The $100 laptop

The IT world is abuzz with excitement about a project to hook up millions of children in poor countries to the internet. Have all the bases been covered?

Imagine if every child in the world were linked to the internet. Even in the wastes of the Sahara, the slums of Sao Paulo or the jungles of Thailand they could do courses in astrophysics, play on-line games, watch CNN, get spam about Viagra and access the complete works of Shakespeare.

Nicholas Negroponte, the American technology futurist, is doing more than imagining it. He is overseeing the manufacture and distribution of 100 million laptops by the end of 2006 to be sold for a mere US$100 each. The rugged green machine will have a full colour screen which will do nearly everything except store huge amounts of data. It will also have USB ports galore, 1 gigabyte of data storage and wireless links to the internet. Power supply in remote villages? No problem. Negroponte’s famous Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a wind-up battery.  

The One Laptop Per Child project was showcased last month in Tunisia, at the United Nations summit on information technology. When UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan cranked the computer up, the handle broke, but he was not discouraged. "Children will be able to learn by doing, not just through instruction,” he said enthusiastically. “They will be able to open up new fronts for their education, particularly peer-to-peer learning.”

So far the MIT group has knocked the unit cost down to about $130 by lowering the cost of the display, using free open-source software, and manufacturing by the million. The governments of China, Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt are all interested and the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, hopes to order 500,000 for schoolchildren. Manufacturing will begin when 5 to 10 million machines have been ordered and paid for.

The idea is strongly supported by the IT industry. Five corporate sponsors, including News Corporation and Google, have chipped in $2 million each. Negroponte’s luminary reputation helps. His name is synonymous with MIT’s Media Lab, which focuses on the human interaction with technology, and he helped to found Wired magazine. He counts Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell amongst his bosom pals.

Educational goals
The ultimate real goal of the project is educational, however, not technological. “This is not about machines,” says Seymour Papert, a child learning expert who works with Negroponte on the OLPC project. “It is the next big step toward a vision of learning being transformed as radically as medicine, communications and entertainment.”  .

In societies where everyone has access to a computer and nearly everyone is wired up to the internet, distributing millions of $100 laptops to children in countries where $1 a day is a fair wage seems a brilliant idea. But is it? Could it be another utopian project driven by an unquestioning enthusiasm for technology?

Two experts consulted by MercatorNet were reassuring. Dr Paul Nightingale, of Sussex University in the UK, an expert on technology development, says that the impact of IT in developing countries has been largely positive. “One technology that has had a big impact on the very poor has been the mobile phone,” he wrote in an email. “Phone booths are opening up all over Africa and allow farmers to make sure that there is a market for their crops. Previously they ran the risk of taking their good to markets where there were no buyers and the crops would either be sold for cattle feed or left to rot.”

Another was Dr Sugata Mitra, of Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. His own project of a “hole in the wall” computer for poor children has become world famous. He placed a kiosk with a PC with an internet connection in a Delhi street with no instructions. Children immediately began using the machines and quickly became computer literate. He feels that the laptops will be an extremely effective learning tool. “Our experiments show an order of magnitude decrease in costs over the formal system. Even more importantly, computers and the internet will get cheaper and more effective while teachers will get dearer and of poorer quality,” he told MercatorNet. “Primary education in rural and disadvantaged communities have no choice but to rely on technology.”

The critics
Others with experience of using computers for children in developing countries are more sceptical. Lee Felsenstein, of the Fonly Institute in Silicon Valley, introduced computers into a remote village in Laos. His company specialises in low-cost, locally-operated, sustainable systems for rural communities. He has lots of questions for Negroponte. “So far as can be seen, no studies are being done among the target user populations to verify the concepts of the hardware, software and cultural constructs,” he writes on his blog. Along with others, he asks whether the MIT group has studied how to distribute the machines. “If it goes forward as currently described, the laptops will most likely wind up in other than students' hands.” If children get valuable computers for free, they might end up being sold -- or never reaching them.

From Peru come questions about how laptops will be integrated into faltering education systems. Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla, of the Pontificia Universidad Católica, is another sceptical blogger: “Considering that many developing countries haven't reached the point where the goals of education are clear and understood by all those involved, the main danger of a project like this one is to create a huge mirage of understanding, one where the main thrust of education is to turn kids into techno-savvy individuals with the potential to find and understand all the information they need for themselves, without consideration of little things like social cohesion, a common historical frame of reference for all, development of local knowledge, promotion of aboriginal languages, and a really long list following. School is about all of them, not just the nice but narrow focus that OLPC has.”

What effect immersion in Western technology and culture will have on traditional societies is another issue. “I am sure that there is little analysis of what the impact will be,” says Dr Nightingale. But in any case he thinks that it is almost impossible to predict what changes will occur in a society as a result of technological change.

And Dr Mitra says optimistically that India can absorb the challenges offered by exposure to the internet. “I think it not a question of what the internet will do to such children, it is a question of what the children will do to the internet. I think India and her children have a culture that is not easy to change. Instead of the internet causing cultural change, I think Indian children will cause cultural change in the internet. This has happened before -- to Alexander, to the Mughals, to the British, to cable TV, why not to the internet?”

The dark side of the internet
And no one seems too worried about the tough issue that confronts parents already hooked up to the internet: pornography. Dr Mitra’s experience is positive: “In my experiments, access is public and in large groups. This automatically stops pornographic access. Pornography is a personal and alone kind of thing. No one does it in public and in heterogenous groups. After all mum might pass by! In the case of laptops, pornography could be a problem, though not with under 13-year old children. Screens must be bright and visible to others. That, more than any complicated software will stop pornographic access.”

It does seem that the OLPC initiative is long on technology but short on social impact. However, the United Nations is committed to building an "inclusive information society". It wants to see more than half the world wired to the internet by 2015. Negroponte’s dream is just one scheme amongst many which will eventually transform the developing world. But surely more thought ought to be given to possible drawbacks of galloping technological change.

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He writes from Melbourne, Australia.