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Thailand Government Cancels OLPC Participation
patiwat writes "Thailand's new junta-appointed Education Minister has cancelled Thailand's participation in the One Laptop Per Child project and scrapped a plan to give a 2B1 laptop to every primary school student. He has also cancelled plans to roll out computers and a broadband connection to every single school in Thailand. The cancellation of half a million scholarships for needy students is being studied. He cited the lack of readiness of teachers and the need to focus on basic education standards. "We will not focus too much on technology and materials. We will focus on substance," he said. This comes on the heels of the cancellation of the Thai government's open source policy."
"He cited the lack of readiness of teachers and the need to focus on basic education standards."
This guy needs to manage my Data Center. It is a well known thought (from a sysadmin point of view) that throwing hardware at an undefined problem may mask the issue for a time, but it does not 'usually' solve the problem.
High technology CAN be a liability if it isn't managed correctly.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
250,000 less to show up on EBay.
Hopefully, /.'ers and others won't look upon this as an
Open Source failure, it isn't. It's (in my opinion) more of a
triumph somewhere of sanity... Technology has it's place, but a
laptop for every child smacks of the program's hubris and less of
a sane approach to helping poor countries.
I think they show real insight when fearing little return on the effort because teachers are poorly trained. Heck, even in wealthy countries teachers consistently have no computer smarts (my sister is a teacher, she hasn't a clue!). Compound that with a techie-Linux platform (I love Linux, but for the mass public, with minimal background and training?) and this program was running off the rails from the beginning.
There are excellent examples of schools in the United States where huge investments in technology for schools showed no tangible gains in students' profieciencies and at the same time examples of poor schools shifting emphasis to basics, discipline, and community with strong academic results.
Technology for technology's sake is just that, but not much of a salve for third world economies, at least not by giving a laptop to every child. I think this is actually a positive development because it has (had) so many ways it could have gone wrong allowing companies like Microsoft down the road to point fingers at Open Source as the culprit, and if only Microsoft had been chosen to save the world.
(For the record, this whole OLPC effort would be just as much of a train wreck with Windows, just a whole heck of a lot more expensive.)
You have to admit, that man has some. To cancel such a high-visibility project like this... Wow. Especially while admitted that they were ploys to get elected. Wow. Even while admitting that it was an election-winning campaign, he cuts it.
Not that I necessarily disagree with him. If those schools are worried about their power bills, giving the kids laptops and high speed internet is NOT the solution. Maybe the cuts necessary to pay the power bills could have come from some other crazy scheme, though. I dunno. I haven't seen their budget.
At least he didn't mention starving children, though.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
OLPC in Thailand would have been a real coup
I think this is good news. As others have pointed out, poor people with computers will be tempted to hire themselves out as turing-testable spammers, sleezing URL's and keywords into blogs and comment pages and bulletin boards the world over.
Better to invest the money in basic infrastructure: the $100 laptop is not a key to education, but rather a cargo-cult curse that encourages developing countries and their citizens to expect pre-packaged solutions from the Great White Hunters.
Bellhead
Democracy off. Chaos On.
I don't see cancellation as being necessary. Perhaps a more moderate, phased in approach would work. Start with magnet type schools and go from there. Taking time to do it right makes sense but to outright cancel seems extreme.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
An education minister that's taking serious steps to increase the quality of education in his country instead of just throwing money at useless projects? How do we get him appointed to the US cabinet?
So sad. And my company was about to send 5,000 high paying tech jobs over there. Oh wait...no. That's right, the thought never crossed our minds.
Not quite nailing on the head as he's not going into enough detail, but he's pretty close. The Thai people know better than to go for OLPC, and this education minister is using no blanket statement to cover it.
Did you see the poll?
There was no poll -- who is asking the citizens? It doesn't matter what a poll says or what the citizens want. Unless, of course, the generals decide it matters.
