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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."
is about to get an influx of supply.
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?"
There's a rising tide of African voices that agree with you since most of that aid never leaves the capitals of the nations being "helped".
Other times the aid ends up trashing the local economy since aid agencies are quite often less concerned with the results of their efforts then with shaking down rich donors.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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.
Maybe they could put like a Papa John's pizza coupon inside each one or something?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
We just sprinkle them over the poor, and POOF! All better.
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.
"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.
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.
US schools are buying iPads to help teaching, countries with no or poor education systems are being given OLPC to help teaching... see, not much a difference!
I see! So it will fail just as hard as introducing endless piles of computers to US schools has! Good show!
I tease (somewhat), but, hey, have at it. At the very least it might result in an influx of new and interesting talent to Deviant Art.
This isn't just a Cargo Cult. This is the people dropping the cargo believing in it.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child..."
Not the brains. The mouth.
The Raspberry Pi project ("An ARM GNU/Linux box for $25" - http://www.raspberrypi.org/) might just obsolete OLPC.
I doubt it. As much as I like the Raspberry Pi, it doesn't come with a keyboard or display or power supply, and certainly isn't designed for use by the illiterate. As much as I think the OLPC idea is far from being proven to be effective, it's designed for rugged use away from the power grid.
Sadly you speak the truth, just look at the history of aid to Africa and you see one failure after another. Hell does everyone know where we got the word "technical' to describe trucks turned into battlewagons? That was what the Red Cross would call the bribes paid out to warlords using improvised battle trucks, they would put down "technical expenses' which of course just gave the warlords more money to build more battlewagons.
While I'm all for helping out poor folks i'm reminded of the old "teach a man to fish" saying, as all we are doing now is simply pissing money down a rathole and i have no doubt hurting the poor more than we are helping by giving aid to the ones that are their oppressors!
As much as i think the man is batshit on...well just about everything I do have to agree with Glenn Beck on one thing, the idea that probably got him kicked off Fox News. Its time for us to "Be Switzerland" and stop trying to control the world and instead look to our own here at home. We have Americans living in tents, we have millions that are missing meals, no jobs, its time to take care of our own and let Africa take care of its own. I bet if we got the hell out and left people alone Africa would advance and join the rest of the world. it won't be pretty, and there will be probably several civil wars, but in the end the only TRUE change comes about from the people that live there wanting to change their conditions, not from somebody throwing food and money at them.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.