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CEO Says One Laptop Per Child Project Has Achieved Its Goals
waderoush (1271548) writes "A blog post at OLPC News last week went viral with the claim that the nine-year-old One Laptop Per Child project is dead. Media outlets quickly controverted the assertion, but the response from the OLPC Association itself was brief, saying that its mission is 'far from over' and citing ongoing projects to distribute laptops in Central America. In a more lengthy Q&A this week, OLPC chairman and CEO Rodrigo Arboleda says the organization has achieved many of its goals, including demonstrating the value of the 'Constructionist' 1:1 learning philosophy originally espoused by Negroponte. With 2.5 million laptops distributed so far, the OLPC vision is 'on track to being fully realized,' Arboleda says. He sees 'commercial greed' and a 'status-quo mentality' within ministries of education and teachers' unions as the main hurdles holding back faster progress."
:-)
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
Laptop project is done... as in toast.
1. "Has Achieved Its Goals" == "on track to being fully realized"
2. "Mission Accomplished" Redefine goals to state what has already been done, declare victory, forget about the rest. (banner and photo-op on aircraft carrier optional)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
maybe they are trying to logon to ask for help? http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=millions%20dying%20going%20hungry&sm=3
Are they distributing their own model of laptop, or do they just distribute generic laptops. I remember their original idea was to design a super cheap and rugged laptop for $100 that could easily be used in developing countries. The free market has made cheap tablets available to all. Is there still a need for them to have custom hardware?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
How many of those 2.5 million laptops still work? Most of the OLPC laptops I saw at trade shows were broken.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Won't somebody please think of the children?
I didn't realize the world only has 2.5 million kids left. What happened?
Giving children a laptop that ran a non-standard operating system, which would teach them no computer skills they could use in the real world at school or to gain employment - why? I loaded OLPC up in a VM when it first came out, and the user interface made no sense at all. Why not give them Linux and OpenOffice or something?
Boy did they reach their goal. There's now 2.5 million OLPCs for each child that actually wants one.
My karma ran over your dogma
Love his obvious disdain for capitalism vis-a-vis "commercial greed."
Why, pray tell, is OLPC's original mission essentially dead in the water? Because of innovation, competition, and the marketplace mechanism, not because it lead the world to cheap hardware. Platitudinal NGOs started by tenured academics are created in a vacuum, away from market forces or awareness, living in ivory towers of unlimited funding.
OLPC was/is an NGO charity case, relying on the largesse of the white guilt complex for the third world to support it.
Yea, computer hardware is cheap, faster, and more accessible than it's ever been, to the point where it's at disposable pricing even for the third world. Whether it's Android or RPi or Arduino, we're well into an era of a complete computer that costs $20 for all the parts. Tablets are $50-$75 a pop.
And you know what OLPC is selling their "commercial" Android tabs for? $150! Far more than what it really costs to make. One can presume the profits will be used to fund additional tabs for the third world but the more likely scenario is those profits will go into the pockets of guys like Arboleda and "honorariums" for Negroponte and his ilk.
Confirmed distribution of the OLPC laptop outside of Mexico, Central and South America are all but non-existent. Deployment of XO laptops
That doesn't make a good case for a culturally-independent constructivist philosophy of education --- at the core of which is the notion that kids in the primary grades can teach each other and that adults are redundant. Which lead inevitably to fire-and-forget "parachute drop" deployments.
OLPC hardware was never as robust as claimed.
Several defects in OLPC XO-1 hardware have emerged in the field, and laptop repair is often neglected by students or their families (who are responsible for maintenance) due to the relatively high cost of some components (such as displays).
The Sugar interface has been difficult for teachers to learn, and the mesh networking feature in the OLPC XO-1 was buggy and went mostly unused in the field.
The OLPC XO-1 hardware lacks connectivity to external monitors or projectors, and teachers are not provided with software for remote assessment. As a result, students are unable to present their work to the whole class, and teachers must also assess students' work from the individual laptops. Teachers often find it difficult to use the keyboard and screen, which were designed with student use in mind.
Hardware and software bugs
Rwanda provides an interesting example of the conflict between the theory and reality of OLPC.
Rwanda had a total primary school population of just over 2.3 million as of 2011. As of September 2012, exactly four years after the launch, according to the Rwanda Education Board, there were about 115,000 computers in primary schools across the country.
The aim is to have half a million of the laptops distributed, and at least one million by 2017
At least one school in each of the 416 sectors in Rwanda is expected to get the laptops. A sector is the equivalent of a sub-district or division in Kenya.
