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OLPC Project Rollout Begins In Uruguay
Acer500 writes "The One Laptop Per Child project became a reality Thursday in Uruguay, as the 160 children of school number 24 in the humble town of Cardal received their XO computers. The learning tools came directly from the hands of president Tabaré Vazquez. It has become a matter of national pride that Uruguay is the first country to realize the project's goal. The target is that by 2009, every school-age child in Uruguay will have one, and an initial 15 million dollars have already been allocated to the project.
From the newspaper articles: 'The happiness of having a PC in their hands, some of them for the first time, had the kids in ecstasy, which didn't wait to turn on their computers, introduce their personal information (required the first time they're turned on), choose the screen colors, and start experimenting with them. What initially made them more enthusiastic was the possibility of taking photographs and filming each others with the included webcams.'" More information below.
According to the unofficial blog of the Uruguayan project, named proyecto Ceibal, the infrastructure for wireless is not yet in place but will be provided in the next few days by the national telco ANTEL. No photos of the event have been posted online, but you can see an institutional video on Youtube. One interesting point is that it has not yet been decided that the XO will be the laptop of choice for the entire project. Two other companies want to be considered: Intel, with their Classmate PC, and Israeli-manufactured ITP-C. In a press conference, Intel manager for the southern cone Esteban Galluzzi went as far as to compare the XO to a Pentium II, and stressed that the Classmate is able to run Windows XP. As advisor and local guru Juan Grompone stated, 'who will ultimately benefit from this is education?' This will be an interesting test to see if the OLPC project meets its intended goals of 'learning learning'. Let's hope this project is the means that will foster among some of the children the desire to learn and to tinker."
I agree with you in part, regarding the studies showing laptop aided development in developed countries has little, or even negative impact. However in areas where there is no ready access to technology, and other teaching materials such as books are expensive, then the concept of having a cheap way of distributing content to children and of giving them access to technology may actually be very beneficial. Although this shouldn't be seen as the only thing we should be doing to close the digital divide.
The OLPC project hasn't just been sold as an educational tool to politicians, it's also been sold as an economic one.
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Not only is it more than twice the price, the Classmate PC is vastly inferior. Let me list the ways (stats taken from Wikipedia):
-XO has a 1200x900 screen which can be flipped around (tablet style) and converted into ultra-high resolution grayscale for displaying text. The refresh rate can automatically adjust (down to 0hz) to save battery power. The Classmate PC has an ordinary 800x480 LCD.
-XO has a camera. Classmate doesn't. This article shows that the kids obviously like the camera.
-XO has a large trackpad that can be used as a graphics tablet. Classmate has a standard trackpad.
-XO operating system interface was designed from the ground up for this purpose. Classmate uses Windows XP Embedded.
-XO promotes the concept of Free software. Classmate has a freakin' Trusted Computing Module installed!
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
You are forgetting a one very important question, namely: would the money spend at otherwise have a bigger return. It may be trendy to produce your own computers and keep as much money as you possible can circulating in your own country, it even may boost your national pride, but it will probably not be the smartest move to make. The smart move to make, in developing and under developed countries is to use the money to industrialize, namely: opening mines, building factories, building dams, building power plants, building roads and railroads, these all have very much higher returns for the whole economy.
It should also be pointed out that people in developed countries enjoy higher quality of life, because A) infrastructure build in last 200 years, and B) specialising on certain task and performing them better than any other or most other places. So keeping as much money circulating your own economy is not the thing where to aim, but to be better at manufacturing or better yet designing things is a key to succeed in a global economy.
On a different note, I also would like applaud Uruguayan efforts introducing OLPC to school children. OLPC can be a good step to educate their future workforce to be better suited on industrial and manufacturing industries: i.e. making a pulp or paper mill to work, or operating a nuclear plant requires having educated workforce.
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I find it disturbing that such focus is put on third world children when a significant number of children in the U.S. and other developed countries do not have access to a similiar device or good educational opportunities. It's a shared failure of Western governments and projects such as the OLPC to favor others over their own for the sake of political correctness and what I can only describe as some sort of institutional guilt over priviliege combined with well-intentioned, but nonetheless clueless, naivete.
When it comes to technical leadership, it is sort of like the airline safety instructions you get - if the airmasks drop down, secure your own first so you can help others without losing your ability to do so. Think about it while you go to mod me down.
There's a law (in progress, ie: not yet approved) that would require the public offices to use (as far as possible) OS software and force them to use open formats. So in that respect, the education that kids are getting is positive and useful. Up until now, Windows was taugth. Not to mention that not every school had PCs.
Also, other South American countries which are on very friendly terms with Uruguay (such as Venezuela) are too pushing OS into the public offices. In Venezuela's case, the law is in place already, and it will force everyone to switch before a set date (Uruguay's law will be a progressive change). Brasil also has a widespread use of Linux in bussiness.
A fun tale about this law: A few weeks before the law proyect was presented, Microsoft determined that ANEP (the public schools) owed them something like 500k USD in licenses based on the number of PCs and students that the schools had. After the proyect was presented, Microsoft gracefully donated those licenses.
I've heard that the plan was to put the textbooks in the laptops, which, if done, is economically viable. Each textbook is around 200 pesos (8USD), each year you require 4 of them (sometimes more) and there's 5 years of schooling. That sums up to 160USD. The laptops may be a bit more expensive now, but I think the plan is to "recycle" them (once kid gets out of school, give the pc to a new student). Also, you're getting other advantages that plain old textbooks don't give, like net access, PC education, games...
