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countries bandwidth and internet access

countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 6:29 UTC (Fri) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: countries bandwidth and internet access by Alterego
Parent article: Changes at OLPC

OLPC's concept of net access is mesh networking, more than connection to the global backbone. Kids can network to teacher's laptop. Teacher can get materals by sneakernet.


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countries bandwidth and internet access

Posted Jan 9, 2009 11:06 UTC (Fri) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

True, mesh networking is a really good idea, maybe a short term low cost solution of using a wire/wifi would have been enought ?

I was refering to the OLPC propaganda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMeX2D4AOjM
"connected so the child can access the internet" 42s-44s of the video.

This is unrealistic in Africa, which is nearly half of the developping countries.

The OLPC team of 60/32 people is probably more important than the team of Nepad working on ICT and education.
This is also one identified problem of development: foreign NGOs have more power than local governments (at least in Africa), and they do what they want, no matter if it is asked for, or at least adequate.

I can tell you: they don't care about high-tech for children, they just want normal (preferably low power) computers for universites and schools, they can tune and repair easily, like we do with ordinary exchangable components. And they need to part-time work as cyber-center, to cover the expenses (mainly teachers, power and bandwidth cost)

There are many very sad examples of great ideas leading to complete failure due to ignorance, eg contraception (translated as "barrier to children" which is opposite to culture whereas a local term "spacing sorgho plants" would have been perfectly understood and accepted http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/01/08/l-aide-a...), agriculture (new food people don't eat, or which require very long cooking time so the energy budget explodes), in water management (destabilise the local economy balance and create international tension, or deep drill that fall apart after 2 years and force people to manually get water from 40m when before it was 10m) ... This only due to, let's say, the certitude of being Right, when one has only a very superficial knowledge of the situation.

Child education is very culture-dependant. So, we (highly tech developped people), can maybe provide technology expertise, or share university courses, but for child's education the content must be done by local people, or for sure it will be inadequate.

Let's say olpc had some great ideas, partly suitable, but went wrong, and need to travel in Africa to learn.


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