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OLPC Project To Air-Drop Laptops
sl4shd0rk writes "Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project are still going and have a new plan in the works: a laptop air-drop to help facilitate 'self-education' in areas with large poor populations. 'In the first year we'll go in and meet with tribal elders and aid organizations, people not involved with education, but then we let the kids learn,' Negroponte said. All of this work by Negroponte and others was essential, he explained, because market forces were leaving the poor of the world behind. Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world."
I'm waiting for the stories of what happens when you drop a ton of laptops on a remote tribal village somewhere. Hope the cameras are rolling.
is about to get an influx of supply.
Give them laptops and access to the net, watch them discover ebay, see OLPC laptops appear for sale. Standard human behaviour.
you can bet a good percentage of them will be traded for food and they will end up in the hands of criminals
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Hopefully everybody else will, too. Just imagine how much money the world would save if everybody stopped providing aid to Africa.
Africa is one of those continents where no matter how much help you provide, they still can't move forward.
Most people who are poor can afford an old computer somehow. Not because they want to read about open-source stuff all day, but because it's a way to make money *on the internet*. Indians making less than $50 a month can do some training and make hundreds a month on horrible sites like freelancer.com.
So if we drop these laptops to the poorest of the poor, the quintessential world vision child whose last camel just died and is living on subsistence sloth with no broth... it goes without saying that he's not going to spend time using this precious netbook... afterall he's literally poor and has practical concerns each day, he cant start earning money on freelancer.com as easy as an Indian can.
Point being there's a good chance he'll swap it for a can of beans to someone a bit less poor who will swap it for a crate of beans to a merchant who already can afford his own computer.
It's flying something behind it and I can't quite make it out. It's a large banner and it says T H A N K S... from O... L... P...C! What a sight, ladies and gentlemen. What a sight. The 'copter seems to circling the village now. I guess it's looking for a place to land. No! Something just came out of the back of the helicopter. It's a dark object, perhaps a skydiver plummeting to the earth from only two thousand feet in the air... There's a third... No parachutes yet... Those can't be skydivers. I can't tell just yet what they are but... Oh my God! They're laptops! Oh no! Johnny can you get this? Oh, they're crashing to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the thatched roof of a hut. This is terrible! Everyone's running around pushing each other. Oh my goodness! Oh, the humanity! People are running about. The laptops are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Folks, I don't know how much longer... The crowd is running for their lives. I think I'm going to step inside. I can't stand here and watch this anymore. No, I can't go in there. Children are searching for their mothers and oh, not since the Hindenberg tragedy has there been anything like this. I don't know how much longer I can hold my position here, Johnny. The crowd...
Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world.
On the contrary. Many of the world's largest countries send massive amounts of aid to the developing world, which is then promptly stolen by corrupt governments of those countries. Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food and now they've got almost impossibly-high inflation rates. Maybe we should work on that before air-dropping laptops into these places?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
As God as my witness, I thought laptops could fly!
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
this is not what these kids need.
this is not what developing countries need.
this will not provide food, shelter, clean water or medicine.
this will not help these children's parents provide food, shelter, clean water or medicine.
this will not keep people in third world conditions from continuing to have children regardless of their ability to care for them.
Why are we doing this?
1) Compromise the system
2) Give laptop away cheaper or for free
3) Get a huge Botnet!
4) ???
5) Profit!
I swear I thought laptops could fly!
Man I hope these OLPS's have impact smart hard drives ... otherwise I smell the start of the Zombie Apocalypse on us!
"Curiouser and Curiouser...." -Alice
I have heard that some areas have become so reliant on food airdrops that kids, when they are hungry, look up at the sky for their next meal. They are foretting how to find food for themselves. Point being, if these laptops are dropped from the sky they might be inadvertantly eaten.
We have living proof that access to free knowledge isn't equal to the will or desire or will to acquire it. Nor the vision to apply it.
All those perfectly good laptops are going to be pitched into the ocean.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
where do I sign up?
Please read http://perniciousolpc.wordpress.com./
We just sprinkle them over the poor, and POOF! All better.
an electric power supply in those villages?
Negroponte tried a "PC in the wall" experiment in a poor district some years ago. This is being used as an argument for the airdrop strategy, but the experiment was in fact not successfull. The kids in the neighbourhood did learn to use the PC, but to little or no use. They played games but did not learn marketable skills or otherwise improve their quality of life.
In aid and development, To airdrop aid is the very image of a failed strategy. You bring in a celebrity and a tv-team, you throw money at the village, build a well or a lavatory, then write a report and pull out. Your funders want to see results quickly, but development doesn't work that way.
