OLPC

I know that the One Laptop Per Child project is old news, and that’s precisely why I think it’s finally time for me to weigh in on the subject. Hindsight is 20/20, and since OLPC is so completely different from anything that came before, it has been easy for people who care a lot about education to get caught up, either in the hype or in the backlash.

That said, OLPC is a truly revolutionary project. It isn’t just the quality for the price, either. The big computer companies are right: their OLPC knockoffs can compete on those grounds alone. But OLPC is also the greenest laptop in the world “by a factor of 10.” It features easily replaceable parts. (How many of your devices do?) It’s super-durable. The mesh networking system is positively brilliant.

OLPC also uses an open-source operating system. I know that the OS has been seen as a negative by government officials in some countries, who see it as sort of Microsoft knockoff, but open source allows for possible future user experimentation with the software, which is a plus.

A motivated person can learn more from a computer connected to the internet than from a lifetime of formal schooling. More importantly, people can learn the way that they naturally do: by exploring every path that interests them, as illustrated in this fabulous XKCD comic on the addictive potential of Wikipedia.

Honestly, if I were the US government, I’d buy a whole bunch of these and send them to Iraq and Afghanistan. The goodwill it could create (particularly in conjunction with a removal of troops) would be enormous. A connection to the world can make a 180 degree difference in a person’s life.

The biggest mistake that the OLPC project has made thus far is not to continue the Give-One-Get-One program. The units are selling on Ebay for around $400-500, when the give-one get one program charged $350 or so. Ebay sellers are making profit instead of poor children getting computers. An equally, if not more, harmful long-term consequence of their decision to end Give-One-Get-One is the amount of user innovation that could otherwise be integrated into future models/peripherals/upgrades. People in industrialized countries are more likely to have the money to put their creative ideas into action, meaning that large numbers of people could have created and tested new ideas on the OLPC with no R&D cost to the project. What if a DIYer somewhere in Texas or Vermont has an idea for the OLPC that could revolutionize education technology as we know it, but they feel morally amiss paying $500 to an Ebay scalper for one? To me, ignoring the open-source ingenuity of residents of industrialized nations is the biggest mistake of the project.