One Laptop Per Child Talks

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.

This particular school is one that I built with my family and my son; this was 1999, in the year 2002. Connected it, we put in the laptops; this is motivation, this is not evidence. I'm not trying to present this as a piece of scientific evidence, but it got us motivated. In this village, the average income is $47 per year, not month or week, per year. No electricity, no telephone. There are five villages now; two of them don't have a road. Every kid takes a laptop home. They're connected to the internet. They've never seen a telephone or a handset, but they use Skype everyday. The first English word of every child in that picture is Google. They access all the books, they brought up Khmer sites, they learned how to type and read English to a certain degree in two or three months.

This particular school, last September, a 100% more kids showed up for first grade than the previous year, not from neighboring villages. What happened was that the previous year, the kids started telling their friends who weren't in school how cool school was. Parents started looking into the windows, and I'm very affected by that because I think that most kids drop out of school in developing countries because school is boring. Not because they're needed for work in the fields, not because there's some economic pressure, but because it's just fundamentally boring. Also, some kids have learning styles that just aren't accommodated.

So this is what we did about two years ago, now it's maybe two and a half. We launched a non-profit. This is very important. It's a non-profit. I don't even draw a salary. We raised $25 million in a few days. Not weeks, days. It's such a compelling concept and idea doing the engineering and getting the funding for that was really very easy. And, everybody who contributed did it because it's a non-profit. Now, the second point is really important. Most education projects, computers and education, are little boutique efforts that are done here and there with the good will of somebody or the teacher that has the energy or maybe a village that has been adopted by another village or an ex-patriot who has gone back to his or her country and has done something for his or her village.

None of them have scale. And one of the reasons we're interested in scale is not just the typical economies of scale where you can buy a million of something cheaper than you can buy one or two, or ten or a thousand, but because scale can change corporate strategy. When we were building this laptop, which we'll show you in great detail, the display is a very important feature because the display is, in rough numbers, 50%, actually usually 60%, of the cost of your laptop. That display is a very crucial component.

So when I went to one particular vendor, I went to see the President, and I said I need a small display that isn't perfect in color or doesn't have to be that bright and so on. He said, "Nicholas, our corporate strategy is to make big displays, perfect color, very bright. So our corporate strategy and what you want to do; they're the opposite. So we cannot help you." And I said, "Well, that's a shame because we need a hundred million units a year." And he said, "Well, let me see." And guess what? They changed.

They're building the display. They're even building a fab as we speak to build the display. And that fab costs two billion dollars. We're only using 50% of the capacity, so that's a one billion dollar investment. That doesn't come because we're good guys and made a smart laptop. It came because the scale justifies it. And at the end of December, if everything goes well, the capacity, whether we get there or not is a separate thing, but the capacity is to make a million laptops a month. That might not sound like a large number, but the world production at the moment, world globally, all the companies in the whole world, Apple, Compaq, [HP], put them all together, is five million per month. So I'm standing here telling you that we'll have the production capacity, which is 20% of the world capacity, in seven months. You have to think I'm either crazy, but its all part of scale and whether we actually get it rolling to the full median doesn't really matter. The point is that scale is key.

Here the partners, you probably don't recognize the two in the upper right-hand corner. Quanta is key. They make 40% of the world's laptops. So your laptop was probably made by Quanta. They make everything; HP, Dell, they make them all. Chimay you've probably never heard of. It's the world's largest maker of plastic and second largest in Taiwan in LCD's. I think everybody else you might recognize.

Announced it with Kofe Annan a couple of years ago, and when you announce something with Kofe Annan, everybody pays attention. This was the machine we showed in Tunis about eighteen months ago. It's a charming photograph. It actually worked with a lot of wires under the table and it's unrealistic, but everybody remembered the pencil yellow crank. And so that image, even if it's not what we ended up with, was very, very important because people looked at it. It's kind of toy-like. It clearly doesn't need to be plugged in. There wouldn't be a crank there. It clearly is child-centric. So even if that isn't exactly what we ended up with, it certainly, at the time, was a pretty good image.

For those of you who are actually tech-y, this is what is actually in the laptop. I keep laughing with Walter about the fact that we sound like laptop salesmen. There are so many technical features in this that are outstanding and I just highlighted three. One is that it operates at less than two watts. Your laptop operates at thirty-five to forty. So this is really a big time difference and it's very important because the two watts means that a child can crank it, can do things. It's within the range of what we call human power; even a malnourished, small child can generate enough power.

The mesh network we'll talk about in great length, but it's how you go into a village that doesn't have a telecommunications system. You don't want to put one in and you don't want to start building towers and sort of setting up iMacs and cell phones. So, the laptops themselves make the network automatically.

