Nu op Project Hoop: one laptop per child. Scroll naar beneden naar de ‘SocialVibe’ en help ons geld te verzamelen voor dit goede doel.
Hilde Roothart

But perhaps I have jumped into things too quickly. I haven’t really had much of a chance to explain that yes, I successfully made

Airport in São Miguel. Sort of classy for an airport, eh?

it though a wonderful week in the Azores (which I’m sure you all will hear plenty about, especially when I’m sitting in my lonesome back home in DC, whenever that is), arrived in São Tomé, learned how to type accents on my new computer, and, well, have just been having a heck of a time.

I took a plane from Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel in the Azores to Lisbon, then stayed with my cousins Marina and Sérgio and their adorable new bundle of baby, Santiago, for a couple of days. After getting a small preview of the awesome effects of Doxycycline if not swallowed under its very specific and rigid guidelines (I say “preview” because there was much more to come but two weeks later), I hit the airport again, bags ready to go, toting a spartan number of tank tops and shorts, a disproportionate weight of candy and books, and a really nice bottle of Azorean wine to give to my gracious host, Ned.

All this was in the forefront of my mind when we traveled from the little mini airport shuttle at nearly midnight towards our plane, an odd time for a flight and a totally disorganized system of boarding that even seemed a little out of the ordinary for Portugal, a country I once lambasted for its own lack of efficiency and charm. I couldn’t help but wonder if Portugal and São Tomé were still on hesitant (if not hostile) terms.

My wondering was quickly floored by awe as we approached our plane, a once-a-week luxury of TAP Portugal, and, clear as anything else I’d ever read in my life, in letters the size of people, the name of the plane reads:

WHITE

No, this is not a joke. But you might think the following is: Below it reads:

Coloured by You

White, Coloured by You, courtesy of the White website- http://www.flywhite.eu

Good Lord, how I wish I could make this stuff up.

I could hardly keep myself from laughing. I’m sure people thought I was crazy. The plane is called WHITE? And it’s colored by…what…a rainbow of singing, dumb Africans that somehow, at the right time, just showed up for the plane trip of their lives??

Well, what do you do?

You say, okay! We’re getting on this huge, phallic machine called WHITE, and we’re going to penetrate virgin Mother Afrika at 400 miles per hour.

My life in São Tomé has been peppered with little bits that make me laugh like this. What else CAN you do when a country’s history of European control is so recent (they only became independent in the mid-1970s)? Not only this, but their whole home, their entire history began as an overflow zone for starving Cape Verdeans in an overpopulated island to contract into honest work, only to be deceived and thrown into slavery. How do you come to terms with that when it’s something the Santomenses deal with every day of their life?

The STeP UP office

Among a few English classes, some translations, some great friend-making (I love standing out; I feel like people in the USA never remember my face but here everyone knows who I am) and other things, the thing that keeps me busy here (and what I originally arrived for) was to help an incredible NGO called STeP UP (São Tomé e Príncipe Union for Promotion) coordinate and work out the kinks of a very generous donation by the One Laptop Per Child Program to a local middle school in the capital. About 90 very excited twelve year olds were handed an amazingly efficient, durable, and inexpensive laptop computer that is complete with photo/video camera, microphone, a swivel frame, multiple USB ports and wireless internet access (you can buy one for yourself or any child for $250, and included in this $250 is the donation of a laptop to a child in a poor country as well- how about that!). I’m here to learn the OLPC platform and teach it to teachers and students alike, then facilitate a way for them to incorporate these computers in their everyday learning environment (both in school and at home).

Yesterday was my first day of class with the kids themselves. While we waited in hopes that the energy would turn back on

The kids wait for the energy to come back on in class. And go camera-happy while we wait

(something that is horribly unreliable and inconsistent, and often just doesn’t work at all), the poor kids waited, say 75 of them, crowded into one classroom, for hours. I couldn’t leave them there so I thought I would at least get their attention and play some games- whatever I could think of on my feet, really- 7 Up, red light green light (outside), and, my favorite, Hangman.

At least it was my favorite, until I suddenly wanted to simultaneously laugh and cry. Here I am, a white woman, of Portuguese descent nonetheless, teaching these African children a really great spelling game that incorporates lynching. I am certainly going to Hell.

Either the kids never picked up the reference, or someone Up There was on my side yesterday, because the kids actually loved the game and it occupied a solid 30 minutes of our time. But good grief, what a trip. I had played my own race card, and it was a wild card, and here I am in Africa, and, from now on, Hangman is going to be something much, much less violent.

Hundreds of educational technology bloggers and conference speakers hold forth on the need for transformational change in our educational system, and the conversation can get pretty lofty and philosophical.

I am a strong advocate for transformational reform; but it seems to me there are two very serious roadblocks in our way that we have yet to address.

The first roadblock is our school structure:

How does a Middle School or High School teacher use technology to create a student-centered, project-based learning classroom environment, when they have less than 45 minutes with their students per day?

BTW, they  must use these precious minutes to meet demanding state NCLB standards, and their curriculum may be governed by detailed ‘maps’ that outline the pace and sequence of teaching and learning in their classrooms.