I'm sure the money would be much better spent on basic education and materials than on computer hardware. The very idea that giving computers to children will somehow make them learn more is just stupid. Maybe there is a very small minority of kids that would take the computer and hack around and learn stuff, but the vast majority of the kids are going abuse the computers (both physically and software-wise) and not get anything out of them but smoke.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The real problem with the OLPC is that we have literally millions of good machines we are dumping as waste, calling them "obsolete". Instead of a stripdown-meltdown environmentally unfriendly "recycling" process, wouldn't it make more sense to organize a program for reusing perfectly good equipment instead? The targets of the OLPC project need food, electricity, and medicene much more than some ivory tower dream of sending poor kids new equipment that is no better what most in the US are just putting in landfills. The OLPC seems to me to just be a waste of resources
"We will not focus too much on technology and materials. We will focus on substance," he said.
Translation: More Microsoft Office, no games (except mine sweeper).
The minister's points are valid. What good is a nation of kids who can point and click if they cannot write a decent sentence or do math without a calculator? Once the educational system is meeting certain basic standards of education in literacy and mathematics (the "three Rs" - reading, writing, and arithmetic), then taking the education of the children to the next level with computers is warranted, but until then, giving computers to a bunch of semi-literate kids with poor math skills is a stupid idea.
I didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite". It's not going to hurt these kids to get a good grounding in the basics and get the computers a little later in their education.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
"We will screw our dear students by not giving them much needed educational materials. We will further screw our students by teaching them stupid, useless stuff. Because we think we cannot compete with the tech services offered by nations such as India et al, we will provide the so-called developed world with cheap, undereducated, unimaginative lumpenproletariat who will not and cannot act against oppression-thru-sweatshops. Therefore, we will be able to compete with other developing nations to provide you the cheapest possible labor."
Believe me when I tell you: I know how such a government thinks...
It hasn't even started yet. It may be a failure, but to declare it a failure is like declaring who has won the 2010 World Cup today.
The OLPC may go to more places than developing countries. There are a number of places that are doing a trial of the system.
With Libya's order going through they have enough to get serious volumes being made. Once they show that then other countries, including richer developed countries may be interested. OLPCs may work well as text book readers. How much does the average school system in a US spend on textbooks per student per year? Who can say now whether some of these uses will take off.
The OLPC may fail, but it hasn't failed yet and it is silly to describe it as having failed before it's even been tried.
In the world of politics, in ANY nation, this is a very understandable result. Computers can and do change the world every day, including enriching the imagination and lives of many, many children - but for all the wonders of the world of computers, they are quite simply NOTHING in the face of basic education needed to allow them to both exist and be useful to a society. Not that such education isn't present in Thailand, or that computers couldn't elevate or create new possibilities if made more common - but against the political landscape of the same resources being used for more basic education, even the cheapest electronic computing tools would appear as naive pie-in-the-sky fixes to a important set of problems. The importance of making technology available to everyone is a huge step towards advancing a nation towards excellence - but politically most people everywhere will vote first for the basic health and happiness of the everyday people around them, before striving for technological excellence.
Also, this isn't a permanent dynamic in a variety of ways. With a GDP of around $8,600 per person, both the affordability of more and more capable computers and the income per person can reach further towards eachother in a rather quick order. Also, despite the slight blow to open source in government, the growing private and educational sectors can pursue the technological excellence that the government at large cannot politically take up.
$100 computers will offer hope, and widespread open source adoption will bring deep innovation and economic improvement anywhere - but weigh that against $100 spent in many other ways, or the concentrated organized effort and political costs needed to push open source over commercial software wherever possible, and you don't end up with something politically possible now. That shouldn't be a shock.
I do think it sucks if anyone sees this as a blow against open source - but I don't see it that way. I do think it hopeful in a sense that governments can see the ideal behind open source development and emerging cheap technologies that can improve people's lives - but I don't think we should expect such things to be used as more than leverage in debates until there are no other cultural issues seen in competition against action other than just commercial value V. open source values. And at that point, no legislation will really be needed.
