids everything they could possibly want to know. Only without the AI or the educational content or even the capability of storing educational content.
I would view this differently if these came with 100G of storage and filled to the brim with the best educational software this world has to offer, starting with english learning software. Then it would have value.
They probably thought they can just use the net as storage but that just doesn't work and besides somebody still has to produce and make available the content. For free.
Y'know, if you'd actually bothered to find out what you're talking about first...
Thank you for posting. This topic seems to be a veritable magnet for people with strong opinions and a complete inability to read or even just watch a video. There also seems to be an assumption that this non-profit effort is taking money out of some of these commentators pockets. Hey, if you have another idea that you think is better then go for it! No one is holding you back. Negroponte has been pursuing this goal for years and there is nothing naive about his effort. I hope more people read about the mesh network architecture that has been built into these laptops and stop parroting the fashionable dismissal of the internet.
Possibly the best aspect of this effort is the chance to avoid the usual corruption that fungible aid has always created. A grey market in these devices needs to be kept in check by treating those with diverted laptops as social pariahs.