For someone in aid and development it is then obvious that Negroponte does not focus on actually improving things for the kids. Like many caricatured IT developers, he is focused on the product, not the user. He wants to prove that the user interface is so intuitive that you don't have to teach the kids to use it. He wants to show that the laptop is very robust and water proof so he drops it from a helicopter. He is using one of the vilest tricks in the IT-salesman's repertoire: That if you just buy my hardware, everything will be up and running with no extra cost. No running costs on training people to use it, no need to organize the use or for teachers to follow this up. No need to have anything centralized and government-like working for these villages to reap the benefits of IT.
It is a vile mix of PR stunts, naive IT optimism sold to supposedly uninformed savages and an appeal to prevailing ideologies among the western funders. All combined just to sell hardware.
If you are in a poor country, watch out for falling laptops.
Seriously though, how can children understand what they read on the Internet if they are illiterate? They cannot teach themselves to read by staring at the net any more than you can learn French from scratch by reading a French book. He cites Sugata Mitras work as evidence that this can work. But the slum kids in Bombay who used the internet were not completely illiterate. Even the poor in Bombay try to send their children to school for a few years and they typically learn rudimentary English. This may not be true for isolated African communities.
Electricity is still largely unavailable, so how would the laptops be even usable?
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
So they can't read, they can't write, what can they do with a laptop?
Here's an interesting ultra-cheap netbook I found one day. It obviously does not come without flaws and the specs are weak, but for 65€ it offers great value and is a nice entry-level system to get you connected if you're poor.
Once again the European white world is trying to drag the black world up to its level. Once again, it will fail utterly.
"In the first year we'll go in and meet with tribal elders and aid organizations, people not involved with education, but then we let the kids learn,' Negroponte said"
I'm sure the people of Detroit will be most appreciative.
From coke bottles to computers...
I've felt for a while that constructing some kind of "internet bomb" which would consist of a sat-phone internet connection and a simple web-browsing device (or even just a wifi hot-spot) which could be air-dropped would be a really useful thing to have for helping ferment revolution in some of the countries world-wide where free speech is heavily restricted.
Are they going to airdrop people who can teach them how to use this technology from the heavens? Some tools are intuitive. To people who have never seen a computers or even really much technology at all, computers are not.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
The most likely scenarios is that no one will figure out a use for the device and they will realize that there is more value selling it on the market. You need to teach the villagers the value of the device first and have a way to help them learn how to use it. Self learning is good, but you need to learn the basics before you can explore on their own.
There are also the problem of adults just using the device for themselves. Do they really know that it is a kids device?
Distributing it through the schools to be a much more effective way of making progress. You can teach others how to use the device, provide support and it will be associated with education so adults will be less likely to use it.
They're just going to go to the end of the earth and toss it.
Which is a cool movie, BTW.
Here :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/
When the laptops are dropped, people with guns will be waiting to received them. If something that can be converted into weapons falls from the sky, do you think happy children will be scooping up the goods while their poor parents watch in delight? Not happening.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day .. give him a laptop and he will either start sending out 419 scam e-mail or w*** himself to death looking at porn.
Has anyone asked the poor if they want to be developed?
Seriously, I'd rather live any number of "poor" native lifestyles, with their lack of medical care, occasional famine, etc. instead of being in a welfare slum, with no health insurance or affordable medical care, crappy job market, pollution, stress, etc.
Thanks for the insight... Have any more totally off-topic and irrelevant rants to share? If so, you might have a bright future in blogging on Livejournal!
In the words of Arthur Carlson "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!"
http://radio.about.com/od/thanksgivingradio/a/WKRP-In-Cincinnati-Turkey-Drop-Episode.htm
"Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f-ing Peace Corps." - John 'Bluto' Blutarsky
So OLPC is a durable paper weight?
This project has been clueless from day one. The founders are projecting their experience as kids from well-to-do homes who got rich because they were exposed to computers early in life during the beginnings of the PC revolution with the situation of the poor in undeveloped countries. The two are in no way similar.
To the extent that these countries can benefit from inexpensive computers (as opposed to getting rid of corrupt politicians), those computers need to be in the hands of parents, allowing them to learn useful skills, conduct business and farming more efficiently, and get better medical care. Improve the lot of the parents, and the kids will automatically be better off.
It seems that using real bombs would be more efficient that OLPCs to get rid of the poors ?
Oh... it's poverty, not poors... then it would probably not work..
"Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child..."
Not the brains. The mouth.
The OLPC hardware is too expensive. Even middle-income countries like El Salvador and Honduras have struggled to get them introduced into schools. The Raspberry Pi project ("An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25" - http://www.raspberrypi.org/) might just obsolete OLPC.
... I thought laptops could fly!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
We should drop Negroponte out of a helicopter.
