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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.
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.
Which part of "military coup" did you not understand?
More likely, he is canceling this because the last thing a military dictatorship wants is informed citizens.
What surprises me is how few people really disagree with you here. I think there's a growing sense that OLPC is a boondoggle, and it is to their credit that more and more geeks are realizing it.
It occurs to me that one of the stories told about widespread internet use is that people would be able to do things like "look up how to fix their irrigation systems on the web". Well, I've been using the web since Mosaic 2.0, and I'm much less able to fix a truck, repair an irrigation system, care for a garden, or do a whole bunch of other things that I know a lot of other people who aren't using the net know how to do. If I want to learn how to fix a truck, I might use my laptop to find a school or a place to do it - but then I'm just replacing the yellow pages. I'm more likely to find someone in my own personal social network who has the skills I want to acquire, and hang out with them.
The one practical thing that net connectivity has given me is access to recipes for cooking that I didn't have before. If the OLPC enables children in the developing world to cook eggplant parmigiana, I guess that's a good thing, but it's probably a lot less ambitious than what the creators had in mind.
The early zeal of the project isn't even a matter of "having a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail," it's more like "having a cantaloupe and thinking it's a hammer, and then throwing your cantaloupe at vaguely nail-shaped kittens."
It depends on the person.
Some people aren't into DIY, so they use the web to look for someone to buy from.
Some people are into DIY and use the web for things other than shopping.
In my case, some of the things I have used the web for are:
Probably not the things a person in a developing country might look for, but that is because I don't live in a developing country. It does demonstrate that the web is a useful reference library, and I contend that the web contains information that is useful to a person in a developing country, that they would otherwise miss out on.
For example I've heard of villagers using the web to monitor world prices for various crops they grow, placing them in a stronger bargaining position when the people they sell to try to understate prices.
I don't think there is any question that the developing world needs the Internet. The question is how to best get it to them. Many people seem to view the Internet as a luxury, which it is if used for entertainment or amusement. The flip side of the Internet is textbooks, meteorological reports, market prices and the like, which are necessities for anything but a subsistence life style. Maybe people in developed countries take these necessities for granted, so don't notice the Internet's role in providing them?
If not OLPC what then? Information can be distributed on paper but as the volume and timeliness of information picks up the Internet is cheaper. OLPC seems like a cute misnomer for "Internet without infrastructure".
It is not permitted to fail in a Thai school. So, the teachers either keep testing and testing until a pass is obtained, or they simply make the lowest grade a pass, and distribute the rest of the marks accordingly. I know, because I was forced to do this. The Thais need to focus on sham. And as far as I know, the Thai university system is not accredited.
In the provinces, things are the same, except not nearly as wired.