And most importantly is the display down there works in the sunlight as well as indoors. Nobody in this room has one that works in the sunlight. Your laptop, if you try and use it outdoors, you just can't. This one, you use it out in the sun, and it's better. It has higher resolution by a factor of three than it does indoors. So the book experience is very, very important. You want kids to read books. Shipping them a thousand books, each one is a minimum. The point is that the reading experience is very, very important.

This is what we made, and we have a couple here that we'll show you. As I said, the book experience, it converts into a games machine or a book. And then everybody sort of smiles and little ears come up. Those little ears connect them to each other. I've sat in meetings where nobody gets a Wi-Fi signal except me because its performance is so good. I don't know, do you get a signal in here?

Walter: Yeah.

Nicholas: Yeah? Probably not the bank signal…

Walter: It's the bank signal.

Nicholas: There is a bank signal? Is it encrypted? It's locked. Does somebody have a password they want to share? Log-in to the bank system.

At any rate, it's pretty good. Actually, I'll go back to that. There are two modes, one is what we call eBook mode and one the other is sort of laptop mode. The reason that's important is because some systems you may want to introduce just as an eBook. That's a very non-invasive way to go into an education system and not be so disruptive and say well, we're going to change teaching in different ways. If you want it to just be an eBook, and then at night, the kids use it as a laptop.

This is important to me probably more than to you, but that's the real assembly line with the real people making the real machine. I've been traveling for two and a half years showing people plastic models and saying, "This is what it's going to be." Well, this is the real thing, and that's actually the first machine rolling down the assembly line when it was made, the first editions. There are about four thousand in the field being tested on kids right now all over South America, Africa, Asia, and a thousand with us.

This is a quick image, excuse me for going fast, but the Q and A is much more important. This is just one example of how you generate power. It's a little but bigger, perhaps, in thickness than the diameter of a hockey puck, or maybe a fat tennis ball. And you pull it, and by doing that, you are suing both arms and your upper body. Everybody in this room can generate about twenty watts. Only for about a minute; you get tired, but a kid can do it. Maybe some people in this room can even generate twenty-five watts, but the point being is that you can really make your own power.

The mesh network is really key in the sense that when you roll these out, it's key not just because it makes the network, but it also invites collaboration. So the whole concept of collaboration, kids learning from kids, kids sharing; kids are deeply rooted in the software. In the Q and A, you're going to get a lot of answers from Walter that relate to that because the concept of sharing isn't just about a connectivity expedience, it's actually a fundamental aspect of learning, and is reflected in a way these communicate.

We try to go in to the most remote parts of countries, partly because economic development has been so synonymous with urbanization, you'd like to so this in very, very remote regions. I happen to think that the worst form of poverty is urban poverty and rural poverty really isn't poverty at all. It's primitive living. And if you could, in fact, stem the tide a bit, that doing things in the remote, rural parts would actually be very good for a lot of countries and really be the right way to start. That's probably what's going to happen in Peru and Pakistan, maybe in Nigeria, but it's all up in the air because we deal through governments. Government is always a political process and your constituency is very rarely out in the remote, rural parts.

This is just an example. It's the same school in Cambodia, but you set up so that the schools connect to each other just by putting an antenna, just like that person's doing, on the roof. That now reaches twenty miles, to all the neighboring schools. This is an antenna that costs a few dollars. The cable costs a few more dollars. I don't have any of the solar panels in this thing, but we have solar repeaters so, in case a child bicycles home and is bicycling two or three kilometers home through a thick jungle, then that child may have to put something that is about the size of this and nail it to a tree. It has a solar panel that only costs ten dollars and a repeater underneath it so that it can extend the signal to the hamlet or the house or whatever that's needed.

I'm going to let Walter talk about this, or do you want to do it after?

Walter: After.

Nicholas: Do it afterwards. This is sort of the interface itself. We use Linux. Windows will run on the machine. You're welcome to use Windows. We happen to use an open source operating system that's very child-centric and Walter will talk about that.

This is a map of the countries where we're launching. It's less up-to-date than your map. You had a more current map. I should pull mine off the Internet as well. But it just gives you an impression. We're absolutely insistent that the project be global; that it launch simultaneously in places. One country comes to use and says, "We'll do it all by ourselves." We say, "No thank you. It really has to be several countries at the same time."

These are the countries we're talking to and this list changes all the time. What constitutes our reason to talk to a country had been scale now. You can see there are some small countries in there. It includes other things, but one laptop per child, depending on how you count; if you count the open source community, there are over 2,000 people involved. If you count just the people working on the laptop who draw real salaries, it's a couple hundred. If you count just the ones that are working for us and are really drawing salaries from us, it's below fifty, it's closer to thirty.