Maybe the teacher does their best to squeeze in a project or two for the students during the year; but that doesn’t significantly change the primary classroom dynamic that is presently dominating secondary education.

The second roadblock is our technology deployment practices:

How does a Middle School or High School teacher use technology to move to student-centered, project-based learning, when they generally have only one or two computers, and maybe an interactive whiteboard and projector in their classrooms?

Maybe the teacher has a student use the interactive whiteboard while the rest of the class sits and watches, maybe the class watches a good video clip, or simulation; but the one computer classroom is a passive one and does not fully utilize the potential of technology to empower each individual student.

Unless we fully address these two basic questions, our best PD and transformational change efforts will make little impact on what is really going on in our schools.

pete

A little lunchtime blogging catchup.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has intrigued me ever since a senior member of the team came to speak to us at one of the early DESTIN Friday afternoon lectures at the LSE. I distinctly remember asking questions about internet access and social networking, based on my experiences with young people and TakingItGlobal - providing facilities for children and their families to connect with the wider world and in particular communities of other OLPC people to share ideas and encourage innovative use of the laptops.

For those who haven’t come across the OLPC project before, it aimed initially to provide laptops to kids all over the world who would not normally have access, for $100 (US) per child.  While this cost proved impossible, the cost has still been kept really low as mentioned below.

To me, it’s an incredibly sensible and exciting project as part of wider education projects and reform. Computer skills are increasingly necessary in today’s world, wherever you are. While basic needs must be met first, it is important that the skills needed to get ahead, to get jobs wherever, to help propel developing countries forward, including IT skills, are developed at a young age. The networking and education possibilities from internet access spark my excitement - years of talking and working with young people in many developing countries on youth development initiatives via TakingItGlobal has shown me the eagerness to learn, network and develop via the internet, largely from internet cafes for those I’ve worked with.

I was really pleased to see, therefore, news of Uruguay joining the small group of nations involved - with provision of an OLPC laptop for every pupil in state primary schools – in the BBC Tech news a couple of weeks ago. According to the article:

“The Uruguay programme has cost the state $260 (£159) per child, including maintenance costs, equipment repairs, training for the teachers and internet connection. The total figure represents less than 5% of the country’s education budget.”

As Miguel Brechner, head of the project in Uruguay, puts it “This is not simply the handing out of laptops or an education programme. It is a programme which seeks to reduce the gap between the digital world and the world of knowledge”.

Now that’s exciting!

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a huge fan of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and the XO laptop. A previous OLPC related post may be found here. As a result I follow the OLPC News blog which recently had this great article by 16-year-old Derek Chan on his experience with a small scale OLPC implementation in Kenya.

My name is Derek Chan, I’m 16 years old, and I was part of Mark Battley’s team of high school students from Upper Canada College that initiated a small scale OLPC implementation at the Ntugi Day Secondary School.
Part of our goal was to provide Ntugi with power for their initial complement of 8 XOs and 2 Cradlepoint PHS300s at a school that had no access to the country’s power grid.

In addition to this being a very well written piece about an extremely fascinating project, Derek enumerates some lessons learned that are directly applicable to any Infrastructure and Integration project. Especially security infrastructure projects like say a Network Access Control (NAC) or Enterprise Single Sign On (SSO) project. Just replace the word “school” with “enterprise” or “business“.

Ultimately, we were successful, but not without missteps and failures along the way. We did lots of things right, but we made a few newbie errors. Here’s what we learned!

1. Learn as much as you can about your destination school’s physical resources.
2. Don’t assume that tests in the lab will duplicate conditions in the field.
3. Read all the relevant blogs, forums and bulletin boards before implementing.
4. Don’t underestimate the sophistication of local technology and expertise at your destination.

 

Let’s think about each of these in turn, much as Derek did in his post.

Learn as much as you can about your destination physical resources.
Who hasn’t heard the horror stories from the installation team that just tried to add “one more appliance” to the customer’s data center, only to find out that the power or cooling or rack space just wasn’t there. Always verify ahead of implementation that the destination has all of the physical resources required by your hardware, all of the compute resources required by your software, and all of the network resources, including IP address space, required to connect it all together. An actual visit to the site by your Systems Engineers is a really great idea. Never assume that the destination is a “typical” configuration or that the customer knows the difference.

Don’t assume that tests in the lab will duplicate conditions in the field.
Boy Howdy! This assumption ranks right up there with “no customer would ever do that” as a surefire path to failure. The point is that the lab, by definition, is an artificial environment. Sure our QA engineers do the best job they can to simulate a real world environment, but the key word here is simulate. It’s pretty hard to simulate things like network latencies or ATM noise in the lab. Remember your lab techs are good, not god. What a difference that “o” makes.

Read all the relevant blogs, forums and bulletin boards before implementing.
Not that this has ever happened to me, mind you, but I’ve heard of engineers that actually believe the promo literature and design the system around that, assuming that all the details are handled. I mean how much difference can there be between Server 2K3 and Server 2K3 R2? Yeah. Just do the homework. That’s called “due diligence” in business speak.