Ryan Fenton
Which only goes to show, communism is DeAd
OTOH, he *could* just be planning to replace "get high marks if you wear a short skirt" with people that actually care about teaching. Teaching in Thailand won't make you rich, but the free healthcare is what draws, and that doesn't always equate to capable people doing the job.
I'm disappointed, but this guy is 100% new AFAIK - it's actually too early to know what he'll do.
Insert
Ok, the student has now his new and shiny computer that can calculate tanh(0!/2). How much useful this will be if student doesn't understand what this notation means? And how much of a computer does your teacher need to teach math? Aside from the most basic arithmetic, all math is symbolic, and you don't need any computer to calculate integrals. An engineer does benefit from a differential equation solver in his pocket, but a student does not need to know the numeric answer; his task usually is to come up with an analytical solution that demonstrates his understanding of issues. Most math doesn't have a single, precise answer, and can't even be visualized (try to visualize an inverse matrix, NxM, for example.) And when a few, very few, students progress to the point they are ready to try some practical math, they will have access to a computer. Most students, though, will fall by the wayside - not everyone wants to be a programmer.
$500 is not expensive but also is not cheap. There are better uses for that money.
As well, how much can an elementary-school kid get out of a laptop besides playing some games and doing e-mail? Playing games and sending e-mail can be learned in a day. They do not require the kid to own a laptop. He can learn that mindless simple stuff on the library's computer.
The story might be different with a high-school student. He would have enough mathematical knowledge or scientific reasoning to do some nifty projects for the local science fair. Alternatively, he could also use the laptop to write insightful political research papers solving the Iraq quagmire in which Washington is stuck.
The Thai government should consider buying a laptop for all freshmen in high school instead of the pouty kids in elementary school.
Of course, the first computer lesson in high school is "Here is how you write biting commentary in Slashdot. The Slashdotters love that stuff."
These laptops are designed to replace textbooks. The infrastructure required to print, distribute and inventory paper textbooks is bigger and more expensive than you might think. The OLPC devices are designed to be simple, rugged and self networking. Abandoning them will doom the country to an expensive past and yield the same results as it always has. No learning, no bread.
You, posting here on Slashdot are data rich. When was the last time you needed a library for anything? Sooner or later, everyone will realize how much cheaper and easier digital publishing really is.
Next thing you know, they will start pushing creationism.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The guy sounds quite rational there. I mean, there's bad education and then there's complete and utter lack of education. If you're in a country where 10% of people can't read and write (1% in USA, Canada and European countries, 0.5% in Russia) - you'll be better off if you spend the money on teaching them how to read and write. No fancy hardware is necessary - just a pen, a book and some paper. If you're in a country where 95+ percent of people are literate but computing is not easily accessible to high schoolers - that one can benefit from OLPC type program a lot more. Things are incomparably worse in India (which is why I guess it declined to participate early on). 30% of male and 52% of female population can't read or write. In Nigeria, percentages are 25 and 40% correspondingly. In Brazil - 14 and 13% correspondingly. In Argentina - 3 and 3%. Based on this, out of four countries in OLPC project (Brazil, Argentina, Thailand and Nigeria), only one country - Argentina - can potentially benefit from spending on OLPC more than from spending on basic education. In order to run, you first need to learn how to walk.
High levels of government corruption in participating countries is not a coincidence either. Someone will make a lot of money on this, and you can bet it won't be teachers.
I didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite".
Your schools could afford textbooks and libraries. That's why most of your peers are literate. Those things don't work where you can't afford them. Today, you consider electronic publications cheaper and better than paper publications. It's the same way for schools and that's the point of the OLPC program.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Thailand ministry slams open source. OLPC is all open source. Figure it out.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olpc of children holding up identical laptops, and I think
Socialism! Communism!
How about 1 computer kiosk per village? See where that takes us.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
the one where Thailand announces a major plan to outfit all schools and public services with a massive rollout of Vista and Office 2007... all sponsored by a major price deal with Microsoft...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Yes, we are a fairly intelligent creature, the human. BUT WE ARE WAAAAAAY MORE FRIGGIN' INTELLIGENT SINCE we started using tools available to us. First the "pen" and paper. Those are the bare essentials, but we've come a long way since then. Give them the friggin' computers and be amazed at what they can do. Tools do matter.