The numbers, depending on how you look at them, they're not large. And so if you take something like sales and marketing, whatever the equivalent is for a non-profit, you're looking at it. It's right here. It's not a mass army of people that travel around to countries and have the sales marketing and PR organizations. It's a really small lean machine that's put all of its effort in the engineering and software and, more recently, in the content.

I want to show these images just at the end because they're really current. These images are very new. This is a group of kids in Cambodia that got their machines very recently. It's that same school. They're getting more machines next week. It's completely changed that village, and as I've already said, these kids are pros because they have been doing it.

This is where we're trialing in Nigeria. This school has a couple hundred machines. Somebody from Mexico just went there to work with them, and it's been a very interesting test site for us because the machines are getting brutalized. One thing, we just didn't even think of this; these kids have sloped desks, which is not so uncommon. Well guess what? All of the laptops are sliding off the desk onto the floor. The woman who's there said that every hour, she hears one or two hit the floor. They're very robust. So she's built a laptop hospital for them and the kids work on the hospital and they fix the laptops.

These are child-reparable, and it's very important because just take the display for example. If the display on this laptop I'm using were to break in the sense that the light source, the fluorescent light goes out, you have to buy a whole new display, an entire new display. The industry wants you to do that because if a little piece breaks, they want you to buy a whole new display, and that's very clever. For what we use, the light burns out, the child opens it up, pulls out a one dollar component, slips in a new one dollar component, two screws; and what's important is that you make it child-reparable. You even design it to be the most economical thing going in terms of the advantage of repairing it.

This happened about a week ago in Uruguay. I just tried to pick on from each continent. The President of Uruguay launched this school, so I can't tell you if the kids are excited about the laptops or the President being there, but the President being there for a few minutes, they can now get the laptops for the rest of their education.

Do I have another slide? Yes, I have two more slides. The target price is $100. I say 2008 in the slide. It'll probably be early 2009. It's hard to predict because the numbers are so large that currency fluctuation, the cost of a nickel, has tripled since we started this project. They have a huge impact on us. Literally, the cost of plastic affects us, so we're subject to fluctuations.

$176 is where we're at at the moment, but it floats. It's a floating price. It's not a fixed price; it floats, it's readjusted every 90 days, and it's constantly lowering. Now, if the cost of nickel keeps going up, which it's been doing, then we switch nickel out. We've gone to lithium ferrite as a chemistry because we don't see nickel coming back down, so we'll change the chemistry. That's been happening right now as we talk.

Grey market issues are really, really, really important and we've solved them in some ways that are technical. If you steal this laptop before it gets to the kids, it's useless. It doesn't even turn on. Now obviously people have to know that or they might steal a whole truck load of them, but you can't even turn them on. When they're shipped, they're shipped with a person, the person has the keys. Now, I guess you could kidnap the person and steal the keys, but the person has the keys in the digital sense. Each child gets enabled, and then if you steal it from a child afterwards, it's disabled.

It's really a complex lock-and-key solution, but there's also a cultural one which is very important. That is they're, and I use this example all the time in the United States; there are thousands of cars in the United States stolen each day, but not one single post office truck has been stolen in the history of the United States. The reason is that there is no secondary market for post office trucks because they look like post office trucks. You can spray paint them, you can do whatever you want, but it's still a post office truck. So it's kind of hard to deal with post office trucks, and we hope that the same thing can happen here. That it's such a distinct laptop, it's not available in the commercial market, and it's not sold in town, and so on. So combination of technology, which we have extraordinary, very special technical solutions combined with the fact that there isn't a secondary market, we think, will help solve that.

Now maybe there's one slide after it. This is the way we're launching. We deal with governments; it's hard, it's painful. You know better than I. It's very top down at the moment. It's not Grassroots, bottom up, only because we can't do it incrementally. It's not as if we can put this on the market, have it appeal to the girly adopters, and then put more on the market, and then have them increment and to a few benefactors that go to a few schools and then a few nations. We can't use the normal market approach that incrementally grows this into sort of the "next Dell" or something. It has to be done totally differently.

We weren't going to use the United States, but we decided to do something in the United States and will, partly to build up more critical mass of kids making software and people making software for the kids, and also to answer the question I'm constantly asking. That is if this is such a good idea, why is it not happening in the United States? So, we're doing the United States. We work a lot with countries paying for other countries. That's even harder because now you have two countries in the equation and sort of dealing with two governments, but it's certainly a way to do it.