Don’t underestimate the sophistication of local technology and expertise at your destination.
As engineers we always like to think we’re way smarter than the mere mortals we tolerate in our presence. But never fool yourself into believing that you can understand the ins and outs of a customer’s infrastructure as well as they do. You may think they are yokels, but they are yokels with way more relevant experience than you. And they are the ones who control your payday. Just suck it up and let them make it easier (or possible) for the project to succeed.

So there you have it. Excellent advice from a 16-year-old who has already learned some important lessons. Well done Derek.

Blame it on the birds. And the elephants, lions, biochar, Indonesian agroforestry, dirt batteries, mechanical caterpillar waves, global maps, messenger bag-cum-lighting systems, a cyber-dance experience and one very lovely essay about migration. But not too far into the first day of PopTech, the conference’s “Reimagining America” theme disappeared. Which was fine. It seemed too limited for a confab about Big Thoughts, even here in a small, charming  American town (that could use a little reimagining itself – connectivity way, way too spotty). In any case, you can’t really reimagine, or even imagine, America without including the rest the world in the equation.

And nobody brought that point home with more heart-wrenching eloquence than Chris Jordan with his slide show of photographs of dead albatross on Midway Island, killed by a diet of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Photograph after photographs of birds, heads twisted by pain, guts split by a bounty of all too familiar bottle caps – perky shades of reds and blues favored by marketers – had the audience in shock and *this* audience in tears. This wasn’t an isolated occasional bird tragedy, but the picture of a extinction-in-progress. And because it took so darn long for anyone to discover the Garbage Patch, a ghostly-insidious man-made chemically-enhanced primordial soup the size of at least a couple of Texas’s (Texi?), it is far too late to do much about it – at least for the albatross (“Midway Journey” project blog – notes & videos).

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Save the microbes! Save the plankton! Save the food chain!  Who knows? We might just save ourselves, too.

_____________________

The day was filled with jolts of Overwhelming Problems paired with Glimmers of Hope.

John Fetterman, the myth-come-to-life mayor of Braddock, PA, a bankrupt rust-belt town that had been all but written off. A strikingly tall bald figure, with dates tattooed on his massive arms to remember the victims of violent crimes (thankfully, no new tattoos in over a year), Fetterman’s unvarnished recitation of all that had gone wrong coupled with some very basic ideas of what can be done had the crowd on a can-do upswing. Renovate those $5,000 homes (average price – since the recession, they’ve lost value). Add artists. LOTS of artists. Plant urban gardens. Hold lots of family-friendly it-takes-a-village-to-make-a-village. Clear debris and make a park. Then came news of a major hospital closing, which will not only take jobs from the area, but leave the population – mostly poor and minority – in a health-care desert. It is hard to make money taking care of poor people. So much for the greater public good or, for that matter, public health.

I began to wonder whether some of the health solutions being tested in the developing world -  many driven by cell phone tech – wouldn’t be appropriate here, too? (e.g., PopTech Fellow Josh Nesbit’s FrontlineSMS: Medic & Hope Phones).

Indeed, one of the conference’s most intriguing themes to emerge so far is this concept of two-way innovation: developed to developing world and vice-versa. (Note to makers of One Laptop Per Child: I really really REALLY want one of those computer screens designed for use in full sun…)

_______________________

On the Glimmers of Hope front, the PopTech Fellows were batting it out of the park. From Jason Aramburu’s efforts to commercialize biochar, a carbon negative solution that also improves soil fertility, to Eben Bayer’s nifty mushroom-mediated compostable alternative to landfill-choaking styrofoam, Aviva Presser Aiden and Hugo van Vurveen’s “dirt batteries” and Emily Pilloton’s no-nonsense determination to enlist an army of young designers to come up with Better Answers, there was a sense that it’s still not too late. We can, just maybe, turn this thing around and not go down the climate change tubes.

FLAP – Flexible Light and Power – a prototype of a portable lighting system stitched into a Timbuktu messenger bag – also caught the crowd’s imagination. Designed by MIT’s Sheila Kennedy, it’s a simple idea that could radically change the way we think about solar deployment, opening up the space to all kinds of new ideas. No longer would solar be consigned to rooftop panels or a strip on a pocket calculator. It can almost literally be woven into the fabric of our lives, turning us into portable “plants,” photosynthesizing as we go about our daily business. (More from Erik Hersman on field-testing the design in Africa.)

Indonesia-based Willie Smits also has big plans for photosynthesis, with a scheme that would not only reforest the world’s rain forests, but generate jobs and an array of crops, supply power to poor villages, restore biodiversity and wildlife habitat and dramatically reduce demand for foreign oil. Smits “Tapergy” plans is an integrated system that works with Nature to increase the productivity of land while capping CO2 “volcanos” that result when millions of acres of land, particularly peat-lands, are cleared from monoculture oil palm plantations. (read more about Smits work in “Trees for Trees” post – page down to section on “You Had Me at Organgutan” – includes videos)

There was much more to Day 1. But Day 2 is about to begin. So, connectivity willing, follow on twitter: #poptech / @trackernews.

