Why OLPC Struggles Against Educators, Big Business

afabbro writes "The current issue of BusinessWeek has an expansive article of the history of OLPC and why it has, to date, been a flop. Among the reasons: no preparation for the educational systems expected to use it, uncertain pedagogical theories, poor business management, competition from Microsoft/Intel, and no input from education professionals in designing the software. As BusinessWeek quotes one educational expert, 'The hackers took over,' and the applications are too complex for children to use. To date, 370,000 laptops have been shipped — a far cry from the original 150 million planned to be shipped by end of 2008."

Comments

No different from business

[rah1420]

If you let the IT folk articulate the business process, you're going to get the same exact thing. That's why we have business analysts whose job it is, ostensibly, to figure out what the business people want and translate it into a swiss army knife that's going to be wildly popular and successful.

To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure. The problem is that it is visible to more people, sad to say.

They had a good mission

[WaHooCrazy7]

OLPC had a good mission when they wanted everything on the system to be fully open source, with simple point and click applications and the ability to view the source of any application. However then they got into talks with microsoft, and started to include some very complicated applications with their product, and their mission kind of went down the crapper

Re above, I don't *think* that it's off-topic.

[RustinHWright]

Sorry if I went on a bit there, but I think that this is an important point re the penetration of the OLPC. I grew up in academia and have now lived long enough to see both of my parents comprehensively condemn the establishment cultures in which they worked. In fact, my mother ended up meeting with (among others) Robert Reich and then traveling to Nicaragua and several other countries investigating just this: the obstructions caused by the dominant culture of the ostensibly do-gooder world, especially as manifested by folks like the World Bank and the IMF. She recommends the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman as a good place to start.

If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.

Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.