Child to child funding will start in about eight to twelve months, or something in that region. We'll start a scheme for "pay for two, and get one." So let's say these become available for $300. If you buy one, a child in Africa gets one too. And maybe we'll be sufficiently sophisticated and prepared by that time that the child can get it with an e-mail address kind of attached. So when you give your seven-year-old niece of a $100 laptop, there is, perhaps, a seventeen-year-old girl in Uganda who's gotten one to, and you can start doing all sorts of things. There's commercial subsidies; all of that is pretty straight forward.

That's my last slide. As I said in the beginning, and I'll stop and use the rest of the time for Questions and Answers, we're at a real cusp, we're at the launch point. We have to trigger the supply chain at the end of next month. Next month is tomorrow, if I'm not mistaken, so you are hearing this in real time. We have to get enough countries behind this to get that to start because the starting is very important. Once it starts, it's a little bit like an avalanche. Once you get the first few pieces of snow to fall then, the whole thing can sort of crash.

It's not necessarily in the commercial interest of many companies because this isn't the way technology normally works. You add features and you keep adding stuff to keep the price, what I'll call, artificially high. Using open source isn't popular with some of the biggest companies. So we've made some pretty big enemies, but so far have received an extraordinary amount of support. If you saw 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, they were so generous. God, it doesn't get better than that. Just click on their website; its there. They were really extraordinary about the project.

So, I will stop. We'll do it with Q and A. As I said, Walter Bender runs all software and content. I'm on the road everyday, literally. That's not a figure of speech- every single day, and I have been. Walter lives a more sane life, almost more sane, in Boston and runs the operation there. There are people all over the place. So, thank you for your time. The most provocative questions are welcome. We have no secrets. So you can ask absolutely anything you want. Thank you.

[28:20]

Ruth Kagia: Thank you Nicholas. I enjoyed that, and I hope you did. The floor is open to discussion. I'll take four questions, and then Walter and Nicholas can just point.

Man: Is it easier to pull the mic out and pass it around? Yeah. And then the next question, you can pass it to the next person.

Emiliana Vegas: Thanks so much for this very informative presentation and we've all heard a lot. I work in Uruguay with the project, so I've actually been involved a little bit in trying to help the education administration, [and the signing away and evaluating] so at least we can learn what this really does for the system. First of all, I just want to say what a great initiative this is and I hope you succeed in really getting these laptops to kids.

I don't know what the impact will be, and we'll have to see, but one of the questions and suggestions I have is to think about when you launch it, what are you doing to accompany the kids who get it? Because although it's true, like you said, that kids are going to be very quick in using it, they need some support in using it to learn. And that's where the challenge I think is in most countries that you're targeting. We don't have the most qualified teachers, and the teachers themselves have not benefited from the digital advancements that we have in more developed countries.

The second question that I have is when you launch it and you say you talk with central government and you negotiate with them like we do, at least in the case of [Uruguay] which I know well, you've talked to the President directly, and he's been a big [campaign of this]. The education people have seen it as something coming from the sky. They're not going to say "we don't want it." It's not really in their benefit. They can't, their boss is saying it's coming, but they don't know how to take advantage of it. So they're in a hard place to really use it. They haven't been given time to make a plan, a strategy for incorporating laptops in education. And so in a way, what I would hope for is that, I know you can't do everything and right now you're focused on getting it out, but that in the years ahead or in the months ahead, you focus on really accompanying the [presence] so that you maximize the impact on education if this is really en education project. I mean, when I learned about it, I thought it was more of a bridging the [divide] than an education project. When I hear your presentation, I hear a lot about how you use it for learning, maybe because of lack of time. Thank you.

Ruth Kagia: Let's take a couple more.

Woman: Thank you for your presentation and that we all understand the passion and the dream behind this product. It's wonderful to see how you presented that. My name is [inaudible]. I am Greek and I've work in MENA countries. My first question is related also to evaluation. When are you looking at the website where you are presenting the laptop, I didn't find any impact evaluation on that project, and for us, it is very important.

The second question is related to the developed countries. I know that [you are scheduled] with the government in Greece to introduce a laptop there. Yes, and so I'm wondering why a project that is so important, as you presented, in countries [in Cambodia], it would be also important for countries in the European Union. There, most houses have, [will] or they have already, computers and Internet connection at home.

And the third question is related also to if it is in reality an education project or something else because if you are taking teachers out, and this is very [legitive] and I understand that, why do you present that through the education system and why not allow this directly to families? Why do tax-payers and the government have to use the education budget to buy that and not address it directly to families? Thank you very much.

Peter Materu: Thank you very much for the presentation I've been waiting for for a long time. I think the objective is very good and [giving] the world access to computers has been a problem, partly because of the cost issue, but perhaps mainly in several places. Second point which I see that is very strong is the fact that you have decided to use the open source platform which allows the users to create the content themselves, something that doesn't happen with a lot of the other systems that we have around. So I think from that point of view, that approach is good.