C.S. Lewis once wrote;

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

I am pleased to be writing about Great Minds first client in this post – Schools Without Borders (www.schoolswithoutborders.com). I am pleased for two reasons, firstly, it allows for a wider discussion regarding education and secondly it allows me to identify the type of clients that we believe we can be of service to.

Horace Mann once wrote; “Education…beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men –the balance wheel of the social machinery.” It is absolutely true and has been witnessed in this past century alone. He went on to say”…It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.”  I believe that as this century progresses the second part of his statement will be shown to be true so long as we take crucial steps to address the root causes of the problem. One of those issues I believe firmly is – EDUCATION! However, we are now at a moment in history that requires us as a civilization to reevaluate education with regard to its content and delivery.

Education is something that has always been near and dear to my heart. My Mother is an highly educated woman and my father has just recently started his Masters. I have always maintained that the solution to many of the problems that are facing the world at large are the result of, at least in part, a lack of quality education being delivered. One of the Millennium Development Goals, slated for achievement by 2015 is Universal Primary Education. A great and noble goal to be sure and one that I hope will be expanded in scope after 2015 to become Universal Education.

We live in an age where one week of the New York Times contains more information than the average person in the eighteenth century would get in a lifetime. We have at our fingertips the instant delivery of information on any subject at any time. Of course the caveat here being the ability to decipher that information in terms of factuality and relevance.

Given the state of technology and the rapidity with which it is constantly evolving – Is there not a better way for us to deliver education to those most in need in places where schools, let alone classrooms are hard to come by? There are, at present, organizations that are working on such as One Laptop per Child and its desire to fulfill on the promise of its name all around the world. My point here is to demonstrate that it is in civilizations best interests to do more than just send out the clarion call and then plug along. As a civilization we need to adapt to and embrace the times in which we live if we are to stave off the worst situations that are facing us in the not too distant future.

In the past year we have seen the way that mobile phones can change lives not just because of Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 3Gs but also in the developing world where mobile phones are now being used by farmers, villagers and women to help foster community, build relationships with vendors and suppliers and just to reach out and touch someone. I would encourage any of you interested in this to pick up the September 26^th edition of The Economist which had great coverage regarding telecom in emerging markets.

As phones become smaller, have greater connectivity, computing power and are more readily available around the world how can they serve to advance the aims of civilization as it relates to universal education? Especially with regard to the lesser developed and developing economies and their struggles with delivery in both rural and urban settings? Great Minds is looking at current and past models of private public partnerships (P3s), current and past delivery of education in rural and urban settings trying to identify organic successes with on the ground ownership.

These are some of the issues that I currently am exploring and if they interest you I encourage you to do the same. There are no right answers at present. Perhaps there are answers that work but that are not necessarily right. Time and again as we progress it has been shown that what we once thought was the right way was in fact correct but could have been done better.

Horace Mann also once said; “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for mankind.”

This is the first of many posts I will be writing about education. I did this all in an effort to preface why I felt that Schools Without Borders was and is an ideal client for Great Minds Global.

Why Schools Without Borders?

When I returned from the United Nations in June it was immediately clear to me that I had to begin a journey to find a range of organizations that could benefit from the skill sets that are present in Great Minds Global. I spent a month pouring through research on the Internet trying to identify the best ways that I could be of service to the not for profit world in an effort to broadly speaking ‘make the world a better place.’ Over the course of that month I was able to identify five organizations in Canada that I felt could benefit from what we do and several further internationally. After that first month, further consultations at the United Nations, meetings with friends, colleagues and family I felt that Great Minds had a platform to help and as such started seeking out clients. The first contacted was Schools Without Borders.

Schools Without Borders (SWB) is a “unique youth-led organization that makes education and learning more accessible for young people. We view real learning not merely as a classroom experience, but rather as a life-long journey, inspired by meaningful experiences and sustained by strong partnerships.”

SWB represented a perfect client as a proof of concept for us. In SWB we had a fully functioning, well run, program oriented organization that was operating not just in Canada but also internationally. In going through its materials I was able to see that it had programs in 11 countries and was touching peoples lives in a meaningful way.

SWB has an approach which rings true for me with regard to the delivery of programs. They are not focused on trying to create solutions in Canada and parachuting them in to the developing world. Instead, perhaps by virtue of their age, they realized that this has not worked in the past and certainly won’t work in the future. Instead they created and adopted an approach that has yielded positive results and will continue to into the future.

SWB is an award winning Canadian charity committed to training youth around the world to step up and take leadership roles in communities that face incredible challenges everyday against poverty, violence, criminalization and racism.

Their mission is to support young people to create platforms for change and build the communities they want to live in.  Whether it’s through photojournalism workshops in Brazil, sexual health training for young women in Kenya, basketball programs in Swaziland, or organizational mentorship in Canada, SWB transforms hands-on experiences and community projects into life-long learning experiences.

