One Laptop Per Child Talks

Negroponte at OAS

In July 2006, Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the OAS Lecture Series of the Americas on One Laptop Per Child and shared his vision and his efforts to revolutionize education worldwide.

Below is the transcript of Negroponte's presentationwith Moderator Irene Klinger, Director, Department of External Relations and Coordinator of the Lecture Series:

Okay. I'm going to use about 30 minutes to do 3 things: Tell you sort of why we're doing what we're doing, tell you how we're doing it and what we're doing, and then use the end of it to tell you exactly where we are. Now the people in this room will have the benefit of the images over there, and people who are looking at the web cast, unfortunately, will not have those pictures, so I may use extra words to describe what the pictures are. And maybe we could ask the audio visuals to put the first picture instead of the last picture on the screen so we can start at the beginning.

This project is about learning, not about laptops. And that is perhaps the hardest thing I have when I travel around the world bragging because all too long people think that this organization is selling laptops and we are indeed distributing a huge number of laptops, but the purpose is education. And the reason that we do that is very simple.

No matter what global problem you are dreading, whether it's the elimination of poverty, whether it's the creation of peace, whether its solving environmental energy problems, the solution- whatever it is- multiple solutions, the solutions always include education, never is without an education component and sometimes cannot be done without education. And if you look around the world you must remember there is not one decent education system in primary and secondary school. And in rough numbers half of those girls lived in the rural part of very poor countries and in rural countries the education is generally poor because teachers who have been trained literally have no interest, and in going back into rural parts of the country.

So when we decided we would look at how we will proceed, we decided to look at the heart of it all- the younger children of children and poor kids. And we looked at it from the point of view of learning learning, not learning something. And there is actually a profound difference. I spent a lot of time in rural parts of the world, remote places that don't even have a road. And You'll find a school where somebody has got two or three desktops that are connected to a battery or generator. They have it all set up which is very hardcore, until you look at what they're doing.

They're teaching the kids excel and word, and it's heartbreaking because why would kids learn excel and word. Teachers are thinking this will help the kids get a job in the city when they grow up. That's right. The children should be making things. The children should be writing computer programs. They should be learning by doing. The thing is not to learn excel or such programs it is to learn to learn. And my team has been doing this for many years.

In fact this goes back to 1982 in Senegal where we do things with computers with children in school for the IBM. And the person whose name is just right down the book on red is Seymour Papert. And Seymour's experience are the very roots of everything. And what Seymour observed in the late 60's and early 70's, in fact on April 11 1970, the first group of patients, a very large public one, called teach your children.

And what Seymour and his colleagues observed when a child wrote a computer program, using the child language for writing computer programs, the child can understand very profoundly what the he is doing. So if he wrote a program about a circle, you had to understand what the circle was. It wasn't just word circle. It was that he wrote a program. And instead of a circle the first time, there were lines all over. The children had made a mistake. And the child goes back and debugs the program, looks at what the behavior was on the screen, picks at some things, tries it again, and maybe on the second time it is a circle, maybe it isn't. But on the third time, fourth time, eventually it is a circle.

And what's important at this point in the story is not that it became a circle, but that the child was involved in debugging. And so we found in the 70's and 80's that children who did this, applied the concept of debugging to their own learning. So when they went into a spelling bee with ten words and they got two wrong. When I went to school when I had a B or B+ in spelling it was very good, I was very proud that I had a B because I was a bad speller. And I had no interest whatsoever in the two words I got wrong. Because it was a B and B was good, so who cared about those two- put them under the rug.

The kids who were writing programs became very interested in those two words because that was debugging. And did they get it wrong because they didn't understand that I came before e except after c or whatever. And we found that children who were writing programs suddenly were better learners because they had learned about learning. They had learned something that they could apply to themselves. School isn't done that way.

School we still think we have to give them exams and training and sort of repetition and memorization and do multiplication tables and all of that. It is a very big shift underway. And so perhaps the biggest thing the 100 dollar laptop will do on this planet is to change education. Because the truth is the way we teach children today, even in the richest countries in the world kills half the children. Half the children are dead on arrival. They don't make it through but they're very creative, very high energy, but they just didn't make it.