This guy seems to have his priorities right. Seems to me like we haven't yet finished the One Pair of Shoes Per Child Project, Clean Running Water Per Child Project and the Effective Sewage Per Child Project. I know very little about the OLPC project, but it sounds like a pet engineering project that's trying to justify itself with a philanthropic spin. Most of the kids that will receive these computers would probably rather have a bike anyway. I was fortunate to have both a bike and access to a computer by the age of twelve, and the bike was more useful to me. Maybe I'm just experiencing a little irony after reading an earlier article about Electronics Waste in Africa...
Don't believe it? Go look for yourself. The OLPC FAQ page brings us such disarmingly trite generalities as:
That's right! Little Juan, Choudary, and Byung-Sun need a "tool" with which to think -- and I thought it was called a "brain". No, they need a window into the world, and a way to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration! Never mind that all of that can be accomplished *without* a $100 laptop in the hands of each child. Want a window into the world? Get them a good library with a few current events publications, and a computer lab with a few internet connected computers. You can build a heck of a good public school library (or 2 or 3) for $50 million dollars
But wait -- there's more in the FAQ!
Where to begin?? To compare a $100 dollar laptop with a pencil that literally costs pennies is ridiculous. And the final argument, that warm-fuzzy-hot-chocolate-lump-in-your-throat claim... "It's important that the kids OWN something to maintain through love... and care." Awwwww.... how can we say NO to that?! Once again, footballs, dolls, and books don't cost $100 per child.
Your final claim: Makes my mind boggle. By this same logic, anything that hasn't been tried, no matter how stupid, far-fetched, or wrong-headed, should be tried. After all, if it hasn't been tried, it's silly to predict that it will fail, right? Might as well just spend the 50 million dollars and see what happens!
50 million dollars (500,000 laptops * $100) is a LOT of money to gamble with in a developing nation. I'd much rather see them spend that money on projects that have been shown to have a significant positive impact on educational quality -- smaller class sizes; basic health care so that kids don't miss weeks of school; upgrading school facilities with good lights, good water, and a reasonable amount of climate control -- good roofs to keep the rain out, ventilation to keep things cooler in summer, heaters to keep things cooler in winter. Save the OLPC project until it's actually shown that a laptop in the hands of each child will benefit them, rather than wasting money, wasting time, and putting yet another cement block around the neck of developing countries.
Some links in the story submission were deleted by the editors.
The "junta" being referred to is the Council for National Security, a clique of the Thai army that seized power in the 19 September coup.
The Education Minister is Wijit Srisa-arn, a former Opposition member of parliament.
http://en.wikipedia/wiki/
...thailand has announced that a project designed to be able to provide thousands of books to individual students at a cost of around 150$ has been cancelled because it was too expensive and not technologically sound. They have decided that the old way of paying 5 bucks and up for single books made from paper is just way the bestus.
insightful / informative
Average literacy rate in Thailand is 92.6. Which means 7.3% of people can't read. That's one out of every thirteen people, completely shut off from education. If you're telling me that giving underpowered, incompatible laptops to 5% of the kids is better than teaching 7.3% of the population to read/write - I guess we'll have to disagree.
Gotta agree with Mr. Gates here. The primary vehicle for computerization in these countries will be the cell phone. It has sufficient processing power and connectivity is built in. The infrastructure is already available in a lot of places. Two things are missing from most cell phones right now - QWERTY keyboard and TV out. They can be added easily and cheaply.
We are calling them obsolete because they are. OLPCs use very little electricity. An old refurbished PC would use up so much electricity that an OLPC would pay for itself in a year or two.
In case you haven't heard the news, energy prices are up and making electricity requires burning stuff, which in turns releases CO2 in the atmosphere.
"Mordak, Preventer of Information Services" got promoted to high places.
