The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) mission is: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. The target group: The nearly two–billion children in the developing world who are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. The means to the end: A project to build and distribute a small, simple, robust and sub USD100 laptop that would revolutionise life for the poor by educating their children - or, in the most idealistic version, allowing them to educate themselves by playing with the software.
I'm reminded of OLPC upon visiting the Intel booth and surprised that it is apparently still alive. Even more surprised that our Ministry of Education is running the pilot in 10 schools. We had the Smart Schools MSC Flagship Application that drained hundreds of millions of taxpayers money without any results to show. Then came the Education Blueprint. Now this.
OLPC was launched in Jan-2005 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland by founder, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab. It was endorsed by Kofi Annan, Rupert Murdoch, Presidents of Brazil, Nigeria and 20 or more countries that announced their intention to buy. Several hundred thousand of the laptops have actually been delivered, mostly in Peru. Reportedly, no one knows exactly where.
Critics say it was an expensive gimmick. In places like my kampong that can hardly afford pens and pencils for their schools, it is not obvious that a USD100 laptop for every child is the answer to mass illiteracy. Read the blog of a OLPC senior executive who quit this year, Ivan Krsti, after he was sent out to Peru to oversee the distribution of the some 40,000 laptops in about 570 schools there. He describes "across jungles, mountains, plains, and with total variance in electrical availability and uniformly no existing network infrastructure. A number of the target schools are in places requiring multiple modes of transportation to reach, and that are so remote that they're not even serviced by the postal service. Laptop delivery was going to be performed by untrusted vendors who are in a position to steal the machines en masse. There is no easy way to collect manifests of what actually got delivered, where, and to whom."
Even if the laptops reach the schools they are supposed to reach, there is no evidence at all that they will actually help children to learn. Lets learn to learn. Lets learn lessons from our not-so-successful Smart Schools project that emphasized computers. It takes a leap of faith to believe that children learn better through computers than books.
The last I report I read the OLPC is going down. The collapse of the scheme higlights the falsity of the believe that IT alone can lift people out of poverty. Knowledge may, but the technology that spreads knowledge best is literacy, not laptops. Supporters say that the laptop enables people to have access to more information via the Internet allowing them to tap into a vast reserve of knowledge - e.g. Wikipedia. But how much information does a person need to consume to have sustainable livelihood? Though the Internet gives you access to information, but so does a good textbook.
How is a laptop more efficent than a book? Textbooks require no power, don't need winding up or solar cells, they can be passed to the next kid when it is finished with. They only use sustainable trees in their construction, and are cheap.
And what can a unsustainable laptop teach that a book cannot? Only IT skills, and I'd imagine that an agriculture community like my kampong, Singai, in Sarawak, does not have IT top of the survival skillset.
I'm 40 something and the Internet wasn't there to impact on my secondary education. I'm sure none of my forty something colleagues would regard our education as woefully deficient.
Not that I want to generalise, but back in my kampong school in remote Sarawak, we studied English lit with 10 copies of the novel to be split between about 60 kids. In that situation, at least, a laptop for every child would have been laughably irrelevant.
In the age of the Internet today, how is that a McKinsey study finds that only 11% of our graduates are employable by multinational companies?
An even deeper lesson: Just watch our own children - without adult support and encouragement, children will use all technology to play with. If you give them paper, they will make paper aeroplanes; if you give them laptops, they will play solitaire. So really what our beloved Malaysia needs is better educated teachers.
MOE, please learn one more lesson: In the Smart Schools project, the people in charge don't bother to find out what the end-user really needs and can cope with. The project ends up enriching some private companies, wasting lots of taxpayer money, and doing no good, and no-one takes the blame. In the end the verdict is that "lessons will be learnt" but in fact they never are because the same mistakes are repeated over and over.
At the Intel booth it was revealed that its soon to be released new generation of the OLPC, the NetBook, will be powered by the new generation Intel Atom processor.
Intel joined OLPC in July last year and introduced its version of the laptop.
Watch a video of Intel's Classmate PCs in Dr Craig Barrett's Keynote Address at WCIT 2008. His presentation defines what is a world-class presentation.
No comments:
Post a Comment