As Nicholas Negroponte would say, One Laptop Per Child is an education project, it's not a laptop project. So here are the education related achievements of the OLPC project to date:
Uruguayans love XO laptops
- 1. 1.5 million children are now using the XO laptop every day. Most if not all children, teachers and parents involved are very positive about the experience, at least if you look at all those hundreds of videos that have been published on the Internet which for the past 4years, I have been aggregating at http://olpc.tv from all the pilot deployments from around the world.
- It's only a matter of time before more politicians unlock more funding for many more millions of laptops to be deployed.
- The beginning of the research and development of educational tools, contents, digitalized curriculum are being collaboratively thought for by thousands of teachers and education planners and researchers in all those countries involved.
Although, the deployment of XO laptops has been mostly a success as far as I have seen on the online videos and as far as I have been able to read on most Google News items that have been published everyday for the past 4 years, OLPC globally I think still have a lot more convincing to do in the Education department.
OLPC needs to make it absolutely obvious to Barack Obama, all EU politicians, the United Nations, everyone at Davos, world leaders in developing countries and beyond, that the implementation of One Laptop Per Child is an absolute necessity, and that no more time should be wasted on R&D and pilot testing, now is the time to do the massive deployment and connect all students and their education onto the Internet.
This is not only for the children of the developing countries, millions of children in supposed rich countries like EU and USA are also being left behind. We absolutely need to implement the logical solution to global education reform.
Connect every child to the worlds knowledge on the Internet, provide each child with personalized access to education, to the worlds information, to the complete knowledge of all books, let them experience all stories and simply let them see the possibilities that are available, let them believe that they can become whatever they want when they grow up. It is that basic feeling of self-confidence and thirst for knowledge that needs to be communicated to every child and enabled by technology.
This is the second installment of Charbax's two-part response to "What Have We Learned From OLPC?". Have your own answer? Submit it as a Guest Post today!
Recent Comments
I would maintain that this is best done in steps, starting with pilot projects that are successful and then tranferring the technology to large projects. Throwing the switch to a whole system does not always go well:
http://www.bwcitypaper.com/Articles-i-2009-11-26-232786.113121_A_Costly_Lesson.html
The approach of Oceania in small steps or even the single classroom of roomtwelve.com best serves the incorporation of the XO into the classrom. Would that OLPC allowed the sale of smaller lots for a more hardy root system.