Free cars but no gasoline nor road, or with all the roads built but no cars nor gasoline (like North Korea).
You might be interested to watch this. These OLPC laptops are simply Mr Kay's "Dynabooks" with (heh) inferior software. And they are cheaper than the textbooks they replace.
OLPC original definitely is not just a text book reader, dude. By considering redirecting the target market, seems like you're admitting the idea of OLPC in developing countries is a failure.
Cannibal Mercenary.
If they're not using them, can we have them?
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
I think textbooks are a bad example to show where olpc gives a financial gain since the printing cost of a textbook is ~$5-$10, most of the cost is in the copyright.
Because the OLPC has lower power requirements, making it better suited to situations where electricity supplies are limited. If the lights dim when you turn on a few of those old clunkers (which will be fine, since they all have switched-mode power supplies and can run off anything from 160 to 300 volts, DC to 1kHz), or a substation fuse blows when you turn on more than one machine at once (those switched-mode supplies can draw tens of amps for a brief instant at power-up), then that might make you unpopular.
Not that it's an inherently bad idea to ship refurbished computers to some people. But the OLPC will be more useful in more situations than used kit.
What's stopping you from taking a year out to work with a programme where you will help the locals sort through the e-waste we're currently dumping in Africa to find any usable parts and assemble working computers (and probably other appliances) which could then be sold? All you'll need are a fine-tipped soldering iron, a digital storage oscilloscope, a known-working computer, a good set of tools, a generator and a few CDs of Open Source software. Be prepared to write the whole lot off if you don't make enough money to replace everything within the first year. You will also have to teach the locals how to do the work after you have gone home. It won't interfere too much with the OLPC project anyway, since OLPC's goals are different.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A military junta is the ideal form of governmet to support Microsoft, or the MPAA, or the RIAA.
Maybe we should try that here.
Wait.........
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Sometimes the total is greater than the sum of the parts.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
A military junta is considering NOT empowering enterprising kids with some level of technological savvy? Call an ambulance, I'm having a heart attack!!! Next thing you know our own unelected military dictatorship will let all the black people drown, and make sure that 25% of the children in THIS country live below the poverty line.
Nah, that'll never happen, this is AMERICA!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Umm. I can't visualize the inverse of an m x n matrix. Only square matrices are invertible anyway.
when they're supposed to end up as sex slaves in Pattaya, huh Mr. Junta "Education" Minister.
I am a math teacher in Florida. My anecdotal evidence is reflected in data that is becoming apparent above and over the F-U-D of whatever devil group you wish to posit (Corporate Blah-Blah/Education Lobby/Gummint Know-alls, etc.). We are awash in technolgy and the worse for it. When you come across a 17 year old who does not know what "8 * 7" is, and is ANGRY when you expect him to add "4 + 1" (YES, really!) without a ca'calatuh, something is bad, bad wrong. Yet, that is the way it is. Last week, I watched a class for a teacher for a few moments and saw an otherwise happy normal floundering around finding the mean (That's "average"...) of 6 numbers. He was in front of a Dell Pentium 4 AND had a scientific graphing calculator that could run the banking systems in four small countries simultaneously and he HAD NO CLUE!! We do not demand things of our students today because we wish to "bypass" those dreary rote things so we can get to *High*Level*Thinking* . What nonsense. You would not allow a doctor to perform surgery on you without knowing the requirements of his trade. You would not allow a pilot to fly a plane in which you were traveling unless he was completely qualified and certified. Yet, we throw a ca'calatuh in front of a third grader, do not demand ability to spell and write a complete sentence and demand only that the student feel good about himself. Keep up the good work, Junta! Charles
You seem to be making the mistake that (every/the) receiving country is totally in a deplorable state and has needs lower in maslov's pyramid. For those country OLPC does not make sense, and these countries/regions do not contract the OLPC project to sell them those laptops. But there are countries that have their basic needs fixed and think they might profit from this project. And they are not basing their investments on a english-language PR website, that is for the donors, hence the sentimental tones.
