Category: Information and Communications Technology

The OLPC in India

I spent the last evening in the American Center near Churchgate, Mumbai, at a presentation on the launch of the “one laptop per child” — OLPC — in India. The event was hosted by a bunch of institutions: Asia Society, Digital Bridge Foundation (created by the Reliance ADA Group), MIT Alumni Association of India, and Consulate General of the US.

I had received an email saying that Prof Negroponte would like to meet with me after the presentation. Negroponte, as most people know, is the founder and chairman of the OLPC project and a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. The announcement said, “Professor Nicholas Negroponte will discuss the MIT-Media Labs developed XO-laptop which is widely seen as revolutionizing primary education around the world…”
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The Fabulous $10 Indian Government Laptop

“Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper,” wrote Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow in 1966 about Milton Friedman, another Nobel laureate economist, the father of monetarism. 🙂

Everything reminds me of India’s failed education system — and by extension — the stupidity of the government policymakers, bureaucrats and politicians included. Unlike Bob Solow, however, I cannot keep it out of my posts.
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Laptops and Learning

Let me begin with an “I told you so.” For a few years I have been obsessed with the use of technology in education because it is my considered position that the smart use of technology provides the best hope of solving the problem of educating the hundreds of millions in India.

But a bit of thinking brought me to the (apparently contradictory) conclusion that laptops in the school learning environment is detrimental to learning. I love the idea of using technology in schools but totally distrust the idea of one-on-one laptop use in schools. In 2006 I wrote, “It is predictable that in the near future, good schools around the world will prohibit school students the use of laptops while in class, just as students are not allowed cell phones.”
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Advice to BSNL and MTNL

My friend, Arun Mehta, has some advice for the public sector telecom providers. They are losing customers. Arun believes that their approach is wrong and that they should see the opportunity in using their last mile access for affordable internet connectivity. I reproduce (with his permission) his recent contribution to the india-gii mailing list.
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Global Poverty and the Cell Phone

A magazine article in the New York Times of April 13th has the rather mistaken and misleading title “Can the Cell Phone End Global Poverty?” (Hat tip: Abhishek Sarda). The article title is misleading because it doesn’t even remotely attempt to answer that question. It is instead about what is called a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist,” in this case someone who works for Nokia and essentially tries to figure out how people actually use their phones and thus how phone companies should design phones for greater usability.
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Infinite Information, Infinite Ignorance

Information, Not Plastics

The world has come a long way since the 1960s when the future was defined by one word – “plastics” – as Mr McGuire advised the young graduate Ben. Now the future is defined by another word and the word is “information.” Plastics was a wonder product of the world of industrial technology which fundamentally transformed the world of objects. Information is the new thing, the product of information technology, which is going to transform the world of ideas. Actually, information is not a “thing” in the usual sense of the term. So it is the new non-thing which defines the new and exciting future.
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My Indian Express column on the OLPC

Yesterday, the Indian Express carried a column by me on the OLPC, a favorite topic of mine. There’s nothing new in there for those who have read my views on the OLPC before. The text of the column below the fold.
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One Snowmobile Per Child

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.

🙂

Intel waves goodbye to OLPC

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?