One Laptop Per Child Talks

Michail Bletsas

In June 2006, Michail Bletsas, Chief Connectivity Officer, One Laptop per Child, spoke at the PARC Forum on The $100 laptop: why it can and should be done.

Michail Bletsas' presentation audio and video.

The transcript of Michail Bletsas' speech:

Michail: Thank you very much for the invitation. It is a great honor to be speaking here. I would like to start with some history. It will explain a lot of things of how this project came into fruition. OLPC is a nonprofit association that’s been a part of the MIT Media Lab where most of the people who work at OLPC worked for the past several years; eleven in my case.

The Media Lab has a long history of using computers in education and exploring the potential of computers in education. This is a picture from Senegal in 1992; this is one of the early experiments that Seymour Papert did. Here is Seymour with an Apple 2 and a student. In the late 90’s we went through a phase where we looked at deploying computer laboratories, [unintelligible] computer laboratories in the developing world.

This is a picture from Costa Rica where we built these self-contained laboratories in discarded shipping containers. We employed the Department of Architecture to build this very nice canopy on top of them. It was kind of fitting, of course, because Costa Rica is relatively well developed and also is an easy place to connect to the Internet. It has a mountain spine in the middle and there was a packet data wireless network on top of that so it was easy to get ISDN speed wireless connectivity but you could get an Internet to these things relatively easily.

Tags: Chief Connectivity Officer | Michail Bletsas | One Laptop Per Child | PARC Forum |

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In May 2006, Tom Munnecke interviewed Michail Bletsas at the NetSquared Conference about One laptop Per Child and the role of technology in education, the design of the laptop, and the technologies be developed. Roland Berger from Club of Rome makes a cameo at the end.

The transcript of the interview of Michail Bletsas:

TM: This is Tom Munnecke with Michail Bletsas from the MIT Media Lab, and we’re talking about a, the $100 Laptop Per Child project. We’ve been talking about this on some other video blogs, by the way.

But, the question I have, has to do with the difference between good intentions and net benefit that’s delivered. And if I were a woman in Nepal, living on $50.00 per year, would I want other people to invest in a $100.00 laptop for my child?

And my concern is (inaudible name) a very powerful and charismatic leader, whose brother is a UN Ambassador, (inaudible name) who knows Kofi Anon. And there’s a tremendous upsurge of putting down technology and funding and political power behind this, which can be very positive.

And the MIT Media Lab is developing some very innovative technology here, but when it actually gets into field, what’s the feedback loop to know that this is a net beneficial activity?

MB: First of all, the laptop is not as it sounds. We (inaudible).

MB: We think what we are not going to do is put down. And try to use any kind of political connection that says, you know, we think the laptop is the best way to go. This is a full laptop. We chose (inaudible) pilot council in the beginning, just to be geographically diverse, to be big, so the expense for the laptop, one may (inaudible words).

MB: It’s a different thing talking about Nigeria...

MB: ...which has a hundred twenty million people and lots of (inaudible). The different thing we are talking about Nepal. There are very few people and very few natural resources.

Tags: Michail Bletsas | NetSquared Conference | One Laptop Per Child | Roland Berger | Tom Munnecke |

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