LONDON — If you’d been told three years ago that someone was developing an educational laptop for the world’s poorest countries to buy for less than $200 each and that, by now, some one million children in 31 countries would be using them, what would you have thought?
fuseproject
Children used One Laptop Per Child's XO1 laptops in Mongolia.
Wow — that’s what I’d have thought. Wow again when I was told that up to one million more of those laptops were on order. The problem for One Laptop Per Child, the American nonprofit organization that has achieved all of the above, is that when its founder, the technologist Nicholas Negroponte, spelled out its objectives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos in 2006, he promised to sell the laptop for $100 and to ship seven million of them.
Does he regret having promised so much? “When I started, I had to be knowingly hyperbolic, otherwise we could not have changed corporate strategy or swung governments into action,” said Mr. Negroponte. “It attracted the kind of attention that made this happen. Had I just said that I would make two million laptops by 2010 for children, OLPC would have been just another start-up.”
Perhaps, but by inflating expectations he has (unwittingly) helped his critics to attack one of the most ambitious design projects of our time. The sad, silly truth is that most designers still devote most of their efforts to the wealthiest 10 percent of the global population, rather than the “other 90 percent” who lack basic products and services. Designing a cheap, efficient educational laptop as part of a flexible learning system for kids in poor countries is a bold attempt to address that. It is also very risky and (thanks to Mr. Negroponte’s flair for spin) so visible that, if OLPC fails, it will be even harder to mount similarly ambitious projects in future. “I’m personally in two minds about its success,” said Cameron Sinclair, a co-founder of the Architecture for Humanity volunteer network, which uses OLPC laptops in a Kenyan school, adding that “it has certainly inspired designers to think bigger and on a grander scale.”
Yet lots of people seem to want OLPC to flop. The development lobby has dismissed it both for being a vanity project (no prizes for guessing whose) and for trying to apply first world solutions to third world problems. Teachers have criticized its educational methodology. Environmentalists have warned of toxic dumps of unwanted laptops. Techies have said it wouldn’t work and raged when OLPC replaced its bespoke operating system with one of Microsoft’s. And the tech industry has moaned about losing potential sales in new markets.
OLPC has undoubtedly suffered from straddling such ferociously political sectors as tech, development and education — and from launching at a time when high profile projects suddenly came under scrutiny from blogging and tweeting. Only two months ago, a Web site run by the United Nations (one of OLPC’s earliest champions) posted a blog entitled “One Laptop Per Child — The Dream is Over.” The one thing that OLPC’s critics — and supporters — agree on is that the XO1 laptop’s small, light tablet format, designed by fuseproject in San Francisco, has inspired other companies to launch similar models and created a fast-growing new product category. If Apple launches its long-rumored tablet computer, that category could become much, much bigger. Impressive, but not one of OLPC’s lofty objectives.
Despite everything, Mr. Negroponte claims that the tide is turning. Late last month the Uruguayan government completed the process of distributing an XO1 to each of its 415,000 elementary school children as the first phase of the Plan Ceibal initiative to provide a laptop for every student and teacher in the country.
Until now, OLPC has only had the evidence of small, isolated projects to rebuff its critics. What happens in Uruguay should demonstrate — one way or another — whether it can achieve its objective of improving educational standards on a sustainable basis. It should also help to establish what sort of support structure is needed, in terms of training, learning resources and tech back-up, to help students and teachers make the most of their laptops. and this information from
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