From Brazil to Pakistan, some of the world’s poorest children will peer across the digital divide this month – reading electronic books, shooting digital video, creating music and chatting with classmates online.
The non-profit “One Laptop per Child” project, founded by MIT academics, will roll out nearly 2500 of its $150-laptops to eight nations. The experiment is a prelude to mass production of the kid-friendly, lime-green-and-white laptops, scheduled to begin in July 2007, when five million will be built.
Its technological triumphs include a hand crank to charge its battery, a keyboard that switches between languages, a digital video camera, wireless connectivity and a version of the Linux operating system tailored for remote regions.
The project’s operators say the price should fall to $100 apiece next year, when they hope to produce 50 million of the so-called “XO” machines. It could then dip below $100 by 2010 when the aim is to reach 150 million of the world’s poorest children.
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“We’re pledging to always drive the price down,” says Walter Bender, the group’s president of software and content. “Rather than continuing to add features to keep the price inflated, we’re keeping the feature set stable and driving the price down.”
A string pulley, which Bender likens to a “salad spinner”, will soon replace the hand crank. A minute of pulling generates 10 minutes of electricity. The display switches from colour to black and white for viewing in direct sunlight.
Food and medicine
State educators in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand and possibly Ethiopia and the West Bank will receive the first of the machines in February’s pilot, before a wider distribution to Indonesia and a handful of other countries.
Not everyone is applauding the scheme, however. Some predict the project will financially burden countries that can least afford it with no guarantee of success. Others say the money would be better spent on food, medicine, libraries and schools.
Some African officials also question whether it suits the education of children outside the US. And others question whether the laptops will simply end up being resold in illegal markets by cash-strapped families and communities.
Staggering cost?
“On the technology I think the project is amazing and wonderful,” said Wayan Vota, whose blog monitors the project’s progress. “What gives me pause is the social implications, the economic implications” of how the scheme will be implemented.
Vota is also director of Geekcorps, a non-profit organisation that promotes communication technology in developing countries, and he predicts staggering costs for some poor nations. “Essentially they want developing countries – or countries that already have a significant amount of debt or other commitments – to borrow even more, or to use even more of their limited resources, to buy the laptops and to implement them in a way that is untried and untested on a large scale,” He warns.
“If you look at the cost of doing one laptop per every Nigerian child it actually turns out to be 73% of the entire Nigerian budget – that’s not the educational part but the entire national budget of Nigeria,” he says.
Hostile response
Some educators may also be hostile toward it because the machines are designed to encourage students to experiment with everything from music and creating videos to writing their own computer programs, says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.
“You’ll find some classrooms where the teachers are excited about letting the students experiment and explore but you’ll also find a lot based on rote and repetition,” he says.
Nonetheless, Vota and Zuckerman praise One Laptop per Child for its pioneering innovations including a laptop that needs just two watts of power compared to the 30 to 40 watts for a typical laptop, and which does away with hard drives, relying instead on flash memory and four USB ports to add extra memory devices.
Groups of the laptops can communicate with each other even without an internet through a “mesh” network, allowing users to swap images and collaborate on projects. It boasts a music sequencer with digital instruments so children can also play and create music.
Bender says the laptops can also be remotely shut down to prevent them being sold in black markets. But Vota contends that hackers will try to buy them and will easily crack their code. “For people earning one dollar a day the temptation to sell it for $300 will be very strong,” he says.
