XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old [LWN.net]

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 9, 2009 5:10 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989)
In reply to: XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old by dlang
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

what i mean is it would be more useful to provide computer to people who really need them now (universities) than to 6-12 yo children who will mostly never see one again.

Flood country with computers ! What is your planet ?
1 billion people are starving, they don't have money for food or drinkable water, electricity is lacking (regular power cut due to some king of round robin scheme to provide electricity to everybody in Dakar, capital of Senegal which is one of the best doing country in sub-saharian Africa).

I won't comment "with very limited bandwidth things can still be done", see Niger with 1MB/s backbone for the whole country some years ago, and probably still now.

The official site of NEPAD, the African continental plan to adress their problems:
I quote only 2 parts of the 3 pages worth to read document presenting ICT:
Aout Nepad > Priority areas > Human Development > ICT
http://www.nepad.org/2005/files/documents/30.pdf

"The connections cost in Africa averages 20% of GDP per capita, compared with the world average of 9%, and 1% for high income countries"

" Objectives :
- to double the teledensity of 2 lines per 100 people
- to develop and produce a pool of ICT-proficient youth and students from which Africa can draw trainee ICT engineers, programmers and software developpers.
- to develop local content software, based specially on Africa's culture legacy"

Cell phones revolutionize communications becauses billions of investments are done by companies because there is a market, and the cost of cell phone is far much lower than one olpc. Thats a real development,(improve infrastructure) fitting real local needs, not a charity done by more-than-gifted-but-ignorant-foreigners, and that why it works.
Cell phone are also a community effort, not one for each people, but one per business unit. Also, when there is no power in a village, there are no cell phones !

And i dont think that giving a cell phone to each 6-12 yo child would solve any problem.

I think its a good thing that olpc fails because it is based on misconceptions, and drains lots of resources that could be much better used elsewhere, for example in universities who really need computers.

OLPC is dead, let's go to OLPUS one laptop per university student, of course with open resources:
- open OS and software to permit them to study how it work, and adapt/build their own solutions fitting their real needs.
- open content (books, wikipedia...), which can be copied and modified, not ebooks with drm that will only cost a lot, and will mostly be inadequate occidental content.
This would work and provide a real help, that was the initial plan of olpc before the treason ;-) even if the targeted audience was/is wrong imnsho.

to post comments

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 9, 2009 18:18 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

when OLPC deploys laptops to a country they give one to every kid in grade school.

in a few years we will see what happens when those kids leave grade school.

it may be that they give the laptops back, but do the schools really want 5-year old laptops to issue to new students? (which would be 10 years old when those kids leave school), or will they get new laptops for the new students and let the kids keep the old machines.

If the kids keep the machines they will continue to use them after they leave school.

just becouse 1B people are starving, that doesn't mean that educating the next 2B people who aren't starving.

and who knows, possibly by educating those 2B people the overall productivity of the world will go up and more food will be available to feed the 1B

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 10, 2009 1:25 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (3 responses)

I agree that educating the not so poor will later help the poorest.

OT: Wrt to food problem, the problem is not world productivity, it is agriculture subventions which allows US and EU to control food for a big part of the planet, and causes misery by preventing primary economy development. Fighting false ideas is very important for human development, that's why i insist so heavily on this, sorry :-)

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:19 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

We're getting pretty far from the topic of laptops for children. But before you pin the problem on agriculture "subventions" - which I guess means control exerted through capitalism on the production and distribution of food - you should also consider the Malthusian aspect. The major governors of population throughout history, and no doubt before, have been famine and disease. Even with the most efficient possible production and allocation of food, eventually the population would reach a point at which all would be hungry, if illness wasn't killing us off. I can't believe we could be very far from that point today. The only long-term solution would be for human beings to limit their own procreation to a level at which the ecosystem can sustainably feed us.

Bruce

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 12, 2009 5:33 UTC (Mon) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

s/subvention/subsidy/ in my posts (and s/subsidy/zero/g in US and EU :-)
The control is exerted by subsidies to the richest countries ! (cotton...)

Agreed.
And one good news is: the number of child per family decreases when people gets richer.

http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;...

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Posted Jan 15, 2009 13:41 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

IMHO this is silly. What's causing damage to Africa is the kleptocracy that's the dominant government form there. A country will get nowhere with a dictator who wants to stay in power even when the population dies due to the effort. You certainly will hear a lot of excuses that the help provided by outsiders is hurting the people.

If you look at other parts of the world, things go quite differently. Asia has developed very significantly during the last decades. There are still poor countries, there are still many countries where the political system is not up to western standards, but at least the dictators are benevolent. They don't kill their own people, like they did in the 60s and 70s.

However, I think the originator of this subthread is right: You should not concentrate on the small children first; if you only have a limited amount of founding, take the students first. The benefit there is higher. It raises the education of the elite, and whatever you think about equal democracy, it's always the elite who sets the direction of a country. When they are stupid, uneducated, and selfish, they will ruin it.

One problem of third world countries is the quality of teachers. Negroponte want to "solve" that problem by skipping the teacher. I don't think you can. By helping the students first, you can create sufficiently good teachers, and it does not really take that long. By the time the OLPC really is a billion unit product, you'll already could have a few million capable teachers.