I think the problem is not hardware for the infrastructure. That is something some well spend money/training can solve. The problem is in the actual curriculum. Where are the books/texts these kids need to read on them. Who is going to write those? What is this going to do the rest of the local market for educational books? This content is instrumental in the succes of the project, but I have seen very little info on how they think to solve that.
50 Billion is a lot of money anywhere, not only in OLPC countries.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Thailand, US, EU, China ..., personally I am glad to see we are not alone in producing an exploitable semiliterate unquestioning workforce that when youthful, idealistic, and patriotic can be utilized for global/local dogmatic adventures of people-popping and village-pillage. I can better understand how things are being adjusted to work in Darfur, and were working so well in Afghanistan, before the US Soldiers kicked the BinLie-Taliban out, but what happened in Iraq {%~]?
NOTE: Warriors have a code, (1) Do your duty honorably, (2) Death before cowardice, (3) We are the FAMILY - ALWAYS FAITHFUL, never do we abandoned family, give up hope, or die alone. (4) Warriors are responsible for individual personal actions. (5) Politicians, and Generals are in command and responsible for the war and failures.
I will alway support our Warriors, fuck the damn politics!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Communism was, in theory, to come in stages. Everything being run by the state was an earlier stage, which was supposed to be taken over by the people without government.
This never happened because it is a fundamentally flawed ideology, not because they were being inconsistent. You could never get past the government phase because 1) people don't want to be under communism so you will never get to the phase where everyone is voluntarily under communism 2) when the profit motive is taken away, you are left with laziness 3) power corrupts. You'll never get to the next phase because those in authority don't want to give up their authority.
So communism was tried. It was and is flawed.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Actually they scraped the plan to give away 2b1 computers in exchange for giving away 3b2s ;)
Try earlier. Try Wilson era.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The Party in the Soviet Union and its satellites was called the Communist party. The party in China remains a Communist party. Every attempt at state sanctioned communism has resulted in a totalitarian government for the simple reason that people are dissatisfied with their 'fair share' and always want more. Capitalism satisfies this basic need, communism does not. Therefore, you need guns to the people's collective heads to make them live peacefully under a Marxist government.
Your attempts at word mincing fail miserably at altering that conclusion. You have the same old tired argument every leftist has had since the fall of the Soviet empire: "they didn't do it right, the next time *WE* will".
Sure.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Because the library is still a better source for a lot of information than the internet:
I'll conceede that the internet is better for some topics where time is very important; but there are many, many more subjects for which the web is a poor substitute for a library.
Finally, and unrelated to why the library is better for most things -- I prefer paper. I spend 8+ hours every day looking at CRT or LCD monitors at work. I don't want to look at yet another monitor.
"In Thailand, Microsoft was the first corporation to be nominated for a royal decoration award from the king"
What possibly could a software vendor teach educators about education .
davecb5620@gmail.com
I love how on slashdot Open Source automatically means good and awesome.
many local governments have recieved grants to purchase Blue-Ray players for their clasrooms in order to watch "An Inconvenient Truth" in all its hi-def glory... for the betterment of the childrens education of course.
Was Thailand a member of NATO or otherwise a US ally during the Cold War? No. Therefore, it is not a "first world" country. Was it a member of the Eastern Bloc? No. Therefore, it is not a "second world" country. What's left? The "third world," aka "everywhere else." Thailand is a third world country.
By the way, as far as categorizing countries by prosperity goes, I've heard of really poor countries being called "fourth world," not third.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I almost wish we hadn't beaten the Soviets. They were such a good object lesson for foolish people.
The truth of the Soviet experience was that the work force was drunk on the job because no one gave a crap. That's the truth of communism. If the work doesn't immediately benefit you, you don't care.
All that crap about altruism is a bunch of hooey when your personal livelihood is at stake. Maslow, baby.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Of an old fashioned US intervention. Man, its been so many years since sucha clasic jerkwatter intervention by the CIA to protect american interests, in this case, Microsoft.
Its Nicaragua or Chile all over again. Boy that Thai government was shurely against microsoft wasnt it?