Just put a 10$ 1GB SD card in the SD card slot under the screen, and the OLPC can boot into a light, customized 3$ Windows XP OS. Microsoft has been working for the past year on adapting a Windows XP light version to run on such cheaper hardware, the OLPC hardware specs are totally sufficient for running a thinned down version of Windows XP. Microsoft certainly has the means and the will to provide such Windows XP on a 1GB SD card option, which each child could after some time and as SD card prices drop get one, and have a choice a boot-up for which OS to use.
And there in is the reason the XO is a superior solution. All the criticism of the OLPC XO and the benevolent offers of "superior" Windows based machines with $3 OS licensing fees is based off the need of a few greedy thugs to build their markets. The objective of OLPC is not to build a market for Microsoft and Intel to sell their products and introduce developing nations to the proprietary software licensing treadmill, its about instilling the ability to learn at an early age so these children will grow up with the ability to improve their living conditions. As Negroponte has already stated "An educated and creative population is, without a doubt, the best path to global health, wealth, and peace."
While I'm sure a more expensive Windows based machine could be used for the same purpose, the initial experiments that led up to OLPC used Windows based laptops, the XO and its software were designed from the ground up to serve the specific purpose of "learning learning" while the so called superior solutions being pushed by multi-billionare corporate CEOs and the like are designed to help themselves break into new markets where their current products are simply too expensive.
These wealthy individuals who lack the knowlege and experience of the people who developed and run the OLPC should simply STFU and let the professionals do their job.
Look, I have pretty much the same experience as you but you must also remember that those who spent the 80s and early 90s on computers were those who chose to learn computers. It didn't take long after I got my C64 to write my first hello world program. I wanted to play around with it and loved the idea of a machine I could instruct on what to do, and playing games and seeing all the cool things you could do with it. I absorbed in everything from BASIC to Tiki PCs to DOS to Windows to OS/2 because it fascinated me.
If you weren't interested in computers, you didn't use one. Your friends weren't all hanging out on MSN, in fact you didn't have an Internet connection at all. Schoolwork was handwritten, in fact I remember it being required so we'd learn to write "properly". My parents bought an encyclopedia as a reference, and then there was the library. You didn't have YouTube or whatever, it was only computer games and if you weren't interested in that it didn't do much. When we were so 16-17, first year of our high school there was a typing class. There were obviously people there who had barely been near a computer or typewriter before.
Today, I'd almost say that your kids have to use a computer or at least otherwise they'll miss out on a lot, at least here in Norway. Not because of the machine itself, but just for normal social interaction with other kids. Getting the message "Hey, check out this youtube clip" on MSN is in fact important to take part in, not because it's important in itself but to establish the same peer relationships and social identity as we did in the brick-and-mortar days.
And yet, even though everyone and their brother is forced to use a computer I don't think everyone is interested in a computer. Just ask all the people who didn't like it when their job started requiring a computer. Of course it's easier for kids who are taught that this is something they need to know, but I imagine quite a few are as unenthusiastic about that as school work. I read a study like that not that long ago that concluded it was a very wide spread among kids - about 25% were heavy computer users, probably like you and me. The rest of course knew a computer, but it didn't interest them much.
Those that aren't interested, just want to learn to get by. Where to click, what buttons to push and how to do things. Certainly they're capable of learning more than one OS, but they're not interested in understanding concepts or patterns. They're not interesting in exploring the tools and figuring out how they work just for fun. There's a lot more of these people that need to learn Word and Powerpoint than there is of those like us. Those classes are the "No child left behind" classes of the digital society. And I mean, that's pretty much what basic education is all about.
You set the standards too high. When we exited highschool, there were still people that barely knew how to type, couldn't do more than basic text formatting in Word and maybe simple arithmetic in Excel (yes, MS had arrived by then). You'd hope that today's students fare somewhat better, but it's still wildly unrealistic to compare their needs to our needs, and their results to ours.
What's missing is a fast lane for those that are ahead of the curve, but that doesn't just apply to computers. I fought that system for many years in other subjects and eventually resigned to just finish "on track". All I got for a desire to learn was more tedious tasks of exactly the same difficulty, which served no purpose other than to slow me down. I would have loved it if school was more like university. Of course you have the required "No child left behind" classes but on top of that take the subject, pass the exam, move on to more advanced classes.
Some people just won't accept that some kids are smarter than other kids. That some people are destined to solve complex challenges while others are never going to do more than garbage disposal. They think that simply by shaping us all in the same mold we'll all be equal, not to
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i'm not sure how well a dictator would take to having an educated and/or freely speaking populace. the stereotypical dictator would _not_ want olpc's in the country, unless the internet was also controlled. i'm sure there's the possibility of a benevolent dictator, but i don't know how often that happens...
the privacy of one's mind is important.
you do have something to hide.
I doubt that they have as much corporate "encouragement" to stay using copyrighted dead-tree textbooks. The movement towards English-language, open, software-based textbooks has been slow and decentralized.
Hopefully, these countries have budgeted textbook creation as part of their operating costs for the OLPC project. If not, you're right, it will fail just like it has in the U.S.
Not, you're not.
Uruguay is a pretty decent small country, of rather modest means, but not Third World in any meaningful sense.
Cheers from across the river,
CC