SWB operates on a global platform with 30 staff and volunteers across 11 countries.  Funding is received from strategic partners including the Canadian International Development Agency, Ontario Trillium Foundation, Laidlaw Foundation, Arts Council of Toronto, Ontario and Canada, and Aeroplan Beyond Miles Program.

For each of these reasons I felt that SWB would be a great organization to work with and to help grow. However, other elements had to be true in order for GMG to get involved and will remain true for all our clients;

1. The organization, for our work with them, needed to be in a position that its communications strategy and delivery across the board (Donor, Corporate, Governmental, Volunteer and Staff), had to be addressed in order to more effectively communicate their Mission, Vision, Objectives.
2. Current fundraising initiatives had to be predominantly grant based.
3. The organization had to be successful in its current operations and had to demonstrate that it was scalable.

SWB was and remains a perfect match. Currently GMG is working with SWB on a limited scope related to its Million Mile Campaign. The Million Mile Campaign runs until November 13, 2009.  Individuals to Ambassadors to companies alike are asked to donate their Aeroplan Miles which will be matched by Aeroplan during the campaign period.  SWB uses those miles to send Canada’s youth leaders to countries around the world to share community development best practices as well as to bring youth leaders from the developing world to Canada.

If you would like to donate please go to www.swb.ca/donate/aeroplan.

After November 13, GMG and SWB are going to work together to completely overhaul the communications strategy, funding initiatives, outreach, organizational structure and support systems. Through this work GMG will be able to substantially increase the funding available to them and to help the organization transition from its current successes to even bolder and brighter ones in the future.

Here, it is important to note, GMG is not creating programs for SWB. As mentioned earlier, SWB does not parachute in solutions and neither do we. Instead, what we are doing is allowing the organization to focus on what it does best while GMG works to support them in those successes by ensuring that their communications strategies are effective across the board and further help them to develop the infrastructure more robustly to support them in their growth going forward.

I’d like to end this post with Chris Kang, Executive Director, Schools Without Borders own words “We’re proud of the work we do supporting youth leaders as they positively impact communities around the world.”

Great Minds Global is thrilled to be working with Schools Without Borders and  we look forward to the challenges of the coming years in helping them continue their great work both at home and abroad.

Be Inspired Today!

The New Currency
SDM

Uruguay has joined the small number of nations providing a laptop for every child attending state primary school. 362,000 pupils in Uruguay now have the distinctive laptops.

[Source: BBC]

I’ve added several widgets to the blog now, but there’s one I feel is special. That’s the One Laptop Per Child program. Some kids are less fortunate and don’t have access to a computer. There is now a widget on my blog to help support the cause.

Please help the One Laptop Per Child organization by clicking the thing on the left sidebar that says “Help me support One Laptop Per Child”. All you have to do is click on that, then rate a video by just clicking a star, then you’re done. It won’t take you a few minutes; it’ll take seconds. (It took about 12-15 seconds for me to do it without putting down my name and telling everyone I helped. When I did put down my name, it took me about 14-17 seconds.) If you help, you will contribute 4 hours of learning to kids in third-world countries. Thanks!

Ryan

Isn’t it ironic that we’re trying to reduce the digital inequality and poverty with ICT, while it is the ICT that caused and augments this digital divide?[1] We’re using technology to solve the problems it has caused…

In ‘End of Millennium’ Manuel Castells showed the status quo at the turn of the millennium. ‘The rise of the informational/global capitalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century coincided with the collapse of Africa’s economies, the disintegration of many of its states, and the breakdown of most of its societies’[2]. But not only in Africa. Informational capitalism is complexly linked to the rise of inequality, poverty, social polarization and misery in the whole world. Castells speaks of the ‘black holes of informational capitalism’; where, not only in the third world, but also in the first, people are socially excluded because they don’t have access to information technology. For example, habitants of American inner-city ghetto’s, illiterate persons, poor immigrants in rich countries, etc.  Those people form what he calls the ‘fourth world’; a world that is inseparable form the rise of informational global capitalism[2].

Luckily people start to become well aware of it and, some say developmental aid nowadays is even ‘cool’. Let’s take the One Laptop Per Child initiative by Nicholas Negroponte as an example. It is been a few years that they started to hand out laptops to poor children in developed countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to reduce the amount of children (almost two billion) excluded from the Internet and to empower them to learn[3]. And I believe they do. They have visited many countries over the last few years and provided a lot of children with laptops.

It certainly is a fantastic thought, but just handing out laptops won’t solve the problem. Access to ICT itself is not enough to ‘close the gap’, as there are several limitations. That is, ‘access’ to a laptop doesn’t automatically lead to access to information.

Firstly, using a laptop requires some skills. In countries where even education is scarce and children hardly can read and write, what would a laptop change? The effectiveness of the information they will have access to, depends on their capacity of understanding and interpretation[1]. A higher school level, adaptation of the education system and development of appropriate software are therefore required, not so much (a huge investment in) exaggerated quantities of computers per school. The process of teachers adapting to a new pedagogic system, in which these new information technologies are implemented, is a necessary but unfortunately long process[1].

