One Laptop Per Child Talks

Nicholas Negroponte presented at Reinventing the Classroom: Social and Educational Impact of Information and Communication Technologies in Education on September 15, 2009

This seminar provided a forum to critically examine: (i) Large scale efforts to incorporate Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) into education; (ii) The impact of these efforts on learning; and (iii) The challenges of evaluation and monitoring.

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Nicholas Negroponte: Well for those of you who know me, you probably saw me squirming in my seat, but I will be very well behaved.

[laughter]

Nicholas: I'd like you to imagine that I told you "I have a technology that is going to change the quality of life." Then I tell you "Really the right thing to do is to set up a pilot project to test my technology. Then the second thing to do is once the pilot has been running for some period of time is to go and measure very carefully the benefits of that technology."

Then I am to tell you that we are going to is very scientifically evaluate this technology, with control groups - giving it to some, giving it to others. This all is very reasonable until I tell you the technology is electricity, and you say "Wait, you don't have to do that."

But you don't have to do that with laptops and learning either. The fact that somebody in the room would say the impact is unclear is to me amazing - unbelievably amazing. There's not a person in this room who hasn't bought a laptop for their child, if they could afford it. You don't know somebody who hasn't done it if they can afford it.

So there's only one question on the table and that's how to afford it? That's the only question. There is no other question - it's just the economics.

Tags: IADB, ICT, Netbooks, Nicholas Negroponte, Reinventing the Classroom, World Bank

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Nicholas Negroponte was interviewed by Riz Khan for AlJazeera's English-language channel on October 4, 2007.

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Riz Khan: Hello and welcome. My guest today has a bit of a problem. He's created a computer at a blockbuster price. For less than $200 US dollars you get a laptop that's Wi-Fi enabled, can be recharged by solar power, has a high-resolution screen, and able to withstand being dropped from up to 5 feet. Sounds perfect, right? The trouble is… In order to be a success it needs the huge global market. And that might just be possible through a new program called "Give One, Get One".

From November 12th for two weeks when someone in the USA or Canada is willing to pay around 400$ for a "green machine", as its called, one will be donated to a needy child in another country. It's a novel idea that's starting to pick up steam. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the "one laptop per child" project, has unveiled his low-cost computer and the World Summit on Information Society, held in Tunis in 2005. Although it was initially ridiculed, his supporters now say, it could become one of the largest laptop players in the United States.

Of course, what do you think of this approach to the digital divide? Don't forget that we take your questions and comments. Just contact the numbers at the bottom of your screen. Nicholas Negroponte joins us now from Boston. Good to have you with us, sir.

Nicholas Negroponte: Happy to be here.

Riz Khan: I gonna start out by asking you where this idea first came from? You'd announced it in 2005. What made you think in the first place "one laptop per child"?

Nicholas Negroponte: Well, the idea actually goes back, I'm embarrassed to say, almost 40 years, where we've been working with children and learning. And in the 1990s we were very interested in connecting children around the world, particularly, the most remote and poorest children. And it was in early 2000, because of some work I've done in Cambodia, that I really sort of made a commitment to work on a one piece that I felt industry wouldn't do, and that was a very low-cost laptop.

Riz Khan: Of course, you've put, essentially It was a very high-profile career at MIT, very much on hold, so to think, to pursue this with quite a passion.

Nicholas Negroponte: Well, my career at MIT helped a great deal, because I knew most of the people in industry, and MIT, being the birthplace of the idea, added a great deal of credibility of it. And, perhaps, more important than anything, we've made a decision two and a half years ago to be a non-profit organization. So, that the moral purpose for doing this was very clear. And that's what attracted a lot of partners and a lot of countries.

Tags: Al Jazeera, Americ, Game Boy, Give One Get One, MIT, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, Riz Khan, Tunis, WSIS

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eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza interviewed both OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen and VP Walter Bender in the Tech Rising podcast "The Technology of the OLPC's XO Laptop".

Mary Lou Jepsen gave an overview of the XO BTest-4 technology and Walter Bender explained the capabilities of the Sugar user interface.

