One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)?
There is a fever going around the open source community lately over the One Laptop Per Child project. For those who are not familiar, OLPC is a project to create and sell a $100 laptop to poor communities, for use by children. The story goes that by giving these kids access to first world technology, they will be better equipped for the electronic economy of the 21st century, or something like that.
Everything I read about OLPC is setting off warning bells. The techie in me worries about the design philosophy. In order to avoid paying fees to Microsoft, the laptop will run a custom built distribution of Linux with its own new interface. I have no confidence that the interface will be particularly good, and more importantly, the OLPC experience will have little relation to that of a “real” computer. We don’t need new paradigms; we don’t need to reinvent the wheel because we have a scheme to save the world.
Even worse, the project has been milking its strange new interface for publicity — they apparently think it is an asset! Thankfully, Microsoft has gotten Windows CE to run on the laptop, which is a promising development, and I imagine some of the countries that purchase the laptop will opt to have WinCE preinstalled instead of the Linux distribution.
The more fundamental problem with OLPC is the notion that one road out of poverty for poor nations is giving children cheap access to technology. I can understand why people who love computers would feel that everyone should have a computer, but come on. Education is enormously important to economic growth and poverty reduction, but the countries which moved into sustained economic growth did not do so by giving students laptops! (How do I know? Because many of these countries experienced a shift in growth before laptops existed: see South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, etc.)
If rich countries really want to help, they should consider much more carefully what poor countries need. Is it laptops? Last I checked, careful studies had shown medical interventions to be quite effective in increasing school attendance and even aptitude (kids who are sick when they are very young tend to do worse in school when they are older.) Are there any studies showing that laptops in schools increase aptitude? Are there any studies about laptops in schools in poor countries, at all?
It is noble to want to help the poor, but if we are going to devote a limited amount of resources to help, then we should make sure to maximize the benefit the poor receive from those resources. By this metric, OLPC fails miserably. It is a very nice but fundamentally flawed idea. If it does fail, I just hope that people aren’t discouraged from helping out in general.
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Two months late, but I agree wholeheartedly. Every word.for that same $100 we could buy them a dozen high quality text books.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I can see why nobody has commented. Because there is no substance here. Just “do this instead” speak. I’m a software developer. My primary operating system is Windows and always has been. It is junk. A linux core is the only practical OS to run on low powered hardware such as this. And it is the only complete, inexpensive, widely utilized OS that makes any sense. Windows can barely run on modern, power hungary hardware. Applications for Windows are expensive and not built for children and too resource hungary.
As to what children need. The poor of the world are a complex lot. They are as varied as any other segment of the population. There is only one thing they all need and that is hope and inspiration. This is one initiative by a bunch of technical people doing what they do best to help the poor and spending a great deal of effort doing that. It is admirable. Sitting back and complaining because they are not channeling funds through other charities and organization because that is what you would do (but don’t) is petty and disgusting.
January 12th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
I can see why nobody has commented. Because there is no substance here. Just “do this instead” speak. I’m a software developer. My primary operating system is Windows and always has been. It is junk. A linux core is the only practical OS to run on low powered hardware such as this. And it is the only complete, inexpensive, widely utilized OS that makes any sense. Windows can barely run on modern, power hungry hardware. Applications for Windows are expensive and not built for children and too resource hungry.
As to what children need. The poor of the world are a complex lot. They are as varied as any other segment of the population. There is only one thing they all need and that is hope and inspiration. This is one initiative by a bunch of technical people doing what they do best to help the poor and spending a great deal of effort doing that. It is admirable. Sitting back and complaining because they are not channeling funds through other charities and organization because that is what you would do (but don’t) is petty and disgusting.