7-year olds get school laptops... in Peru
Wouldn't it be great for education if all school kids had their own laptops? Well, in Peru this is happening. And in Uruguay, Mongolia, Libya and Ethiopia. The laptops are designed and developed by a non-profit foundation called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) started by Nicolas Negroponte, formerly of the MIT Medialab.
The OLPC is a technical miracle. It was in fact considered impossible by all the major commercial manufacturers and software builders like Intel, Dell, IBM and Microsoft. That did not hold back the OLPC team though and they build something not only affordable ($150-$180) but also rugged, maintainable and very, very eco-friendly. My Mac laptop eats 30-80 watts, the OLPC does 1-2 watt. That matters when your primary source of electricity is a $10 solar panel. If the world switched to OLPC's from their current systems the savings on power cost (even excluding the environmental cost!) would be sufficient to buy 50 million OLPC's per year for the third world.
On the software side the OLPC foundation chose to use open source software wherever possible, both to keep the cost to their clients as close to zero as possible but also to allow local communities to adapt the software to their needs, wishes, languages and cultural conventions. All the specifications of the laptop (both hard- and software are available for public scrutiny and improvement from the OLPC wiki. This guarantees the independence of nations basing their education on OLPC devices, they will remain in control over the content and methods of education because they have full control over the technology.
But the technical brilliance is not the most important part of the story. The way digital teaching aids allow for new ways of disseminating knowledge is. When every student has a networked digital device that can store and display digital information, schoolbooks can be fully digitized. That gives opportunities to free the ownership of the information in them from the classic model of big publishers that exert control over what goes in the books. A schoolbook is then just a part of a wiki-type system where teachers, experts and other interested parties can collaborate on educational materials that is then shared freely with the world. Some of these contributers may be financially rewarded for such work in the same way we now financially reward publishers. The output however would belong to all of us and we would not have to buy the same knowledge over and over again.I've written more about this here.
The interesting question for western countries is whether they will lag behind places like Peru and Mongolia in modern education. Western European countries typically spend 150-300 euros per child per year on schoolbooks so there's no question that the budget is there. It just needs to be spent slightly differently.
Much has been made of the fact that teachers would not be able to handle the technology. But teachers don't teach kids these laptops, they mostly teach each other. But don't take my word for it. Listen to the 9-year old expert:
Some interesting ideas from Robert X Cringley on the future of education if all kids have full access to online information resources. As often with these type of articles there are as many good ideas in the comments as in the article itself