And they didn't make it because they weren't compulsive surrealist little children that were well disciplined. They were hyperactive energetic parallel facial thinkers that got into trouble. So this isn't just for educating the poorest and the most remote. This is also very very profound, and we're finding that working in developing countries is perhaps better because they're so desperate for the children to learn. They'll use any technique possible, and they don't have these huge legacies. For me to change education in the United States would be very hard.

First of all, we have thirty thousand school districts. I can't change the United States or Europe. They're entrenched. Worst, we admire countries like Korea and Taiwan, whose children are absolutely brutalized but do very well on the tests and teach to test is a fundamental mistake. Now tell that to the United States? Tell that to this administration? Tell it to a European country? They won't agree with you.

Brazil gets it. Argentina gets it. Thailand gets it. Nigeria gets it. So we're finding, in fact, even though our mission is developed and developing countries, that we find more open reception to new ways of learning in some of those countries. So, that's our mission. The first slide is simply to just say that we've been doing this for a long time. This isn't that I woke up two years ago and said lets build a 100 dollar laptop.

We've been doing this since 1968. I've been on the faculty at MIT since 1966. And its been a long trajectory, but everything has sort of pointed, more or less, to where we are.

Next slide.

If this interests you, this is Seymour Papert 25 years ago in Senegal. The children don't speak English or French. They spoke Wallace. And they used those keyboards like ducks in water. There was just no difference between the behavior of that child and the children in suburban Massachusetts or New York. Just none.

Next Slide.

And after that we started doing some work. It didn't have much traction. It's way ahead of its time. But in 1988 we started in Costa Rica, which I have to say is the poster child of computers and education. Since that time, there's been continued work. I'm not sure why Costa Rica hasn't had more influence on the region, but we think of it as the best example in the world of the use of computers in education. It's been very sustained. It's gone through many administrations, yet nothing is perfect, but it's the best we've found, and the best we've worked with.

Next slide.

In the 1990's, I was convinced that telecommunications was what we had to do. We had to bring telecommunications to the most remote parts of the world. This image is in Kashmir. It's on the Indian side of Kashmir. We were using what was not called Wi-Fi but is today. This is a form of 802.11, which can be focused with a pringle can, if you eat potato chips, very low cost and can go 50 miles. And we were going over the mountains to connect the Pakistan side with the Indian side of Kashmir because the adults were messing everything up. But if the children could talk to each other, we thought that would be a good idea. We did a lot of work in this area.

Next slide.

And it was about 5 years ago that I realized that telecommunications is going to be basically resolved by so many different concurrent approaches. If you have heard in the press or read about Wi-Fi WiMax, 3g, satellite systems. There are just a lot of things happening. So I can argue with some and say this would be a better approach than that and make little differences, but there's nothing I'm going to do that's changing it. The regulatory regimes are changing it. Industry is changing it.

The cell phone industry has grown, so there are already 2 billion cell phone users. That's basically almost about 30 percent of the planet already connected to cell phones. It's moving in the right direction, so you don't need me to change telecommunications. That's not the problem. That's the problem- the laptop. And the reason it's a problem, is that they just cost too much.

And unlike telecommunications, they're not elastic. And what I mean by that is, if I connect the village with, let's say 1 million bmps per second. I give it connectivity to this village. And two hundred kids share it, it actually isn't bad. And now suddenly there are 220 kids, eh, its ok. 225, it's ok. In other words, it doesn't deteriorate, and there is no incremental cost. Whereas, if I give one laptop per child and there are 200 kids, that's one thing.

If there's 250 I need 50 more laptops. It's not elastic. I need to keep giving more laptops. And why do we want laptops? We want the kids to have a seamless education between home and school, between play and work, to use this to make music, to use this to read books, to use this to look at movies, to use this to play electronic games, do the entire spectrum. And this is very important because the laptop and portability nature is critical to what we do.

