I am a little bit worry about this project. It’s true that technology can change many things and solve many problems but in this case (one laptop per child), I don’t think that the laptop is the key to solve the education problem in developing countries.
One of the hot debated issues is the laptop’s price which is around US$100-150. This is very expensive for normal people in developing countries. In those countries, US$100 can gives you more things than you can imagined. I remember when I was study informatics in Indonesia (1997), I can live normally with US$80 monthly. When I graduated and worked in a software company, my monthly salary was around US$200 and I could live normally and saved a hundred bucks per month 🙄
However, the main problem is not about the price but whether the laptop is worth the price. People said that this laptop can train children to be creative and encourage them to do exploration and experiments. Unfortunately, all these things can be done without a laptop.
The laptop has word processor, paint program, and calculator but all these things can be replaced easily by pencil and paper. The children need to thought how to write, draw, and count properly, no matter the tools they’re using.
Another problem is the content that the laptop has. The content is far more important than the media itself. It’s like having a durable school notepad which has nothing inside. Empty. You hardly learn something from an empty book; you still need content to read (education books and materials) and a teacher.
Sure it has Internet connectivity, but the OLPC project seems doesn’t provide any education materials that can be downloaded online. IMO, these centralized contents are far more important than the laptop. It’s the system, not just the client-side device. Without this, the children could be lost and just browsing around the Internet. You don’t want to teach them about procrastination on early age 🙂
This project is still in early process.It’s unfair to judge this program badly. It takes time, patience, and maybe trial-and-errors before we know the right answer for the education problem.
Where XO laptops will be deployed, in the school servers there will be classroom libraries (each for each class, for publishing/sharing works with others), and a school library, pre-populated with content and for publishing of student and teacher projects. There will also exist regional libraries and a national library (hosted in regional servers). Finally, there will be international libraries (wikipedia, others). All of these will be accessible by the individual XO laptop using a common library interface. Or so the plan goes (From reading OLPC wiki).
If the plan is like that, I think it’s important for the OLPC team to finish the online library or the central system first, not the laptop. The laptop is done but it’s only a tiny part of the system. Without the central system (the server and the content inside) to connect with, the laptop could end up as a fancy and expensive education toys.
Unfortunately, I haven’t read any details about what content they’re going to put in the system (server) and how they’re going to manage it. Who’s going to write it, which curriculum standard they’re going to use, and not to mention the importance of local content.
I don’t think relying on Wikipedia or Youtube is a good idea for education 🙂
Let’s hope that they’re going to make it work (optimistic thinking) 😉