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Negroponte On OLPC's New Path, Plans For XO 3
waderoush writes "After laying off staff and splitting the organization in two, Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child effort may be hitting their stride again. In an interview with Xconomy, Negroponte says he has a new model for getting XO laptops to kids in Gaza and Afghanistan — and reveals more ideas about the planned XO 3 tablet and the future of books. 'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."
The OLPC is a stupid idea. Plain and simple.
First of all, books in these countries are cheap. Student's aren't lugging around the hard cover, full-color, overpriced text books Americans get. They're printed in black and white, on ultra cheap newsprint. And for the dedicated student there's always access to a library, well, not always, but the option exists for some. But the most important thing here is that a book doesn't require electricity.
How many parents, in third world nations, are going to want their kids bringing home a computer that needs to be recharged? Electricity costs money and that's something many of these people lack. Supposedly the OLPC had a manual crank for charging it's batteries, but I'd be curious to know how much of a charge that could actually provide. And let's not get into the issue of localizing these devices and providing all the content they're going to need. What's the point of investing in developing these devices if they're only useful in 2 or 3 classes? The point is it's too much work and expense when a far simpler solution is to simply provide the schools with a computer lab.
You can buy a $100 desktop now and it will be more than adequate for these students' needs. And consider the situation: why do these students need computers? I'd argue it's not to improve their education, but provide them with important computer skills which may be valuable when they go out into the working world. Perhaps a side-benefit is to be exposed to a larger world, provided they have internet connection; that's another limitation with the OLPC. As much as people may despise Microsoft, if work environments use Windows extensively, these students are better served being exposed to computers in that environment. I fully understand the implications of chaining people to a particular OS, but I'm approaching this from a pragmatic standpoint: what will be most helpful to these students?
The OLPC is a noble idea. But it's a complicated answer to a problem that much has better solutions. The organization had an annual budget of $12 million, down to $5 million now. I'd love to know how much has been dumped into developing the computer, and how much more will be spent on this new version. All that money could have just gone to buying cheap PCs for these schools and there almost certainly would have been many millions more left to spend on improving these schools and building new ones.