Next slide is just one of two inspirations for me. It's something I did personally in Cambodia, in a village where the average income is $47 dollars a year, no electricity, no water, no telephone, no television. And, in fact, there are now 5 villages involved, and one of them doesn't even have a road. You can't get there. Actually this time a year it's very difficult to get there because of the rainy season. Other times of year you drive or motorcycle through the river bed which is dry in those seasons.

In this village, the first English word of every child is now "google." That's their first word. And it might interest you… I'm sorry that my example is Brazil and not Argentina , but the truth is the kids in this village, the first thing they did was use google to go look up the football players in Brazil. That's the first thing they did. I'm not inventing that. The first night we asked them to take them home, the parents insisted that the kids not open them because they might break them. They could tell they were expensive.

We had Wi-Fi in the village so when they took them home, they'd be connected. The second night they took them home with a message, which nobody could read because the parents are all illiterate, but they believed that the message said something that allowed the kids to open them. And the kids opened them, and the parents loved it because it was the brightest light source in the house. No electricity. And so when the kids opened their laptops that were powered by batteries, they illuminated the room (these are one room houses).

So talk about a metaphor and reality being a little bit hair-raising, I said to myself: Could this scale? Or is this just a pretty picture where somebody, in this case, myself had enough money, went to the village, did something charitable, and it's kind of a postcard. In parallel, in the year 2002, Seymour Papert persuaded the governor of Maine- small state- to legislate one laptop per child. This became law, that the state has to provide children, in this case in the middle schools, because they want to start with all the children in the state, by law, a laptop at the beginning of the year. And they've been doing this now for 3 and a half or four years. This is the end of the fourth year.

I do despair to say that eighty percent of the teachers were against it. And if they weren't against it, they were at least apprehensive. Eight, Zero- most of the teachers. But the governor was a very strong governor and pushed it through legislation. The teachers said "no, we want higher salaries, we want you to paint the school, we want new furniture." Nope, it pushed through. And today we cannot find one teacher, not one, who is anything but absolutely enthusiastic about this project. They tell us things like, "teaching is a totally different experience." They've never had such excitement in their class.

The parents are involved. The parents attend parent-teacher meetings. The parents are suddenly much more engaged in their kids' education. Discipline problems have gone down. Truancy has gone to almost zero. And, the one I like the most, is that they have to turn the servers off at night because the teachers are getting too much email from the kids asking them questions. Now if that's not a good sign- I never wanted to ask the teacher questions because you look like a sissy. You didn't want to go and ask the teacher questions after class. But now when you have your laptop, you can send in privacy a question to your teacher. And the teachers are, in this case, suddenly swamped. So all of these things that were happening in Maine, and the same in Cambodia, we said, "Okay, let's just do it."

And I will show you some images of what we've done. The first image happened because the governor of Massachusetts had heard about this and decided he wanted to do it in Massachusetts. This was about a year ago. So we quickly, we were already doing some of these sketches, sort of looking as to what would the 100 dollar laptop be like. (Now we may to to go through some of these a little faster). The next slide is the one we built as an image for the governor of Massachusetts. This image is very important because you see on the side of it a hand crank. Fifty percent of the kids do not have electricity, worldwide.

At home, they certainly don't. And so, you can't build a laptop that plugs into the wall and charges up because there's not even anything to plug into. So, from the very beginning, we said this computer has to work on human power. You have to be able to crank it, to pull things, peddle it, do whatever, which is very fundamental and within the very first concept.

Next slide.

This is the one I showed with Copiana and Tuna, and the UN has joined us as a partner. And this is the machine that we showed. The yellow crank on the side got so much worldwide press. In the covered machine, the crank is on the ac adapter, it's not on the machine itself. And I can't tell you how many people send us emails saying, "where is the crank? The crank has disappeared." The crank hasn't disappeared. The crank is moved off the laptop and is on the side.

