OLPC Will Remain a Non-Profit

A letter to the editor from Rodrigo Arboleda, Chairman of the OLPC Association:

The story in today’s Boston Business Journal about One Laptop per Child requires certain clarification:

1.     OLPC will continue as a non-profit organization in order to carry out its traditional role advocating for 1:1 computing in developing countries as a means to provide a modern education to children.

2.     OLPC will continue as a non-profit organization in its activities to arrange and manage laptop deployments around the world.

3.     OLPC continues to believe that non-profit status enables it to more effectively communicate on the issues of children and education without the possible taint of commercial self-interest.

OLPC is exploring many avenues for the further development of its educational software on new operating systems and computing platforms.  If such activities are pursued, it may require capital from traditional capital markets such as venture capitalists.  These funding sources may prefer to invest in a new type of vehicle labeled “Profitable Social Enterprises”, which would be a subsidiary of OLPC, but would have no effect on the traditional mission, methods or objectives of OLPC. This new subsidiary may develop its products for the U.S. market for a fee, but it is expected that the software would be made available in the developing world for free. This is all part of a new breed of philanthropy being developed that does not contradict the OLPC spirit or mission.

Rodrigo Arboleda

Chairman and CEO

One Laptop per Child Association

 

Severin and Capota analyze 1-to-1 laptop programs in Latin America

Last month, Eugenio Severin and Christine Capota recently published a report for the IDB, analyze 1-to-1 laptop programs across Latin America and the Caribbean. They considered models for success and cost of ownership over the duration of a program, and looked at both OLPC and other 1-to-1 programs. They share a few broad recommendations for such programs:

Focus on the student and learning results. Consider One-to-One as the relationship between a child and learning, mediated by technology among other factors

Consider infrastructure, digital content, teacher training/support, community involvement, and policy

Consider both initial investment and long-term sustainability

Emphasize the role of monitoring and rigorous evaluations

OLPC has focused largely on supporting the first three points, with the fourth often left in the hands of our national partners (though we offer advice when asked). Over the past year, we have put more energy into supporting evaluations, compiling a list of OLPC research papers and publishing an overview of recent evaluations.

It’s natural for organizations like IDB that carry out and rely on monitoring to encourage and emphasize this. I find it a pity that few of the evaluations included in our overview published their raw data, or were carried out in a way that allowed their work to be directly compared to or combined with similar work in other regions.

To these researchers and others: I would love to see a nuanced discussion about what sorts of things can and should be monitored, what rigor and consistency mean across geography and time, and how data can be shared across [research] projects. Please help make this investment in monitoring improve our understanding of education and societal change, and not simply produce a (gameable) point-evaluation of the success of a policy decision.

I also hope to see a similar analysis for programs across the Mideast and Africa. The OLPC Rwanda program is being studied at the moment, but OLPC projects in http://wiki.laptop.org/images/2/24/OLPCF_M%26E_Publication.pdfEthiopia and Gaza are two of my favorite deployments worldwide — both have great insight to offer in organizing a successful locally-supported and sustainable project.

Comments on Jeffrey James’s olpc critique

By Antonio M. Battro, OLPC’s Chief Education Officer

Jeffrey James wrote a critique of OLPC last year, proposing a balanced pattern of “sharing computers” among children (say 5 children per computer, in the US or the UK) instead of the olpc “one to one” model – one laptop per child (and per teacher). As an alternative to olpc, James proposes that “the number of students per laptop stands in roughly the same ratio as the difference in per capita incomes between the rich and the poor country” (p. 385). In his view, the OLPC idea to persuade the developing countries to exceed the standards of shared computers of developed countries seems “utterly perverse” (p. 386).

It seems that his reasoning will fail if we substitute mobile phones for laptops. We don’t frequently share mobile phones, and in many poor countries their number exceeds James’s predictions about ratios of income and information and communication technologies in the hands of people. It seems difficult to accept the universality of his model about “sharing”, because laptops, tablets and mobile phones are rapidly converging in new hybrids.

On the other side, his ideas for successful low-cost technology sharing are not clear. One of his options, for instance, is “to purchase Intel’s Classmate computer at a similarly low price and let [them] be shared by as many students as is thought desirable” (p.389). In Argentina, where the Classmate has been most widely adopted, the national government is deploying some 3 million Classmates to cover the whole population of students and teachers of the secondary public schools in the country, on a one to one basis – an idea first proposed by OLPC some 5 years ago. It would be interesting to know the current state of affairs of other options he references (Simputer, NComputing, sharing multiple mice). However the quoted references are from 2006 and 2008, and 3-5 years is a long time in the digital era.

From the point of view of psychology and education, some comments about “teaching” need careful revision. First, in his paper James never speaks of the need to give laptops to the teachers, despite the significant mass of teachers in the world. On the contrary, OLPC programs start in every country by giving a laptop per teacher and providing corresponding teacher training. We know that a) “digital skills” develop in stages from the very early ages, as a second language (Battro & Denham, 2007) and b) most teachers didn’t have the opportunity to early access to this new global environment in the poor and developing countries.

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Why laptops? Advice for parents from New Zealand

Rob McCrae, ICT Director for Auckland’s Diocesan School for Girls, shares a conversation he had with parents at his school about why laptops are a fundamental platform for children learning. Via Scott McLeod.

What has become important is the “just in time” model. A model which sees essential habits and attitudes of learning being the focus. A model which sees the ability to think about our own thinking as a focus.

And expect to see traditionally-held beliefs challenged. Here is a model of the human brain showing the areas that are being engaged as the same person (an experienced Web surfer) reads a book and, at a separate time, is browsing the Web

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Web access: a basic human right

Tim Berners-Lee declared access to the Web a human right at an MIT symposium this week on Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything. He noted that it’s incredibly important to push things, in designing the Web’s infrastructure, to help the Web affect society and culture positively. Nicholas spoke later on the current impact of OLPC and the future of the XO-3.