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I devoted several weeks of my time to prepare and promote the October 29 conference to introduce One Laptop Per Child to religious leaders in Rome. Sometimes I wondered what I had gotten myself into by following an intuition that this project could be very important. On the morning of the event, I went with Nicholas Negroponte and Antonio Battro, two of the main movers in OLPC, to the Vatican Radio studios where I had arranged for Negroponte to be interviewed. Then in the afternoon I listened to his talk, which I heard again when I edited the recording I had made. So I have heard a lot and wanted to put down some of my own thoughts.
Negroponte made many important points during his presentation, and he considerably expanded on the scope of the project beyond what the news reports usually say. They tend to focus on the laptop itself, which is an amazing blend of opposing concepts: technological innovation and low cost.
OLPC is a non-profit organization, despite the advice Negroponte got when he was starting up the venture. Many people counseled him to make it for-profit and then donate the surplus to the poor. Because it is non-profit, however, he has been able to get people involved whose talents he could never afford if they were only motivated by normal market concerns. So being non-profit has opened many doors and gives a credibility that they would not otherwise have.
The XO laptop turns normal computer thinking on its head. For years Microsoft, Intel and everyone else have developed bigger applications with more features that demand more computer horsepower. All of that is basically a merchandising gambit to keep people spending money on new equipment. OLPC, by contrast, aimed at very lean, open-source software that runs on a stripped-down, efficient system that draws one-tenth to one-twentieth of the current that a regular laptop requires. Less expensive to buy and to use does not mean "cheap" however. OLPC developed new technology for the screen which has features that you cannot get on any other portable computer, such as the dual-mode screen that works in a transmissive color mode for normal use but also in a high-contrast black and white mode for outdoor use.
Another non-conformist idea is the notion that each child should have his or her own computer. Many schools in the developing world have a computer lab, but the number of computers can be so limited relative to the number of children that the actual time any one kid can spend on a computer is negligible. Negroponte hopes the XO laptop becomes as ordinary, and as widely used, as a pencil. He calculates that the actual class time that many kids in the developing world spend in school is only a few hours a day. His goal is to expand that time by allowing each child to take the laptop home and keep working and learning there.
OLPC thinks big. One of its principals is aiming for great "scale." They figure to make the laptops inexpensive because they will produce so many of them; high volume translates to lowered costs. Since they are not aiming to make a profit, low costs means more computers can go to people with little income who would not otherwise have a computer. And they need to have lots of kids using the computers and learning in a new fashion to have the major impact on education worldwide that they are aiming for.
Scale is also important in the sense of wide distribution of the machines in an area. Since another principle is "connected"-their goal is that each child will share a wireless connection-from one computer to another through the built-in wireless mesh networking, it is important that a lot of computers be present near each other to make that connectivity happen. The built-in wireless is another one of the innovations that is very high quality; each XO laptop has two short antennas that flip up away from the body of the computer and improve the wireless reception.
Of course, the challenge of wide distribution is getting enough money to pay for the computers. And that cost adds up no matter how relatively inexpensive the machines are. Initially the OLPC planners hoped to get governments to do a massive buy-in, but experience showed that governments are slower to write a check than to make a promise to provide the computers to their children. So now OLPC has made a strategic move to individual and corporate donors who can make donations to buy any number of computers, from one to thousands, for a country or even a specific school they are interested in. This change of strategy was the motive behind Negroponte's visit to Rome, since the Catholic Church runs schools all over the world and has the connections to make the project work.
The primary target audience for OLPC are children between six and 12 years of age. That is the formative educational period when kids have a chance to learn how to learn and develop cognitive skills that will change the way the rest of their education works. The importance of this period is well known. Because the laptop is aimed at children, it is made a small size, light weight and rugged. It has a handle to make it easy to carry and a keyboard sized for small hands. The keyboard is sealed so that when (not if) kids spill liquids on it, nothing will happen. The screen sits in a special cradle to protect it from shocks when its owner drops it.
The software is also oriented towards children and cleverly aims to get kids thinking through playing with their environment (with the built-in web-cam), swapping pictures, chatting. Even mathematics can be taught by playing games. In order to make a car turn a corner on screen, the child has to learn how to calculate angles. Music making software and drawing software are also part of the mix.
At the same time, the laptop is a real computer. It runs on a Linux operating system, and has a web browser, email software, word processor. It can run Windows and other open-source software. And that power is what gives the machine its incredible value to the whole family, not just the child. Parents can use the computer for home business or getting health and agricultural resources. And I think it would also make a great "thin client" machine in a school or digital learning setting. Thin client machines are a category that marked by small size, no hard drive, no fan, etc. They are meant to be connected to a serve and function as a terminal, rather than a stand-alone machine like a normal desktop computer. They are simpler than a regular computer, and easier to maintain, so they make a lot of sense in a developing country, especially one with a hot climate that normally would require air-conditioning for a traditional computer lab. Hewlitt Packard, for example, makes one model, the t5530 thin client tower, which has just 64 MB of flash memory and runs on Windows CE operating system software; I saw a promo price for this unit for $276. Of course, this doesn't include a flat panel monitor; once you throw in at least $150 for that, then the actual $188 cost of a XO laptop looks very attractive, even if one were to use it in ways that Negroponte did not anticipate. Since the wireless connection is already built-in, the laptop could function very well even in a quite sophisticated computing environment that uses the latest server-centric software. My point is simply that the computer will work great for children, but is not limited to their use.
One of Negroponte's ideas that I most resonate with comes from his response to the question about the size of the XO laptop's memory. It has one gigabyte of flash memory instead of a hard drive. Most computers will start to move that direction anyway as flash memory drops in price. One gig of memory is a lot if you don't have to store bloated, over-weight Word documents. But Negraponte says that the connectedness of the XO means that the laptops can function as a distributed system. Each laptop can hold part of an encyclopedia so that any child who is connected can share part of his or her computer's memory with nearby machines. One can take that same idea of sharing resources and think about a world-wide network of educational resources that people contribute to. So if a talented teacher in Ethiopia devises a great way to teach math, that material can be shared all over the world. This is a corollary of the "open-source" mentality. Instead of trying to protect "my" work so I can profit by it, the open-source mentality hopes that everyone will benefit by freely sharing what you develop.
Ultimately, that dream of connectivity and cooperation might be the most far-reaching idea that OLPC has, especially if they reach the broad-scale diffusion that they are aiming for. It fits right into a Christian ethic of communal sharing of resources, and it is something worth trying to make happen.