It's on the ac adapter, which is actually particularly good because now you can give it to your baby brother or something to crank for you or you can do something else with it. But it's not attached to the machine and that was a very good decision. But here it's still attached to the machine and because Kofi Annan was involved in announcing it, the world interest just went through the roof. The number of countries who had not added is very short lived, and it really launched the project.
The next slide is sort of where we started to go still with the crank onboard in this image. But how could you make something that was very light and had, this is the first image that had it, which from this little rabbit ears that come up because you have to provide these connected to the internet, and for some reason the press misses this. In fact, this issue, the one that just came out this week of Wired magazine has a whole story on the 100 dollar laptop, and at the end of the story they completely miss the point and actually said the opposite that these aren't connected.

These are connected. They come connected, popped out of the box, so you're connected to the internet. Now how do you do that in a remote and rural place? This place doesn't have telephones, so how are the kids going to be connected. The answer is the following: Pretend you are all kids in this audio and you all had a laptop and the way the laptop down here in the right side of the room and the back left. The way they communicate is by her laptop talking to hers to hers and it goes, like messages getting passed through and finally gets over there. You all make a network, which is called a mesh.

And as long as a child is within 600 meters of another child, that child is connected. And if a child bicycles home 2 or 3 kilometers, so the distance is too far, then we give the child something about the size of this glass of water, so the child can nail onto the tree that boosts the signal to get it to the child's house or the little hamlet that is far away. So now let us say your five hundred children all connected. If I buy a satellite link, commercially, this is commercial prices, I can connect to some point for, let me invent, $500 dollars a month.

That's pretty expensive. But divided by 500 children, that's a dollar a month. So as long as that is on the network, then everybody is on the network. And if you're in an urban area, you do it in a different way. You do it with Wi-max and so on. But it is very important that you have one point that goes back. And if you look at the economics, the laptop costs, in rough numbers, $2 dollars a month, and the connection is $1 dollar a month. You're talking $3 dollars a month per child. And most countries in your region are spending in excess of $500 dollars a year on education, probably closer to a thousand. So these numbers are not so outrageous if you're looking it from the economic point of view. In fact, the cost of textbooks in most countries is higher than $3 dollars a month.
So, quickly moving on, next slide.

This is basically the current machine. It turns into an electronic book when you fold it up. You'll see it in a moment. Next slide. We'll go through these very quickly. This is the current machine. I'm sorry I don't have one with me. It's so beautiful. This is like an ipod. You'll come to cherish and they're really very different. Most of the times when people build low cost machines, they mean cheap. And they look cheap. They feel cheap. And, quite frankly, they are cheap. This laptop will be really a very elegant machine, and you might find it in the museum of modern art and it will really be a handsome thing, really , I won't say bulletproof, but certainly rain proof and dust proof and subjected to a lot of abuse.

Next slide.

That's the machine in use. It also has, believe or not, a camera on it. So, the kids can do video conferencing with each other. They can take pictures. Images are really important to kids. The sound on this machine is absolutely stunning. I couldn't believe the sound processing it could do. So, this is every bit of an ipod in terms of its processing capability and its sound and management of sound and pictures.

Next.

There it is in e-book mode. You can use it in e-book mode. The thing I haven't yet said is that it can be used in the sunlight. It has what is called a dual mode display. This doesn't exist on any laptop known so far where when you go out in the broad sun light, the display changes its mode and reflects the sunlight instead of trying to shine through it.

So this is very important because our constituents will be outdoors very often and very often in sunny places. When you go outside with your cell phone you're covering it and trying to sort of see what your cell phone says because in the broad sun light it almost disappears. Ours will do the exact opposite. In the broad sun light it will just illuminate like a page of print. It will be very very bright. And you can't tell that through the pictures. And this is just to show that those are the rabbit ears and the connectivity.

A lot of press says, " Get a serious computer. Get a real Computer." Trust me, this is a very serious and real computer. And I plan to use it and nothing else, as soon as humanly possible.

Our last slide is just an illustration of the countries. It's the one that was there before. We put in green the countries and pink will be our launch countries. And in red or orange is where we've received a request typically from the head of state. In some cases, it might be the minister of education. And in yellow are the countries where we've received interest from, well it could be ministers, but it's very often not the head of state. You can see very few countries are white, and this slide is probably a week old, so probably some of the white ones have filled in over the past week.

