Category: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Here’s another guy who is not all that thrilled with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. The Strange Case of One Laptop Per Child is made by Eric Posner, a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School. Money quote:

It takes little insight to see that laptops would be low on the list of priorities of the developing-country poor. One Laptop per Child makes as much sense as One iPod per Child or One Snowmobile per Child.

🙂

Barely six months after joining the OLPC project, Intel announced that it is leaving. The OLPC people wanted Intel to stop work on any products that are likely to compete with the OLPC. Which basically means that contrary to what the OLPC people were claiming–that it was not about the laptop but rather about education–is clearly not so. If indeed it was about education, wouldn’t they have welcomed more and varied efforts by others in the same game?

John C Dvorak writes in PCMag “One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Change the World.” (Hat tip: Shiv Senthilvel.)

He quotes some figures from the world hunger site:

In the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty.” Every year, 15 million children die of hunger. For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years. Throughout the decade, more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well fed, one-third is underfed, and one-third is starving. Since you’ve entered this site, at least 200 people have died of starvation. One in 12 people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. Nearly one in four people, or 1.3 billion—a majority of humanity—live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people. Let’s include Negroponte and the Google billionaires.

Continue reading “Dvorak on the OLPC”

Cyrus Farivar has a piece on Slate today titled “Still waiting for that $100 laptop?“. He writes: “Negroponte’s plan to heal the world with laptops is well-meaning but fundamentally flawed. What good is a laptop in the middle of rural Thailand when electricity, much less Internet access, are spotty at best? Rather than getting laptops into the hands of every schoolchild across the world, why not start with an intermediate step? Probably because One Blackboard per Child or One Teacher per Classroom just doesn’t sound as sexy.”

You know, I have been a great believer in the “One Blackboard per School” idea myself and written about it here. Well, as it happened, Cyrus stopped by my place in Santa Clara yesterday afternoon and we had a brief conversation about OLPC and other matters. Today he has a brief report on BBC’s “The World” program on Public Radio International. Near the end, I explain why the OLPC could increase the digital divide. Listen here.

Everything you have ever wanted to know about the One Laptop Per Child but never dared to ask has been answered in an excellent feature titled The Laptop Crusade by Tekla Perry in the April 2007 issue of the IEEE Spectrum. (Here’s a link to the print version of the article.) Continue reading “IEEE Spectrum on the OLPC”

Alex Singleton, President of the Globalisation Institute, a European think tank, argues against the OLPC and says that computers should be left to the market economy. “The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. ”
Continue reading “OLPC and Markets”

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has powerful interests on both sides of the debate. It is easy to guess who’s on which side. Bill Gates, for instance, is predictably against the OLPC as it does not use Microsoft software. The OLPC is not using Intel chips. That could explain why Intel Chairman Craig Barrett will be a critic. Mind you, merely because they are not disinterested observers, it does not follow that they are wrong in their criticism of the OLPC project of Mr Nicholaus Negroponte.
Continue reading “Craig Barrett on the OLPC”