I have two concerns that I would like to raise. One has been mentioned by one of the speakers. The approach to introducing this coming from the government level I know you need political will, and political power behind it. But it is also very important for [buy-in] to get the key actives and education in the country in the game. I have been involved in lots of consultations in Nigeria with the education community. And I didn't get the impression that they had been involved in the effort to introduce this into the country. It's not necessarily that they don't like the concept, just that they have not been given the opportunity. So I suggest that you make more effort to engage the education community in the countries.

And the second one I would like to address is also the open source. Open source is a new thing out in many countries, particularly in Africa, and I understand it might [be in a few others, Hewlett Packard and such] that are involved in this and trying to develop open source capacity in Africa. [It would be good to ramp that up] as well, you really have champions within the user communities that understand what you are trying to introduce. Thank you.

Ruth Kagia: Thank you. Walter, why don't you take these three and then another round?

Walter: Yeah. So, Nicholas said at the end of his talk that we've made some big enemies in industry, but we've also made some friends, and those friends are teachers, parents, and children. There's a misconception about the project that we're not engaging teachers and parents and that we're only engaging children, but it's actually One Laptop per Child and Teacher. It doesn't roll of the tongue quite as well. And we've not yet, and including in Uruguay, met a teacher that's not excited about the project. It's the same in Abuja, for example, as well.

I just got back from Uruguay, from [Vita Cadalo], which is 80 km outside of Montevideo. It's a small community that had no Internet, had no computers, had no laptops, and had no e-mail. Within a week, the children were making multimedia presentations and posting them to YouTube. But more important in my mind is the role of the teachers in that community and what the teachers have been doing because the teachers, first of all, have been engaging in a rich dialogue amongst themselves about teaching. And thinking about how we actually use this tool in the classroom, the teachers have been very explicitly encouraging the children to explore, to discover, and share those discoveries with the other children in the classroom. So the teachers have actually quite explicitly been engaging the children in teaching. So they're playing much more of a mentorship role than an all-eyes-forward-in-the-classroom role. This has been happening without our intervention. This has been happening in the classroom.

Now, I think the point of really focusing how you use the laptop for learning is exactly the right point. Again, as Nicholas said, we don't need to teach the kids or the teachers how to use a laptop as a computer. That's easy. But really, how do we amplify the best ideas around learning. So one of the things we've done with the laptop and with the whole ecology around the laptop is really to focus on communication and to really focus on the spreading of the good ideas, engaging in critical discourse, critique; that's fundamental learning, anyway, this communication and this kind of critical dialogue. So, we've built into the whole infrastructure, right into the very heart of the hardware and software, but also into the culture we are trying to espouse. A bottom-up approach that is related to open source that, unfortunately, the educational community hasn't yet learned the lessons from the software community about the notion of being open, of sharing, of critique engage and debugging. But they are starting to get it and we've tried to build an infrastructure that amplifies exactly that. It really is a bottom-up effort.

Unfortunately, I don't have them with me, but I've got some beautiful slides of the PTA meeting in Abuja and the school with all the parents coming to actually find out what this is all about. It has to be a community project. It's not just a school project. One of the reasons it is a laptop is so it'll go out into the community and be part of the community fabric. One of the reasons why we are insisting on the particular form of Wi-Fi we're using is so that the whole community is connected, not just the school, and really having that kind of engagement.

In terms of evaluation, we're certainly doing lots of evaluation and also our partners and countries are doing evaluations. A lot of that evaluation is happening through the traditional metrics that are used in the ministries of education. But we're also trying to broaden that metric and we're seeing a lot of things that are quite interesting. So, for example, in a small [pilot] we did in Costa Rica, [Nicholas] can sort of sight similar statistics.

In Cambodia, and actually we see the same thing in Abuja and Nigeria, people are actually coming into the community to participate in this project. We're seeing inverse truancy. Kids are coming to school. The spouses of the teachers are complaining because the teachers are spending so much more time at school now because of the program. They don't want to go home; they want to engage in learning. There was an example in Port Alegra where teachers were absent one day and they dismissed the children, but the children didn't go home. The children stayed in school because they wanted to engage in this process and in this learning.

So we need to broaden the metric. In Cost Rica, 80% of the parents are using the laptops at home for their own learning. There are all these things that aren't measured when you're just testing reading scores that have to be a part of the evaluation process.

I want to talk just a little bit about some of the aspects of learning and software. Open source is important, but also supporting legacy, applications and legacy systems is important, and we've built a system to engage the materials that already exist. So, for example, we work with the countries on digitizing books. We already have half a million books digitized for the laptop, but we also have a very efficient, inexpensive way of bringing local communities into the process of determining what do they want digitized, how do they want to load the laptop with materials for their children.