What I want to end with is just a remark more about having to launch something like this. You have to keep in mind we're a non profit, and our mission is humanitarian, it's not marketing. So, if I were starting a company, I would do it very differently. I would market this. I would try and get a few early adopters. And then the early adopters have success. And then they tell other people about it and do it competitively. You know it's a long incremental process.

And you probably heard in the introduction, I'm on the board of directors at Motorola, and that's what we do. And what happens at a company like Motorola is true for all companies of that sort. If we invent something that lowers the cost of the display by ten dollars, guess who gets the ten dollars? In fact it's my responsibility that the share holder gets as much of that ten dollars as possible. And, in fact, we fire the CEO if that doesn't happen. Now we don't put all the ten dollars into the share holder's pocket. We put some into research.

We put some into lowering the price to compete more. Now when our organization, the One Laptop per Child organization makes an invention that lowers the display by ten dollars? Guess who gets the ten dollars? The laptop costs $90 suddenly. We can keep putting every single thing we save down back to the end users. So what we've done is we've floated the price. We pay at the floating price. It's like the stock market. And all we can tell you about the prices is that they'll go down. Prices normally don't go down.

There's a loft leader or something that enters the market. And then we add features and options and the price starts to drift up and then you add more features. And then you make more software, and the software get fatter. Then you need more processors, and the processors get faster. And then the software gets fatter.

And the whole thing is like a nuclear war between hardware and software and we get to where we are today which is pretty hard softer wear. So start over. Skinny it down, and come up with scale. And scale is very important. So we have to launch this with a minimum of 5 million machines. I can't get the price down. So when we talk to countries, we say, "Look, it's 5 million or 0. We're not going to make 100 thousand and then if they sell, whatever that means, make a million. And then if they sell, make…nah, we're making 5 million machines. You know, are you in? Or are you out? And if you're in, terrific, we'll launch. And if you're not, we won't launch." You know, I don't have shareholders behind me who are going to say, "Why didn't you launch your laptop on January 1st."

Answer is: I don't have 5 million machines and I can't lower the price. And so what we've been doing is going to big countries, saying, "Look, Brazil. You're big enough to do this." Do it, and then the smaller countries a year or six months later can benefit. But, that's what we have been doing up till now. And the reason scale is important isn't because I need to buy components at very cheap prices. That's true, but that's not the key reason. The key reason is to change the strategic thinking of companies. I'll give you a very specific example without naming the company. I went to the company and said I need the display.

It's only 7 and a half inches. It's small. It doesn't have to be perfect in terms of its color uniformity. It can even have one or two pixels that aren't very good. And it doesn't have to be too bright. And the CEO of that company said "Well, you know Professor Negroponte, we're just not interested in that. That's just not our strategic plan. Our strategic plan is to have big displays, high brightness, perfect color uniformity. We're looking at the living room. The American and European and Japanese living rooms are our market.

"And I said, "Well that's too bad because we need 100 million units a year." He said "Well, maybe we could be interested." You know, what happens is these numbers, just to put it in context. The total worldwide production of laptops last year was 47 million. That was all, 47 million. So if we launch in year two, a hundred million machines, that's double the world production. So these numbers are more like cell phone numbers. Cell phones this year will hit around 900 million units, maybe 850 million units. China alone has 350 million cell phone users. So those are big numbers. Laptops are small numbers.

So we live somewhere in between.

With that I'll end because there's a human aid which will be moderated in a moment. But I want to say one last thing about poverty. The worst form of poverty is urban poverty, unquestionably. In fact, you could even argue that rural poverty isn't poverty at all, it's the lifestyle difference and so on. Yet, if you look at economic development, globally, over the past 200 years, it is startling how it is perfectly synonymous with urbanization.

Now, I don't want to go into a long lecture as to why we have plums and why urbanization is attractive. That's the world of atom. But what you can do is you can imagine a switching of that tide because one of the reasons people go to cities is for education and opportunity and health services, and if you can deliver some of that back out the other direction, specifically in education, I think you'd have a very profound effect on economic and social development in the country. And so I will end with that remark. Thank you very much.