US$100 laptop concept a 'double-edged sword'
Thursday, June 7, 2007
UNESCO education experts have hinted that the feasibility of integrating the much-celebrated US$100 laptop concept into education in poorer countries is a dream still far removed from reality.
The gadget, which is now being officially marketed worldwide as the 'XO', was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's answer to reducing the technology gap between different classes of society at a minimal cost.
A prototype of the barebones unit was unveiled in late 2005 at the United Nation's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia by founder Nicholas Negroponte. He planned from the beginning to have the kid-sized green and white machines distributed amongst young residents in poor, remote areas under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
Benjamin L Vergel de Dios, an officer on Unesco's ICT in Education Policy project, called it "a double-edged sword".
"(The laptop is) built with good intentions, to make expensive equipment cheap and affordable," he said.
He explained, however, that adjustments to educational systems to accommodate the device had to be taken into consideration.
"It may be achievable for Bruneians, but for countries with large populations like Indonesia, the Philippines and so on, there could be a need to increase the budget on education," said de Dios. " This One Laptop Per Child policy could mean a 75 per cent increase in national education budget for developing countries."
"And then there's also other costs such as maintenance, repair, software, training teachers, adapting to content and technology."
His colleague Dr Tinsiri Siribodhi said that how the technology was made use of was still crucial to the impact the availability of such technology would have on those disadvantaged by poverty and their location.
"It's not like these $100 laptops will solve problems in education," she said. The Unesco team is here this week to train a pilot batch of Bruneian educators in bringing connectivity to schools through Unesco's SchoolNet project, which has been successfully implemented in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
During the course, Dr Siribodhi related her experience with an endeavour to transport old computers donated by the South Korean government to schools in Lao PDR, where she said one of the universities "had only two computers". Unesco had to bring the shipment through the seaport of Thailand, and transport it up to the common border between the two countries.
"It turned out that neither government (South Korea and Lao PDR) could pay for the customs tax on the computers, so we had to take them back." It was, she declared, one of many mistakes to be learned from.
Negroponte has been quoted as specifying that the OLPC initiative was "an education project, not a laptop project".
The XO laptop was constructed on design principles discussed by Negroponte in his book, Being Digital. It comes with a 7.5-inch TFT screen, 1GB flash memory, a camera with a resolution 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second, and runs on the open-source Linux operating system.
The lowest recorded production cost for the XO was US$140 per unit in February, although Negroponte has pledged his dedication to reduce it to US$100 by the end of 2008.
This is despite heavy reliance on subsidies from suppliers such as AMD, and the project was described by the February issue of the Newsweek magazine as "still dependent on the kindness of wealthy partners".
The Brunei Times
The gadget, which is now being officially marketed worldwide as the 'XO', was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's answer to reducing the technology gap between different classes of society at a minimal cost.
A prototype of the barebones unit was unveiled in late 2005 at the United Nation's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia by founder Nicholas Negroponte. He planned from the beginning to have the kid-sized green and white machines distributed amongst young residents in poor, remote areas under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
Benjamin L Vergel de Dios, an officer on Unesco's ICT in Education Policy project, called it "a double-edged sword".
"(The laptop is) built with good intentions, to make expensive equipment cheap and affordable," he said.
He explained, however, that adjustments to educational systems to accommodate the device had to be taken into consideration.
"It may be achievable for Bruneians, but for countries with large populations like Indonesia, the Philippines and so on, there could be a need to increase the budget on education," said de Dios. " This One Laptop Per Child policy could mean a 75 per cent increase in national education budget for developing countries."
"And then there's also other costs such as maintenance, repair, software, training teachers, adapting to content and technology."
His colleague Dr Tinsiri Siribodhi said that how the technology was made use of was still crucial to the impact the availability of such technology would have on those disadvantaged by poverty and their location.
"It's not like these $100 laptops will solve problems in education," she said. The Unesco team is here this week to train a pilot batch of Bruneian educators in bringing connectivity to schools through Unesco's SchoolNet project, which has been successfully implemented in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
During the course, Dr Siribodhi related her experience with an endeavour to transport old computers donated by the South Korean government to schools in Lao PDR, where she said one of the universities "had only two computers". Unesco had to bring the shipment through the seaport of Thailand, and transport it up to the common border between the two countries.
"It turned out that neither government (South Korea and Lao PDR) could pay for the customs tax on the computers, so we had to take them back." It was, she declared, one of many mistakes to be learned from.
Negroponte has been quoted as specifying that the OLPC initiative was "an education project, not a laptop project".
The XO laptop was constructed on design principles discussed by Negroponte in his book, Being Digital. It comes with a 7.5-inch TFT screen, 1GB flash memory, a camera with a resolution 640x480 pixels at 30 frames per second, and runs on the open-source Linux operating system.
The lowest recorded production cost for the XO was US$140 per unit in February, although Negroponte has pledged his dedication to reduce it to US$100 by the end of 2008.
This is despite heavy reliance on subsidies from suppliers such as AMD, and the project was described by the February issue of the Newsweek magazine as "still dependent on the kindness of wealthy partners".
The Brunei Times
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