The podcast is available for download here and the OLPC Talks-produced transcript is below.

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Jim Rapoza: Welcome to techrising, a weekly pod cast dedicated to emerging technologies, their effect on business, people and the world. I'm Jim Rapoza chief technology analyst of e week. Few technologies in recent years have inspired as much interest or discussion as the one lap top per child effort to provide what has been called the hundred dollar lap top of the developing world.

When first discussed many said it would be impossible to build a laptop for anywhere near that price. Then, as the laptop came closer to reality, many took to criticizing it's capabilities and it's mission to provide computer resources as an educational tool for children around the world. Now, the hundred dollar, actually a hundred and seventy-five dollar lap top, dubbed the XO is going into mass production and it will soon be in the hands of millions of children of the developing world.

However, while much of the focus has been on the price of the laptop, many of the most impressive aspects of the XO are in it's technology. The XO has made some impressive breakthroughs in power management, display technology and collaboration. I recently had the opportunity to spend time with the offices of the OLPC and take a first hand look at the final beta of the XO.

While there, OLPC president Walter (Bender) gave me a demo of the XO sugar software inner face and I also got on the phone with OLPC's CTO Mary Lou Jepsen to talk about the many technology innovations of the XO hardware. To start off, I asked her about the recent beta release, about the many innovations of the XO.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Yes, There are two thousand BTest-4's that we built about three weeks ago in Shanghai that have now been delivered to Cambridge and have completed all their testing and so they will be distributed to a lot of developers and kids actually, to test on. People don't realize they focus on the price, they don't realize that there's a stunning technology inside. Some stuff that you would want in your two thousand dollar lap top.

Jim Rapoza: Right.

Mary Lou Jepsen: That you don't have. Where do you start, the industrial design right, the style of the housing is really much more functional than usual laptops, the display, the power management, the security system, the mess network, sugar.

Tags: BTest-4, Jim Rapoza, Mary Lou Jepsen, OLPC Podcast, Tech Rising, Walter Bender, XO Technology

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At the Open Source Summit of the Mass Technology Leadership Council, Ivan Krstić, Chief Security Architect, One Laptop Per Child, and Eben Eliason presented a One Laptop Per Child Update.

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Douglas Naplioni: Hello my name is Douglas Naplioni. I am here representing Nuance Communications, Inc., a local Burlington company and the Python Software Foundation. I have the privilege and honor of introducing Ivan Krstic from the One Laptop Per Child Project along with Eben Eliason, I mispronounced that. I apologize. If you are not familiar with One Laptop Per Child, it is a revolutionary project trying to bring education to the children of the world. Without further waiting, here's Ivan.

[applause]

Ivan Krstic: Hi! Thanks. You will need to give me about 30 seconds to get set up. OK Alright. So very glad to be here. I am going to, so I decided to do something different with the format of this talk from what I normally do. I will certainly explain to you what's OLPC, what I do for OLPC and what we are trying to do, but I am going to try to keep the actual talk and the slide deck relatively short. When I am done, I am happy to take questions. I am going to talk about some of the core technologies and some of the core ideas behind the project and then I brought a colleague that Doug also introduced Eben Eliason, who is in the back who is going to come up and show you what we are actually doing on the user interface side and demo an actual laptop for you. So alright then. This is our sort of very brief agenda of things to run through.

This is the URL that if you're interested you should write down. Because I am cutting sort of the actual slide part of this talk very short, there is a very detailed technical talk that I gave at Google just a few months ago. It is pretty much completely up-to-date. It is about an hour long and goes really into complete detail about all the technology stuff that we are doing and I am gong to be leaving a lot of that out today, as I try to instead to get through things quickly and then open up the floor to you for questions. I do like being interactive in talks, so please feel free to interrupt and ask questions at really any time.

