austraLasia 1331
What's green,
cranked, cheap, and educational?
...find out because some Salesian students in Asia, Africa and the
Arab world will soon benefit from it.
TUNIS: 16th November 2005 -- The live webcast from Tunis
and the WSIS Summit (cf. today's ANS) finished one minute ago, and it
has to have been the most entertaining non-technical, educational hour
one could have spent glued to a tiny screen! Kofi Annan and
Nicholas Negroponte, developer of the $100 'green machine' OLPC project
(One Laptop Per Child), launched the first working prototype of what
they called 'the re-invention of the laptop'. But leave aside any
of the technical aspects (and they were few, but fascinating), the most
captivating aspect of the press conference was the educational passion
of the man who has driven this project, set up a non-profit association
to develop it, and is in consultation with 6 major world nations to put
it into the hands of the first 6 million children.
"This is an educational solution, not a laptop one",
Negroponte said, neatly deflecting a number of questions of the 'geeky'
type. At the same time, he called on a man standing at the back
of the room, Alan Kay, who actually invented the laptop back in
1958. Kay came forward and said "Yes, and I did it initially for
kids". Negroponte revealed in his response to questions from
journalists all around the world, that he had worked in Cambodia
building schools with money he was earning from the internet boom, then
became a firm friend of the man who is now Prime Minister of Thailand
but who was then in telecommunications. No surprise then that
Thailand is firmly committed to being one of the first six countries to
take up OLPC, which means they will purchase a minimum of one million
units, and will ensure these get to children for no more than the
figure quoted, and that the children own their machine.
Negroponte said that was essential. "Does anyone ever wash a rented
car?" he asked? "No, the children must own their machine". And it
will look like a kids machine - who else would want to use a green box
with a crank handle?
He spoke passionately about his experience in
another situation of giving laptops to children in rural villages where
the machine was the brightest light source in the house -which had no
electricity. It goes without saying that the 'green machine' will
work without electricity, or with it. Its crank can produce
enough to run it. It will connect to the internet and 'mesh' with
many other similar machines connectively. In fact there is little
that it won't do that children need to do with it. Since it is
not yet in production, there has been no real field testing, other than
giving it to kids to jump on, drop, twist, chew or whatever: it is
safe, then, and as indestructible as one could hope for. It works
on Open Source software, which means the community worldwide is
effectively helping to develop it.
Negroponte said many things about education in the
course of the hour. He said that all the world's problems
required education as part of their solution. He also said, in
response to a question as to why he wouldn't deal with business but
with governments to distribute the machine, that he believed firmly
that education was a public good and therefore a responsibility of
government. To deal with business rather than government, he
said, was to sanction the latter also turning their back on their
educational responsibilities. That does not mean he is not using
advice and expertise from the private sector. And he hopes
commercial interests will help produce it - maybe even more
cheaply! Google are a sponsor, so is Rupert Murdoch.
And who might the other five countries be? He
let some names slip: Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil, and it's a toss up
between China and India. There will be one other African country.
February should see the first models produced and once they have a few
million they will be immediately shipped.
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