Rwanda's situation is no different from much of East Africa. Uptake for the laptops could be better, except for two main reasons.
The first major reason is inadequate infrastructure, especially electricity supply to schools. The OLPC laptops are mainly operated using electricity, while many schools are yet to be connected to the national grid. Efforts are, however, under way to install solar electricity in as many schools are possible.
The second is inadequate capacity, in terms of numbers and computer literacy, of the primary school teachers. As of May 2012, the OLPC Project had trained just over 1,500 teachers and heads of school --- not only in computer literacy, but in troubleshooting hardware, software and applications.
There is good reason for such technical training of the teachers. Computers often tend to break down for one reason or another, especially in the hands of children. Giving the teachers the ability to diagnose what the problem is likely to be, and how to fix it, is crucial.
Caution has already been urged before the laptop project is implemented in Kenya. It has already been pointed out that the imminent laptop project may not be viable without first addressing teachers' computer literacy, including the woefully inadequate school infrastructure in much of the country, and ensuring the computers are loaded with relevant curriculum.
This includes addressing issues of poverty that tend to hinder access to education. A significant number of school-going children in Kenya lack basic needs, including food and clothes, which has raised questions of feasibility for such an ambitious project.
What Kenya could learn from Rwanda on One Laptop per Child
The 8-bit generation of under $200 computers did more to teach programming than OLPC has ever done. OLPC is a nifty government contractor and nothing more. Sinclair did more for programming than OLPC.
and
are not equivalent. The first implies that ALL goals have been achieved, while the second makes it clear that some have not. Terrible headline.
"CEO of OLPC acknowledges that the smartphone has pretty much made their goal entirely obsolete."
Oh wait, that's not what he said?
-Styopa
Have you ever been to Africa?
Most remote villages in Southern Africa do not have electricity.
OLPC's goal was to induce the creation of computers affordable in the third-world and usable in an environment where basic utilities are not available. At the time, a bottom-end new computer cost around $500.
Today we have a tablet and netbook industry which churns out the cheap components that such computers need at a high economy of scale. Micro Center has a bottom-end android tablet on sale for $50.
Things may not have worked out as OLPC expected or in a way that left OLPC with any importance as an organization, but their goal was surely achieved.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
What parts and what do you mean by electricity? 240AC at high amperages is still hard, but solar home systems are becoming increasingly popular as well as solar appliances. Getting enough juice to recharge an OLPC isn't out of the scope of these systems.
Have gnu, will travel.
OLPC's goal was to induce the creation of computers affordable in the third-world and usable in an environment where basic utilities are not available.
OLPC was a product of the MIT Media Lab and presented to the third world education minister as a take-it-or-leave it package deal in which the laptop hardware was only one component.
The minister was expected to buy big as an act of faith.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of units. No trial deployments, no building out slowly.
The constructivist philosophy of education of OLPC's promoters was gospel truth and not to be questioned. Here at last was a promise fulfilled ---- mass education without the need for teachers.
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages --- simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.
The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.
Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
[Reading deep into the comments here, these Ethiopian kids may not have been as pristinely illiterate in the use of words or images as Negroponte would like to have us think.]
Open Source or the Sugar UI was not open to question either.
The problem from the education minister's point of view becomes how to transition his kids to traditional desktop environments and programs --- particularly when the money may not be there to purchase and support computers which are usable in the primary grades only.
A mouse will remedy this. Some teachers have also found that putting some plastic wrap over the trackpad allows it to be used. If you are not using your XO, there are many small deployments worldwide who would appreciate it as a donation. You can get more info at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Donate_Your_Get_One
The ratio of time to charge to get time of use was not really practical on the early model XOs. On the newest, XO-1.75s and XO-4s, it becomes quite usable (as do solar panels). Just don't attach the crank to the XO itself. Even though it is sturdy enough to take some drops, bumps, etc., the stress of cranking is a bit too much. Attach it to a nearby table top, small tree, or whatever is handy.
Just give them an iPod...give me a break.
What kid wants a hokey junk laptop that can't play game?
E waste nightmare.
Our culture is a morass of crippling and endless failures flavored with the most impotent and banal language. The words "goals", "plan", and "objective" have lost all their meaning, supplanted by cultish ideologies that seek to only increase the number of brain-dead participants to improve the "numbers". How many managers do you know that use these terms to perpetuate dysfunction? Now that we have so thoroughly and utterly ruined education expect only more people to drink from the river Styx.