Regular readers will know that we’ve always rather loathed the $100 laptop and have argued that for any chance for it to be a success in the developing world, an education device needs to be a mobile phone. Still the little green machine is held up and presented as some miracle cure. Maybe, with Microsoft’s partnership with the project, it will be all finally over: Bruce Nussbaum on Business Week recently also argues that Microsoft’s partnership with the global education project is the final nail in the coffin. Nussbaum argues that the deal will kill what was at the very heart of the project – being open source:
The original goal of OLPC was to use open source software to connect children directly to one another and the web so they could learn from one another and directly from many sources of information.
The problem from the very beginning was that this is a Western educational concept encased in a beautiful little childrens’ laptop designed by Westerners for non-Western children and non-Western cultures and educational institutions. The education ministeries in India, China and elsewhere saw OLPC as a challenge to their authority and their abilities. After all, the rise of China and India and the lifting of half a billion people out of poverty in the shortest period of time in history is based on their existing educational institutions. They argued that with US companies chasing Chinese and Indian school graduates, why change their systems to conform to some Western ideal of learning?
…OLPC set a target of selling 100-150 million laptops by the end of 2008 and so far it has placed one order of 100,000 computers with Uruguay, a well-off country with middle class, not poor, children in most of its schools.
…The lesson here is that however brilliant the innovation, it needs to be appropriate to the context and the culture. It needs to fit in and not be imposed. And it needs coalitions, teams, to support it. In fact, in the case of education, which is extremely politically sensitive in every country, OLPC should have developed both the design of the computer and the pedagogy with the Indian and Chinese teachers and administrators, not for them.
With Microsoft’s XP software now being loaded, the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop becomes just another inexpensive (the price will be around $200, double the original estimate) machine competing with Intel’s Classmate and others.
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