NO SIG
I sometimes wonder what they're teaching you Americans in school about U.S.-Democracy, European Democracy and Communism(s).
Yes, they do. Books alone cust more than that per child and per year (let me clarify that so that you don't put words on my mount too: (child * year)^(-1)).
No, but any stupid thing that wan't tried hasn't failed yet. Is it that hard to read without jumpping to conclusions?
No, it's not. 50 million dollars is very cheap for a government program. Almost all governemnts on the world can afford to gamble that, even more on something with the potential of OLPC. It is probably orders of magnitude lower from what Tailand spend on software licences every year.
Rethinking email
liberal commie pinko?
I've been called that for not agreeing 100% with Bush.
This comes as no surprise. The Thai government is notorious for "keeping the Thai man down" to preserve an economic feudal system that has the business-government-mafia hybrid elite maintaining a level poverty as they rake profit of every private and public venture. Only six years of elementary school is mandatory for Thai children. It is prohibitively expensive to send the kids to middle/high school much less college. In this light, I agree that money should be spent bolstering fundamental education, ie- free through high school - at least. However, the beneficient will of the government is suspect. Even with the corruption and some very bad ideas of the deposed Thaksin administration, there were a few good key things promoted during that time (since repealed). The most notable in my mind were the 100,000 baht (US$2250) 0%-interest loans for small businesses that were to be repaid at a 2 year mark. Police and local mafia got their fare share of the pie but it enabled blue-collar entrepreneurs a way out of $200/month jobs with 6 to 7 day work weeks at 12 hours a day. Thailand is still much better off than many of its neighbors with an estimated $200 a month average salary. Compare this with $75/month in China or $40 a month in Indonesia. --dk
Add Thailand to the list of countries who will in coming years be asking "why aren't we competitive?"
Goodbye, Thailand. See you at the World Bank when you're asking for relief.
(and if we keep up our 'most children left behind' programs, we may be right there beside you)
- I am made of meat.
Allow me to throw some facts at you about Thailand, all taken from the CIA World Factbook entry on Thailand, which I think we can agree is a reasonably accurate source.
- Population of Thailand, ages 0 - 14: 14,242,700, 2006 est.
- Budget of the government of Thailand: $30.64 billion in revenues, 2005 est.
Let's crunch these numbers for a few seconds. Assume an even distribution of children across the entire 0 - 14 age range, and furthermore, assume the government decides it will begin giving laptops only to those students whose age is greater than or equal to 6 years, and less than 11 years -- age range 6 - 10. That's ~5,000,000 laptops.Total cost to Thailand at US$100 per laptop: $500,000,000.00
This means that that spending ~$500 million on OLPC means that 1.5 to 2% of of all government revenues are being spent on the gamble that giving each student a laptop will mean that they somehow get a better education. And it's just that -- a gamble. There's no evidence that it will have the intended results.
And this fuzzy thinking is exactly my problem with OLPC. What, exactly, is the "potential of OLPC" that you're touting? I see lots of potential for abuse, waste, and fraud -- when your average per-capita yearly income is $8,600, an extra $100 from the sale of a laptop sure could go a long way. I frankly see very little upside that can't be had by spending the same money on training more qualified teachers, hiring more qualified teachers to reduce class sizes (both of these are proven techniques that do have large amounts of data to support their effectiveness, especially in poor school systems), and putting a few internet-connected computer terminals in the school's library for community use.
How is giving a laptop to every school-aged child in Thailand -- at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars -- going to result in better-educated kids? Nobody seems to be able to answer that. And if it were such a benefit, why haven't far richer countries all around the world already implemented a program like this for their own children? In the US and most other "First World" countries, a $100 "educational laptop" would, barely be a blip on the radar of most family's incomes & most school districts' budgets.
Read the wiki (wiki.laptop.org), not the web site.
We in the West sometimes give ourselves a hard time, forever fearing that we are about to be overtaken by "workaholic" Asians. Well, that may or may not happen but, if it does, those workaholic Asians won't be Thais.