Also, the project is based on the assumption that children go to school. But I believe many of those nearly two billion children don’t really frequent their classes. Castells stresses the fact that, for instance, many children in Asia have to work in enormous factories, weaving carpets for worldwide export. Other children live in the ‘unprotected lands of mega-cities’ slums’. Those children don’t go to school[2]. And in São Paulo for example, I experienced that many children and teenagers ‘prefer’ not to go to school and, instead of that, work, even though they have the opportunity of free education. It’s not that they don’t want to learn, but they don’t see the benefits of it. Of course they will find a laptop incredibly cool, but without guidance and instructions I don’t think it would change their situations.

Furthermore, new technologies are always used by the rich first, and will only later become available for the poor. The development of new technologies always continues, so the gap will never close and the inequality will only become bigger and bigger[1]. That is what in fact is happening with OLPC project. Not only are the laptops inferior and way less advanced compared to the western technology and do issues as wi-fi access play significant roles, also, western actors (Microsoft and Intel) produce and sell these inferior laptops to the Third World and derive profits of it![4] So who’ll in the end get better of it?

Last week I read a blog about appropriate technology, written by a non-Malawian teacher in Malawi, that gave a practical example of my thoughts. He stresses the principle that developing countries should be given technology that meshes with their current state of development. He anecdotally writes how he discovered a box full of green OLPC laptops in the school’s storage room that had remained untouched for months. None of the teachers knew what to do with the laptops and after trying to use the laptops in a couple of classes they left them alone, back in the stock room… The $2300 spent on the laptops would have been enough to pay the tuition for 23 students for a year[6].

Castells stresses an important question: Can the developed world, where older technologies are often prevalent or don’t even exist at all, ‘leapfrog’ over the successive generations of technology to the newest ICT or not[4][5]? That is the key issue. Of course the third world countries and the two billion children without access do not all live under the same ‘poor’ circumstances. I think the OLPC project is too advanced to be used in rural African villages or in slums where children don’t even have food, water, health and shelter. On the other hand, there are more developed but still very poor children to whom the step toward ‘digital literacy’ is smaller. An examination of the situation in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates that many people do use ICT, but don’t have money for own computers or have very little and poor access[1]. I think those people form a big part of the fourth world and I think those people are ‘ready’ for further development in ICT. But then there is still the problem of inferior technology, wi-fi access and the profits made out of the production.

“ (…) what is needed is an advanced $0 laptop with free software for people in developing countries as well as criticism of the capitalist logic that has caused the divide between developing and developed countries and solutions to the social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities that underpin the global digital divide.”[4]

But maybe we should rather focus more on a bottom up process that starts at the ‘beginning’. ICT is now embedded in our daily life, society and economy, but that has been a development. We can’t expect the fourth world to skip that process and simply ‘leapfrog’ into our level of ICT. But on the other hand, since it is their very right to have the same (ICT) applications as we have, ‘appropriate technology’ will never change their situation very much either. Should we perhaps develop new technologies to solve the problems…?

[1] Sorj, B. and Guedes, L.E., ‘Exclusão digital: problemas conceituais, evidências empíricas e políticas públicas’ in Digitofagia; Radical Livros 2006

[3] One Laptop Per Child Website – Laptop.org

[2] Castells, M., ‘End of Millennium’, 2000

[4] Fuchs, C., Horak, E. ‘Information Capitalism and the Digital Divide in Africa’, 2007

[5] Castells, M., Fernández-Ardevol, M., Linchuan Qiu, J. & Sey, A., ‘Mobile Communication and Society; A Global Perspective’. Massachusetts Institute of Technology; 2007.

[6] Teaching in Africa – Jesse’s Blog

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child, recently presented the U.S. Senate with a brilliantly simple way to help resolve the conflict in Afghanistan — educate the population! Giving all 5 million children in Afghanistan ages 6 through 12 an OLPC XO-1 laptop would cost around US$750 million. Given the river of money flowing to Afghanistan, this is a only a small amount of the budgetary bucket. It would, however, be an tidal change in the perception of the US military.

One Laptop Per Child already has the lesson plans, software and the laptops as well as active  pilot projects up and running in Afghanistan. These laptops are expertly designed specifically to deliver elementary education in remote areas; while the XO-1 laptops cost under $200 each, they include technology not yet available in any other laptop at any price. Their rugged design, low power consumption, battery longevity, wireless capabilities and ease-of-use surpass all other laptops on the market. Children teach themselves to use the XO-1 on their own using the built-in collaboration tools and intuitive software. The laptop teaches the children how to teach themselves.

The US military has the supply infrastructure throughout Afghanistan to deliver the laptops, provide them power and supply the data communication backhaul to connect to the rest of the world. The US Census Int’l Database shows there are 5 million children ages 6-12 (1st through 6th grade) in Afghanistan; giving each of them a laptop would cost $750 million and would do more to advance the US desire for a peaceful, stable nation than all of the other military spending combined.

Write your congressional delegation and ask them to budget the funds. Educate Afghanistan and empower them to help us all end the turmoil plaguing the region.