We do a lot of work on localization. So we're launching the project with a different keyboard for every region. In Pakistan, the keyboard has Urdu; in Nigeria, the keyboard has additional characters that support all the local languages. It's all very much localized, and that localization process has to involve the local community. In Nigeria, there are over 300 languages spoken. The only way you can make that happen is if you take a bottom-up approach in terms of software and content. So we're really building an ecosystem again that brings the ideas, the resources from the local community, up rather than thinking about it us all in Cambridge throwing the stuff at the kids and at the teachers. It's very much the opposite.

Just quickly a couple of other technical topics that Nicolas only brushed upon. One of our challenges is that most kids, a majority of children, aren't on the grid. They don't have ready access to electricity. And so, we had to design a laptop that could be used with human power. That could be used with solar. We've got a battery charger that can sit in the back of the classroom that's solar powered so that we can really make this thing run away from electricity. It can run from a car battery, a dirty, noisy diesel engine, whatever the indigenous community can support. The other thing is that on one charge, you can use it as a book for almost twenty-four hours.

So the idea that this really becomes their book is important to [issue it.] It can play the traditional role in learning of being a textbook and that it offers all these other opportunities for exploring and learning.

I'm going to leave to Nicholas to answer the question about Greece.

Ruth Kagia: Before you address that, can you make another round?

Nicholas: You don't want to just quickly answer about developed countries? That was a piece that wasn't answered.

We're not going to do anything in Greece. One of the reasons that we haven't dealt in general with developed countries, let's take this country. We spend, in this country, between $8,000-12,000 per child per year in primary education. The EU average I think is closer to 5,000 Euros. Greece might be right up there, maybe even 6,000. Once you're spending 5,000 Euros or $10,000, or whatever the number is, whether the laptop costs $100 or $150 or $175 makes no difference in the world. You don't need us. We've designed it for zero electricity, for sunlight readability. It actually runs in the Libyan heat of fifty degrees centigrade. I mean there are properties in this laptop you just don't need in Baltimore or Salonika.

So we've focused on the developing world. In the EU, we are dealing with Romania. We will deal with Macedonia. We will deal with other countries in the Balkans. I did approach [Cara Malice] to do it regionally with Turkey and Greece and so on. I did not get a particularly enthusiastic reception and we're awfully busy with the developing world. So we will go back. I'm in Greece every three or four weeks anyway for other reasons, so something will happen. But we're not using the developing world as an early adopter or an economic engine to get it started, and I guess that's the key decision we made way back and we're still sticking to it.

Walter: There's just one other point that you'd mentioned. Well why don't we have the families buy the laptops? And, again, that works fine in the developed world, but these families in Abuja can't afford the laptops, and that's in Abuja, never mind when you get out of the cities. It's way outside of their means.

Ruth Kagia: Okay, we'll just go back starting with you, sir. And then next to you; we'll go to those three.

Woman: Thank you. Thank you for an excellent presentation. I work in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia regions of the World Bank, and I noticed that Kazakhstan was one of the countries up on your map and that was very interesting.

I have a couple of questions and they're based, I have to confess, largely on a Newsweek article I read about you and your competitors, if I may call them that. One has to do with the whole issue of hand cranking and how effective that actually is in terms of providing power, and I think, Walter, you gave something of an answer to that, but I'm interested in hearing more. In the pictures that you showed us, at least for some of the classrooms, the laptops seem to be plugged in, there was a power source. And, in some of the other classrooms you showed us, I wasn't sure if the kids could actually stretch out to use their human muscle power to crank up in the way that you suggested. So, it would be interesting to hear more about that.

My second question has to do with your competitors, the other social entrepreneurs in the world who are trying to introduce low cost laptops. In this Newsweek article, they mentioned a couple of other people. One person stuck in my mind. He's an Indian entrepreneur based in the city of Chennai. The idea there is to have a box on top of a television, which is running the software. So it's an entirely different model. Microsoft is very interested in supporting this activity because the television top box is run with Microsoft software. But it seemed to me that was a model that was, perhaps, very relevant to the Eastern Europe region because television ownership is virtually universal, it's an area of the world that Microsoft is very interested in making [inroads]. The cost is entirely bought by the family. This is not a computer in the school; this is a computer at home. The cost is bought by the family and consists of a subscription to the cable company or whoever, which is providing the software that will run on the server, and then will arrive via the television top box to the household. So I'm just curious to know what your thinking is about those experiments. Thank you.