Before any country starts handing out laptops, they should ensure that their populace has a good command of English, Mandarin, Japanese and other important trading languages. India made a similar mistake by ramping up their internationally-facing call center industry without realizing how limited their supply of understandable English-speakers was.
Communism only equates to evil in the US, in the rest of the world ( and that includes western countries, ) communism doesn't have the same negative connotations. They might of course disagree with communism, but that is not quite the same thing.
One benefit of people living in the jungle and not getting addicted to modern technology is that they will be able to stay self reliant and uncontrolled by centralized power entitites. When everyone in the world owns a PC that does daily "windows updates" from Global High Command in Redmond, that's the end of liberty and human freedom in the world. Perhaps some children can be a lot happier without a laptop.
"Thailand's new junta-appointed Education MinisterIt's a good thing they appointed this new guy, 'cause the former minister was really screwing things up!
50 million dollars (500,000 laptops * $100) is a LOT of money to gamble with in a developing nation. I'd much rather see them spend that money on projects that have been shown to have a significant positive impact on educational quality -- smaller class sizes; basic health care so that kids don't miss weeks of school; upgrading school facilities with good lights, good water, and a reasonable amount of climate control -- good roofs to keep the rain out, ventilation to keep things cooler in summer, heaters to keep things cooler in winter. Save the OLPC project until it's actually shown that a laptop in the hands of each child will benefit them, rather than wasting money, wasting time, and putting yet another cement block around the neck of developing countries.
All that other stuff you said sounds like a fucking lot of money, way more that $100 per child. Also, the ability to address those problems has existed for decades or centuries, whereas the laptop is something only recently made available by a lot of specific efforts and general advances in technology. The average slashdot user probably has no ability or interest in improving water supplies in a random foreign country, but might take more of an interest in helping kids from the third-world if there's a geek angle to it.
Another user points out that books are expensive- one book per child might be less than $100, but how about 5 or 10? With a laptop, any number of books could be supplied to every student electronically.
At the very most, you could argue instead of buying all the laptops at once you could by a few thousand for a random selection of schools as a test (though there's probably something about the fact that by 'flooding the market' with them there would be no resale or trade in the laptops).
the bigger problem is not access, but the ability to extract and synthesize information in useful ways. what is needed is training in first-world information habits, rather than hardware which cannot find any use.
...should really help on a better scale.
The coin operated kiosk can have
- bookmarks to local and global sites for dsl access
- project gutenberg on hdd
- archives of local newspapers on hdd
- attached printer/copy machine with per page charge
They need to change the OLPC business plan
"The cancellation of half a million scholarships for needy students is being studied."
In typical Slashdot fashion everyone jumps on the One Laptop part of the news post but what about these students scholarships?!
"Sorry Billy you can't go to university to do that IT course and get a good job because some idiot thinks open source is buggy. Well get back to work on the farm with no chance of a good life!"
Andrew,
Bangkok, Thailand
The funny thing is, other than a lot of sound & fury, signifying nothing, I don't see too many people here on Slashdot rushing to support the project, either. It's something that sounds good on paper, but there's little to no hard evidence to show that it's actually something that will be beneficial to students on any level. I keep asking someone to show me their evidence for this, and all I'm hearing in response is, "OMG STFU, it's a w1ck3d c001 project, I wish I had one."
And if you've read anything I've written so far on the topic, that's exactly what I am arguing. The effectiveness of the program needs to be demonstrated before it's decided that we need to roll it out to hundreds of millions of kids everywhere, at a cost of billions of dollars. Until there's some hard evidence that shows the kids with laptops have better educational outcomes than those without, it's just as likely to turn into a "THINK OF THE KIDS!" waste of time & money.
I'm not against the concept of giving kids laptops if it makes sense. So far, I've seen no evidence that it makes sense. If you have some evidence to share, I'd be happy to take it into consideration.
Note: I am fully aware that the Amish of 2006 are not the same as the Amish of the 1800s.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*