So who am I? Why am I talking to you? I run security for OLPC. I do a lot of other system related things. What I don't do is almost anything that the user sees which is why I actually brought Eben with me. OLPC came to me sometime in the middle of last year. It was sort of an interesting conversation. They asked me a couple of questions when I first talked to an OPC person. The questions were: Can you secure 100 million machines? Can you rewrite the file system and by the way, can you make this usable by six year olds? As far as interesting job interviews go, this was quite a trip.

The thing was that I had seen OLPC in the news. I had read about it in the papers. I didn't know that much about what is that they were actually trying to do. And I set out and tried to figure this out on my own. I found something interesting which is that the goal of the organization, the goal of One Laptop Per Child doesn't involve the word laptop anywhere, right? So the goal is very simple. It is four words. Change how kids learn. Laptops are really not in the picture. How does this work, right? How does that function?

Tags: Eben Eliason, Ivan Krstić, Mass Technology Leadership Council, One Laptop Per Child, Open Source Summit, Python

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The concept of creating useful, inexpensive, and sturdy computers for school children in the developing world was initially introduced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab in late 2005. Since then, its application in the developing world has seen support, skepticism, and a fast evolution of the aims of the computers and the project "One Laptop per Child."

On May 31, 2007, Nicholas Negroponte presented "The New $100 Computer" to an audience at the World Bank’s Washington offices, explaining the most current work being done by One Laptop Per Child.

Negroponte and Walter Bender entertained questions from the audience around OLPC's application in learning design, project evaluation, how to ally with the education sector to a greater degree, and the Computer’s ground-level maintenance chain.

Below is a transcript of the presentation while the original audio and Negroponte's slides can be found on the World Bank website

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Nicholas Negroponte: The purpose this morning, it's almost afternoon, is to share with you why we're doing the $100 laptop, what we have done, and what we are doing in the next thirty to forty-five days. We're not talking about five year plans anymore.

This is happening right now, and it's interesting to be here at the World Bank because it's a real inflection point for us. I'm pretty good at selling dreams, but I'm not very good at selling laptops. This is not a laptop project, this is an education project, and the key thing that I hope everyone will leave with is that it's a fundamentally different way at looking at learning.

The Media Lab, which I was the director of initially; Walter Bender who's with me and president of One Laptop per Child software and content was the second director of the Media Lab. The two of us took our experiences, in my case, over thirty years of it, working with one particular person named Seymour Papert, whom some of you may know of, or at least historically know of, in an approach to learning which is generally called Constructionist. This is for primary education and, to a lesser extent, secondary education.

I'm just going to run through some slides very quickly and leave most of the time for questions. This is Seymour Papert, by the way, twenty-seven years ago. Before the IBMPC even existed, Steve Jobs gave me a few hundred Apple [tools]. This was outside of Dakar in Senegal. The school is pretty rich, as you can see, but it was still not a private urban school and it was way ahead of its time. It was not connected to the Internet in '82. We were, as individuals, but the school certainly wasn't. What we learned in those very early days in the case of Senegal, Pakistan, and Colombia (those were the three countries we were working in) is that these children play these like pianos.

One of the questions I commonly get is, "Who's going to teach the teachers how to teach the students how to use the computers?" and I wonder what planet that person is on. I truly wonder "where do they come from." I'm sure there's not a person in this room who has a child or a niece or a nephew, but let's say a child, whom that you do not ask for help on your computer or with your cell phone. Including me; I've been doing it all my life. I still ask, or used to ask when my son was home. You always ask children for help.

One of the things it does by the way, because we get criticized for destroying the student-teacher relationship, which is total rubbish. One of the things is when parents ask their children for help, and maybe there are people young enough in this room who were asked by their parents, your relationship with your parents changes. It's kind of a friendship that gets developed, self-esteem on the child's point of view. My relationship to my son was very different than my relationship to my father, partly because of the computer experience and depending on him and asking for his help and so on and so forth. We think, everybody tells me, that the quality of the parent-child relationship doesn't deteriorate. It actually gets better. I think the same thing can happen with students and teachers.

Tags: Constructionist, Infodev, Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, Sesame Street, Walter Bender, World Bank

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