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Intel Aims 'One Tablet Per Child' Program at Developing Countries
retroworks writes "Digitimes Reports that 'Intel is set to push a tablet PC product codenamed StudyBook to target emerging markets. ... The StudyBook tablet PC will feature a 10-inch panel with Intel's Medfield platform and adopt dual-operating systems and will target the emerging markets such as China and Brazil. .. The StudyBook tablet PC will be released in the second half of 2012. ... Intel also hopes to push the product into regular retail channels priced below US$299.' Will this be another 'OLPC' disappointment, or is it starting to look very tough for the traditional school book industry?"
They will still be able to charge stupidly high prices, because you HAVE to get it, but they will eliminate shipping and printing costs. They just need to get the schools on board to give them lists of students, and they sue anyone who didn't buy it via approved channels.
The textbook companies love digital because they can control it and prevent resale. I bought a copy of the textbook my classroom uses for all of about $8 off Amazon. It's something like $100 new. If it were digital only, you can't buy used.
If you want to usurp the textbook companies, you need to start providing cheap, community generated alternatives. Plenty of teachers already ignore the textbooks for the most part. There's no reason Intel and other companies couldn't provide free digital content for various topics that individual schools can then assemble to fit their curriculum.
I'm currently working Khan Academy where appropriate into my classroom so students are more motivated to use it on their own time. But ultimately, I'd like to replace every chapter in the book with free alternative resources that teachers can use. "Infinite Math" is a really slick program that doesn't cost much that can generate problems for many levels of math which takes care of in class practice, homework and tests.
Work Safe Porn
Sigh. Every one of these initiatives fail because people assume access to technology will make people more educated, and education leads to a better life. The problem is, that's not true. What leads to a better life is taking care of basic survival needs sufficiently to allow the local population time to pursue those things. Our industrial civilization evolved away from an aquarian civilization because of advancements in certain key technologies. Tablets were not one of those technologies.
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now its one tablet. Wait, do they both? Or do the kids get to pick which one they want more?
It's just one $New_Shiny per child^Hpoor-kid-that-we-can-use-to-extort-money-from-a-government.
That's the generically correct form for how this will play out. $New_Shiny can be a smartphone, tablet, laptop or Furby. Whatever some large company is trying to stuff down the third world consumption channel.
As usual, it has little to do with children, education, improving mankind or anything else other than PR and profit. Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's hard not to be pessimistic about this scheme. I'm sure that Intel has the engineering muscle and the cash to at least shove some units out the door(if not actually hit their targeted TDPs and battery lives) and the hardware might even be an interesting alternative to some of the present ARM SoC tablets at a similar price point; but that won't really solve the basic problem:
Actually turning computers into educational results, even in the wealthy subsections of wealthy industrialized countries where access to computers has been ubiquitous for a number of years now, has turned out to be difficult. Not necessarily impossible(and certainly a boon for the nonzero-but-hard-to-replicate autodidactic success stories); but definitely not obvious, and generally not happening in places where reasonable amounts of educational success were already being achieved by conventional methods.
It is likely that digital distribution technologies will, at some point in the reasonably near future, firmly undercut print on total price(ie. counting the units needed to read the stuff, and the infrastructure, not just the marginal cost of somebody with a computer and an internet connection snarfing Project Gutenberg), which would be a boon to anybody who has plans for producing material that don't involve paying substantial per-unit license fees; but that only brings computers to parity with print(also, it is fairly likely that sub-$100 e-ink or super-cheapy LCD devices will undercut on price well before fancy tablets do).
Shipping aggressively cheap and robust hardware is certainly a nontrivial engineering challenge, and a necessary condition of any educating-the-poor-with-computers plan; but we already have a test case, wealthy denizens of the developed world, where the hardware and infrastructure exist and we've been able to watch the pedagogical techniques and software in action. The results have not been... overly encouraging...
This is a pertinent quote from Steve Jobs on this OLPC-like programs which end up failing every time.
So yeah, good luck to Intel.
what you're describing is what Professor Muhammad Yunus (joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize) outlines, in his book, "Creating a World without Poverty". in it he describes the best way to achieve the results that you've highlighted.
the absolute most critical point that professor yunus makes is that you can't just go in blithely and "help" people. you *HAVE* to get them to help themselves (or at least offer them the *opportunity* to help themselves). it's none of our business - not a government and not a charity - to go dictating what's best for people. that's what's so brilliant about the micro-loans system: the PEOPLE decide what they want to do - they decide what works for them, and, out of sheer overwhelming gratitude they go for it like you just wouldn't believe.
the loan repayment success rate is so high (over 98%) that the Grameen bank actually considers it THEIR failure if people get into difficulties. compare that to an EIGHTY SEVEN percent default rate in the west (which starts to make you appreciate that there's something desperately wrong with the western mindset). the Grameen Bank is so successful that they don't even bother retaining any lawyers. at all.
it may interest you to know that one of the chapters of Professor Yunus's book calls for IT specialists to take the initiative and create some infrastructure that would help people to uplift themselves out of poverty. that still hasn't really happened yet, and i'm really perplexed and slightly frustrated that it hasn't happened.
anyway, bit of an old article that's still relevant: http://www.advogato.org/article/966.html
The textbook guys are really more of a political problem than a technical one. There isn't any particular connection between paper printing and buying from a vendor who retains the copyright and charges accordingly, if one were to purchase a text outright and shop around for people willing to print and bind it, the per unit bids would likely be considerably lower. As you note, there also isn't any magic connection between digital distribution and low prices. If anything, nuking the used and import markets will make the situation worse(though digital distribution does have low fixed costs, which makes small-scale and iteratively developed stuff possible IFF that is supported...)