For all the criticism of the OLPC project, i personally think the project is on to something. That it will probably fail at the implementation stage is an entirely different story... However many of the criticisms that the guy has in the article dont make sense...
> Many moons ago a host of schools in the US started to equip their students > with leased laptops in a state and federally funded project. Despite home > computer penetration of over 70 percent, the drive dubbed the "one-to-one" > program was designed to increase interactivity in teaching and help kids pick > up skills like creating multimedia presentations and being able to use the > Net for research. Skills that were expected to help boost their success in > the real world. > equating a US market with high computer penetration and various other distractions with failure of the OLPC in other developing countries is foolish at best... > Worse still schools view > it as a critical distraction with the laptop actually getting in way of > teaching. The cost of training teachers, creating new lesson plans, putting > infrastructure into place, maintaining the machines and policing the network > only adds to the problem. Again...employing an american scenario and problems onto a completely different scenario is silly. Cost of putting in infrastrucuture, maintenance etc..is what OLPC specifically addresses... > who've also used them to get really good at typing, network games, instant > messaging to cheat on tests, downloading porn and hacking (in a New York > school, a tenth grader not only ran rings round network security but also > posted detailed instructions for his classmates online). They make it all sound like a bad thing ? if someone wanted to cheat they would have done so anyway. I remember once being introduced to Wrigley stick chewing gum.. and i found if i put it in the freezer for a while, I could write answers on top of the sticks, which was great as a cheating mechanism, i could chew the gum and destory evidence immediately. > > Will the situation be any different in India or other developing economies? > The problems endemic to the system are many. In our country, 23,000 schools > don't have a single teacher, with 3 percent of schools still looking for a > single student. Or take Africa where many countries are part of the One > Laptop Per Child (OLTC) plan promoted by digital oracle Nicholas Negreponte. > The program to dole out $180 devices in schools, has come in for criticism > from the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. > >From what i can see the OLPC rollouts are small scale, unlike the UN approach which would probably have been to do a high impact carpet bombing of 1,000,000 computers handed out in a month. > The UN body maintains that "computers can't solve the problems of a place > where almost half a billion people live on less than $1 a day, and many lack > clean drinking water. When textbooks, chalk, water and teachers are in short > supply, high-tech investments should not be a priority." This is what the UN is aiming to do, and it is one approach, assuming that this should be everyones approach is a bit stupid. I once came across a project where villagers were handed out motorized chain saws (every male in the area carried one, just like the texas chainsaw massacres) as some UN officer decided it was a way to boost local income. Very soon all the vegetation in the area disappeared and there was a drought, and the UN had to drop in relief supplies.