Nicholas: Can we do some of these in real time, just ping-pong back and forth, because the television idea is so stupid. It really deserves some quick response because when we launch this, you know I've made some big enemies, Microsoft and Intel among them, and I've known Bill his whole life. He announced at the World Economic Forum shortly afterwards that really the right solution was a cell phone connected to a TV set. And I said, "Bill, give me a break. First of all, our kids don't have TV sets." So, it might apply to Eastern Europe, but it certainly doesn't apply to where we are. But, second of all, the TV set is a communal experience. Can you imagine a kid, especially a little girl, getting access to the TV set during a football game or a soap opera or something? These devices are pretty busy, they're on a lot, they have to do with families, soap operas, all sorts of things that are going to get the primetime, and connecting a piece of cheap hardware to a TV set, which isn't even good at being looked at at a close distance, is just wrong; categorically, unequivocally wrong.

The person you're talking about in Chennai, his name is Ashok Jhunjhunwala, his approach is wrong, and it's also part of a network computer approach, which is also not the right way to go. N So I don't think of these guys as competitors. These guys are in the commercial market, so they're selling stuff. We don't compete with anybody. So when Intel announced The Classmate, which they say is competitive, when Microsoft dropped the price of Windows to $3, we think that that is pure victory for us, and we're thrilled The Classmate is there, we're thrilled that the Windows is down to $3. It just means that people have caught on. Can we declare victory and exit? I've no share-holders. We don't have to stay in business. No, you can't, because if we did, the price of Windows would go up, and The Classmate would disappear from the market, and other things would happen. So there's a constant downward pressure we have to keep putting. But with that particular example, I'll let Walter answer about power. But those are real questions.

Walter: We can leave that… [lost audio]

Tony Bloome: My name's Tony Bloome, I'm an ICT specialist with the Peace Corps, and it's a pleasure to see you, and a chance to actually see one of these laptops in person, so I hope we'll have a chance to touch it afterwards.

I have two questions. We have a number of volunteers, 7,800 volunteers in seventy-one countries. Many cases, they've already come tech-savvy, and they're helping to lead Grassroots initiatives in exploring the use of technology on the ground. One comment is I noticed none of your countries happen to be the countries that Peace Corps is in and know that there might be an opportunity in the future. But the second question is two questions that many Peace Corps volunteers ask. One of which is the cost of maintenance. While you talked about it being child-reparable, what's your chain of maintenance on the ground for getting that dollar part to a child or a school if they should need to replace that?

And the second of which is in terms of what software comes loaded. For example, do you have software that teaches English as a foreign language, or some [thoughts] in software applications and that regard? Thank you.

Kerry McNamara: I am Kerry McNamara from Infodev. We've been following your initiative from early on, and we congratulate you on the technical innovation, which is brilliant. But I wanted to get back to the economics.

Nicholas, you said you're not doing this in developed countries because [the amount they spend] for child and education is so high that the low cost of a laptop is not an issue. Walter, you said you're not selling to families because individual families can't afford the laptops. So we get back to the issue of who pays and who pays at scale. Scale beyond the first million because who are they going to go to? Are they going to go to the kids in the best schools, the kids in the best politically connected schools? We also get to this question because in many of the countries you're talking about, spend per child per education is, per year, less than even your most optimistic projection for the laptop. And so the question that the World Bank faces when it's advising these countries about education strategies overall, particularly in terms of equity and access for all to education is a great idea, all else being equal. But, in very poor environments, how do you scale this in a way that's justifiable relative to the economic constraints of those countries and the equity constraints of their education systems?

Mike Trucano: I'm Mike Trucano with Infodev as well and, again, thanks for the presentation and the ambition and the initiative.

Two quick questions; one I guess following on this cost issue. We have been in contact with probably most of the ministries of education of the countries that are on the list, and they just want help. The first thing they come to us is about the cost. Everyone loves this $100 idea, $176 idea, whatever it is, but a lot of them are becoming increasingly savvy about total cost of ownership issues, and they want some advice from us on what will this actually cost us over time? We understand if it's $100 million, $167 million that we have to come up with. What guidance can you give us about how we should think about total cost of ownership over time?

And the second relates to monitoring evaluation. If you're not doing pilots for the bases of impact evaluation at this point because you need to get to scale quickly and because others have done those sorts of things in the future, are you entering into cooperative relationships related to long-term impact assessment evaluation? I imagine once you're past this first stage, if you get it that will become increasingly critical and especially critical for the ministries of education working with developing their capacity to monitor and evaluate these types of innovations, which are almost across the board new in the places you're talking about introducing them.

Nicholas: Yeah. What we ask people to do is to, first of all, spread the cost over five years and not look at $176, but to look at the total cost if you look at all of the paraphernalia, the peripherals, then it comes to about $200 if it's the normal ratio of servers to laptops. And then the costs on top of that for training teachers, distribution, are very often costs that are already being born by the system.