Total distribution of XO laptops: 2 million.
Peru 870,000
Uruguay 470,000
India 250,000
Rwanda 120,000
Columbia 65,000 (?)
Argentina 60,000
Mexico 50,000
Total Latin America: 1.51 million
Total Asian: 24,000
It strains coincidence when your global "one size fits all" program for the education of young children succeeds only among those who share a common (essentially Western) language and culture.
Teacher training and ongoing support
The organisation's strategy of simply giving underprivileged children laptops and "walking away" has been criticised because "laptops are getting opened and turned on, but then kids and teachers are getting frustrated by hardware and software bugs, don't understand what to do, and promptly box them up to put back in the corner." This "drive-by" implementation model is the official strategy of the OLPC project, and the mantra "You Can Give Kids XO Laptops and Just Walk Away" are Negroponte's own words.
Nigeria
Other discussions question whether OLPC laptops should be designed to promote anonymity or to facilitate government tracking of stolen laptops. A recent New Scientist article critiqued Bitfrost's P_THEFT security option, which allows each laptop to be configured to transmit an individualized, non-repudiable digital signature to a central server at most once each day to remain functioning.
In 2007, XO laptops in Nigeria were reported to contain pornographic material belonging to children participating in the OLPC Program. In response, OLPC made plans for adding content filters. The OLPC foundation maintained the position that such issues were societal, not laptop related. Similar responses have led some to suggest the OLPC takes an indifferent stance concerning this issue. According to Wayan Vota Senior Director at Inveneo and founder of the independent OLPC News, "The use of computers to look at porn is [a] social problem, not a hardware one... Children have to be taught what's good and what's bad, based on the cultural context."
One Laptop per Child
The problem with the airdrop is that OLPC's root premise is that kids don't need a teacher or guardian.
It has never been quite so simple as that:
When we first started distributing wind-up radios to orphaned children in Rwanda in 1999, a common response was that our radios helped to combat ignorance and ease isolation. In May, when we launched our Prime radio, the response was the same.
Children who head households, as well as at-risk widow headed-families are hungry for information they can trust that will help them learn and grow. They want to listen to the news and practical programmes that will support their personal development, impact behavior change (in relation to sexual and reproductive health), inform on health issues like family planning and HIV/AIDS and peace and reconciliation.
Beneficiaries, who are identified by our local partner organisations, are trained in the use and care of the Prime as well as how to become listening group leaders. They are the responsible "guardians" of the radios on behalf of their family and of their neighbours. Over the years in Rwanda we've seen that roughly 20 listeners share our radios, although many more might gather to hear an important announcement or programme.
The Prime's bright LED light will decrease the use of hazardous candles and kerosene, enabling people to see at night. To the very poorest, even a candle or a tablespoon of kerosene is beyond their daily reach. Children were particularly excited about being able to see well to study.
Prime in Rwanda
AM radio and Shortwave broadcasting are 90 years old.
But the geek --- in his own version of magical thinking --- will assume that using his generation's bleeding-edge tech effectively will be easy for even the youngest of children.
>Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food
Was that because they had a surplus, or because we chaps here in England just nicked all their veg, tossed the chalky landowners a few pennies and left the natives to starve?
*Ireland* was a net exporter of potatoes, during the potato fammine, but only because we pointed guns at them and told them to load up the boats.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I'm lucky enough to know a guy now working on the OLPC project in Uruguay. In his opinion and mine it is an ideal country to try this out.
He works at roll out and technical support end with schools, essentially at the coal face of this idea.
What is his biggest day-to-day problem?
Convincing the kids not to use the laptop as a Frisbee.
Projects like this need a *lot* of work. This current idea is positively idiotic and shows just how little feedback there is in the organisation.
Photocopy the Rosetta Stone and Mathematica Principia and airdrop them along with the instructions for making and using an abacus? I'm sure that the pace of development would be about the same among the recipients, and they wouldn't have to spend the extra time to cranking the battery chargers on those OLPC's.
For their next air drop, I suggest they send oyster spoons, weight loss medication and dog cologne.
i've dropped my kindle to the floor 2x times without it failing. they're only $79 now. and a hell of a lot easier to read in sunlight.
Packages hit the ground and OLPCs start showing up on eBay in 3,2,1....
This laptop looks delicious.
127.0.0.1
Reminds me of a cartoon I once saw; I wish I had scanned it
The scene is an impoverished African village in the jungle with starving natives lying around.
A transport plane has just passed overhead and descending from it with a cluster of parachutes is a large platform. On the platform is a long table with a dozen white guys in suits sat around it, paperwork and glasses of water in front of them.
One of the dying Africans is pointing up to it and saying, in the caption :
"Thank God, an Aid Committee!"