I mentioned earlier that a friend of mine is planning to do something pretty exciting in Nicaragua, as well. (He’s actually that guy with the backpack in the picture a couple posts below.) What he wants to do is work with OLPC–One Laptop Per Child–and get some for Pochocuape. Like my goal with the library is to start at La Chureca and branch off to Pochocuape, his goal is to start in Pochocuape, and branch of to La Chureca. For many reasons, his decision is sound. I’m going to be helping him in any way that I can, so I hope you will as well. I’ll keep you posted. Right now he’s planning and collecting information before asking for project approval from both OLPC and our church.

Check out this video.

When I am asked to help districts save money or financially justify the paradigm shift to One to One computing, I suggest they audit their technology energy use. Shifting from traditional desktop PC’s to laptops, netbooks, or thin clients can save significant amounts of money, to say nothing of it being the environmentally correct thing to do.

A typical desktop computer uses between 65w-250w of electricity. A typical CRT monitor uses 80w and LCD 35w of electricity. You can get the actual amount of energy usage by checking the label on the specific device, or you can use a watt-meter to measure real energy consumption.

So, if we use 158w as an average for desktops and 58w as an average for monitors our total energy use is 216w per computer.

Let’s compute the energy cost of running just ONE computer for a typical school year.

Assumptions:

1. The computer is in use 6hrs per day. (6hrs x 216w = 1296w)

2. The computer is left in power saver mode over night. (18hrs x 35w = 630w)

3. The computer is in use 200 days per year. (200 days x (1296w+630w) = 385,000w)

4. The computer is in power saver mode on weekends and holidays, approximately 100 days. (24hrs x 35w = 840w) x 100 days = 84,000w)

5. The computer uses no energy 65 days of the year.

Total yearly energy cost for ONE computer is 469,000w or 469 kilowatt hrs.

Estimated yearly cost for ONE computer @ .17 per kw hour = $80.

Energy cost for ONE computer over a (5) year lifespan = $400.

Total annual energy cost for ONE THOUSAND computers = $79,730.

Total energy cost of ONE THOUSAND computers over (5) years = $398,650.

Now, lets look at alternatives to the energy hungry desktop PC approach that is so prevalent in our schools today.

A laptop or netbook averages about 30w, most of it related to the display.

A thin client and display also averages about 30w.

Thus replacing a standard desktop with a laptop, netbook, or thin client device theoretically produces an 86% reduction in energy consumption.

Estimated yearly cost for ONE device @ .17 per kw hour = $11

(Savings =$69)

Energy cost of ONE device over a (5) year lifespan = $55

(Savings =$345)

Total annual energy cost of ONE THOUSAND computers = $11,000

(Savings=$68,530)

Total energy cost of ONE THOUSAND computers over (5) years = $56,000

(Savings=$342,650)

Even if we take the ‘best case’ desktop scenario: a 65w computer and 35w display, the energy savings for shifting to laptop, netbook, or thin client devices is 54% resulting in a savings of $227,230.

In One to One implementations, if students use battery power during the day and are required to charge their devices at home, the energy savings can be more than 95% and a cost savings of $378,717.

The yearly $68,530 savings in energy costs (ONE THOUSAND computers) can purchase:

An additional (228) netbooks, or thin clients per year. (@$300 per device)

Over (5) years a school can DOUBLE the number of devices available to students (1140) based on energy savings generated by switching to netbooks or thin clients.

If you are more interested in the traditional route you can purchase laptops and add an additional (86) devices per year (@$800 per laptop) and increase your network by (430) devices over (5) years.

Anyway you look at it there is a good case to be made to go “Green”.

It’s time to shift our technology energy paradigm.

pete

We’re in the throes of one of those major discontinuities that occur in technology evolution periodically. Actually there are two occurring concurrent and affecting one another. Entrenched suppliers hate such events because they are forced to develop new business models for producing revenue. One discontinuity happened with the announcement of the iPhone, which heralded the age of the mobile Internet. The second, precipitated by a genuine desire to bridge the digital divide between the first and third worlds, markedly drove down the cost of computing and heralded two new classes of computing device: the netbook and the smartbook.

The two computing devices are entirely different creatures. The netbook is the product of the traditional PC business, caught unawares when a social experiment got terribly out of hand: an experiment to create a low-cost product for the third world and somehow prevent it from being purchased by the first world. The smartbook is the result of the social networking explosion on the web spurred on by the iPhone creating a web application epidemic.

The netbook came out of the “One Laptop Per Child” initiative that Nicholas Negroponte, started while head of the MIT Media Lab. The program was a noble, well-meaning effort to provide a computer to every child in the third world: roughly a half a billion for an unachievable price of $100 each. That meant open source software and the lowest cost silicon—Linux instead of Microsoft, AMD instead of Intel. The nonprofit organization Negroponte formed, One Laptop per Child, to distribute the PC, shipped its first product the XO-1 at twice the target price: $199. Quanta Computer Inc. based in Tao Yuan Shien, Taiwan manufactured the unit with production stumbling along in fits and starts beginning in November 2007.

Quanta also announced plan to build a version of the laptop for the commercial market, something Asus International also had in mind with its Eee PC, which Asus showcased in two versions at Computex in June 2007. (Negroponte’s hardware and software reference design was well known and easily duplicated using an Intel CPU instead of the AMD unit.) The Asus offering initially contained a Celeron M mobile processor. Asus has since shifted to the Atom CPU, which is the main engine in nearly every netbook currently on the market as is Windows Vista—Microsoft couldn’t be shut out of a major class of portable computing platform. (Search “netbook” on net retailer’s tigerdirect.com and every unit displayed will feature Intel Atom and Windows Vista.)

The price tag on the Eee PC when it shipped in September 2007 ran $349—nearly twice the price of an XO-1 but still pretty inexpensive for a web browsing PC. Needless to say, Asus had plenty of orders to fill when production began. A rush of competitors hurriedly jumped on the bandwagon and the rest is history. The low-cost PC intended for the third world had jumped into the first.

Meanwhile, Intel shut out of the OLPC project in a disagreement with the organization set about building a comparable unit called the Classmate PC. In August this year, CTL Corp. of Portland, OR introduced its 2Go version of the Intel design priced at $399. The design is sold under other brands worldwide. Intel wanted the hearts and minds of the next generation of computer users. Building brand awareness and familiarity in school ensures loyal customers later in life.

As to which has come out the winner, the OLPC organization estimates around 750,000 XO laptops installed worldwide through March this year. Intel says it has shipped 700,000 Classmate PC’s in 2008 alone and predicts it will sell over two million Classmate PCs in 2009. Capitalism triumphs over socialism but at a cost. Negroponte’s social experiment had the consequence of lowering computing cost for both the first and third. The average selling price for netbooks today is around $350, according to Taipei-based tech publication, Digitimes. The ASP for a notebook at the start of this year had been pushed down to around $795 according to Port Washington, NY-based market research firm NPD. And the lower priced netbooks are eating into notebook sales.

Figures from market research firm DisplaySearch shows netbooks represent 22 percent of the portable computer shipments the second quarter this year, up from 6 percent in the second quarter of last year. One reason for the popularity of netbooks could be the economy; consumers are opting for the lower priced computer while corporate buyers prefer to hold off replacing laptops until a better economic climate arrives. By then Intel and Microsoft and PC hardware OEMs can return to business as usual. Right? Not if Cambridge UK-based, ARM Ltd and Sunnyvale, CA-based Google and their allies have their way.

The advent of the low-cost netbook almost coincided with the arrival of the iPhone in June 2007 and the birth of the web browsing smart phone. The proliferation of web applications that followed the iPhone introduction cried out for a platform with a larger multi-touch, touch-screen display and keyboard. Enter the smartbook, which is an ARM-based smart phone in a PC enclosure. It runs Linux, Android, or eventually Chrome not a Microsoft OS—all but Win CE having not been ported to the ARM processor. However, the version now being showed doesn’t pose much of a threat. The platform that will challenge the Intel-Microsoft dominion is the +1 GHz-ARM-9 Cortex running the Google Chrome operating system expected out mid-2010.

Smart phone users wanting the web-friendly experience they have come to expect will now find it on a smartbook: instant on, day-long battery life, multi-touch touch-screen display, immediate access to social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, SMS, and a full up Qwerty keyboard all with a price tag much lower than a netbook. To be fair, network service providers will subsidize that lower price. And the subsidy will apply to netbooks and smartbooks, but the user experience will favor the latter over the former. The remaining questions are will the netbook close the user experience gap by the time the killer ARM-Google platform rolls out and will the ARM-Google solution deliver a compelling enough reason to switch.

Regardless of the outcome of the struggle between the Intel-Microsoft and ARM-Google camps, the bottom line is that hardware prices will be reduced. Scottsdale, AZ-based market research firm, In-Stat has suggested that pressure from some of the ARM chip vendors may push Intel to further lower prices on some of their computing devices in the future. That reduction will come from fiercely competitive market share battles in the growth regions of China, India, and South America—where price is a major concern. It will also come from competition for buyers in the U.S. and Asia Pacific. The high-tech world is changing quarter to quarter and the netbook-smartbook evolution is accelerating the process.

Digital divide ist die Weiterführung der Wissensklufthypothese.

Es beschreibt die ungleiche Verteilung, die digitale Spaltung der Menschheit im Web aufgrund des Zugangs (Access), der Wissenskluft, dem sozialen und kulturellem Kapital, sowie der qualitativen Nutzung und dessen Intensität.

Im Web 2.0 ist der Access weniger das Problem für
die digitale Kluft als die Bildung, Umwelt, Häufigkeit
der Nuzung, Gruppenzugehörigkeit usw…
siehe auch: one laptop per child

Schlussendlich braucht es aber für die Vielfalt auch viele verschiedene
Gruppen in der Welt und keine starre Einheit.

Un internaute, sous le pseudonyme de perfectlymadebirds, a mis en vente sur eBay un One Laptop Per Child passé au micro-onde.

Celui-ci est aux enchères pour 26 001 dollars.

80% de la somme sera reversé à l’association One Laptop Per Child.