So we'd like to think of it as somewhere between, depending on how much a country really needs and how rural you're going, we think of it as between $30 and $50 per year per child, including the connectivity. We know how to get connectivity unlimited for every child in the region of ten cents per month. It may start at fifty cents per month in land-locked countries like Rwanda, but somewhere between ten and fifty cents a month, so you can fold that in too.

You can't use traditional telecom; you have to do other schemes. But once you're in the $35 to $50 per year range per child, you're within every country's education budget because even the poorest country's spending close to $100 per child. Maybe I should make that a question. Do you know of a country that spends less than $100 per year per child? Maybe there is one, but that's pretty low, and even when you look at some countries like Nigeria. 50% of the kids aren't in school. In Pakistan, it's 50%. In Afghanistan, it's 75% of the young girls, etc, the big numbers. So if you count those as not in school and weave them in, then maybe per child is even lower.

We think that if you're going to invest a dollar or a Euro or a pound in education, even if a person says, "well, the windows are broken, and they don't have a physical school," and so on, it's still the best investment in town. If you're under a tree, give them a laptop before you build a school. You're going to have much, much better impact on education. Now, that's a hard one to argue because it is very counter-intuitive, very counter-intuitive, but I think it really is the right answer. The total costs- you're better than we are at that. But, I don't think they are anymore as near. People think of IT and corporations and a CIO and a person's buying laptops for an insurance company and has to double the cost each year because of maintenance; it's just a very different ball game.

Ruth Kagia: Thank you. We will take one more round…

Nicholas: No, wait, enough of that.

Walter: Alright. I'm just going to go very quickly in the power issue. Part of the idea is that the laptop is so low in terms of its power consumption that it's going to run all day on battery charging the classroom. The pictures you saw were from early prototypes before all of the power conditioning, so the idea that kids are going to have to be constantly recharging their laptops in the classroom is not the way it will work. But because we're down to just a Watt or two, there are so many more options in terms of how we power this thing. I've actually never seen a hand-cranked television set, one more problem with the television set model.

For a little piece of solar panel this big now which gives you five watts, which can power the laptop, only costs $12. We can put a solar-powered gang charger, a multi-battery charger in the back of the classroom, and since our battery itself costs less than $10, we can have extra batteries in the classroom, swap them in and out, so the kids go home with the fully charged battery, and then come in the next day; lots of things like that. The model is not that every kid at their desk is constantly doing this. It's a very different model.

In terms of software, our approach in terms of software is to provide three sets of tools, and then we can talk about specifics in terms of software and content. One set of tools are the tools for exploring knowledge. So, there's a fully featured web browser built into the laptop. There's an eBook reader built into the laptop. There's a multi-media player so it will play movies and videos and the like built into the laptop. That's all for exploring the materials that might come from the ministry, that might come from an NGO, it might come from the World Health Organization, another one of our partners, it might just come from things they find on the Internet.

There's a second set of tools which are the tools of expression because we think it's very important that the children don't just receive knowledge, but put that knowledge to use. And so we built into the laptop any number of tools for taking knowledge and putting it to use, whether it's writing programs, whether it's using the built-in video camera to make your own multi-media presentations, whether it's the Wiki that allows you to add your own commentary to the pages of the book. There are many, many different expressive tools that are built into the laptop.

The third set of tools on the laptop is tools of communication because, again, our model of learning is not just, again, receiving knowledge, but also engaging in critical dialogue with other people about that knowledge and engaging in critical dialogue with the things you've created. And so we've built into the laptop many, many different things. We have everything from video conferencing, so the laptop will support video conferencing, for example, between teachers to share ideas and best practice, and also the whole collaborative process.

The other thing we've built into the laptop is something called a Journal, and what the Journal does is it maintains a diary or portfolio for each child while their working. That portfolio is available for themselves to measure their own process and also for the teachers and the parents to get engaged in what the child is actually doing, learning, etc.

Now, in terms of specifics, we're working with a number of organizations, some of them commercial, some of them non-commercial, some of them government, some of them non-government, to provide some rich points of departure within the laptop. We've already mentioned we're working with organizations that have already digitized hundreds of thousands of books, and we'll work to digitize more. We're working with, sort of, best of breed. We're working with, for example, Steven [Wolfram], on developing a mathematics program for the laptop. We were discussing just yesterday at the U.S. Department of State about English language learning applications for the laptop. There's a large open source community that's developing for the laptop. Just next week, there's a Game Jam to develop educational games for the laptop. There is already a wealth of games here.

But, again, because we've got an open source, at some level it's a completely standard system. You can reach out to any kind of legacy tool. Still, we have this expectation that a lot of what's going to happen is not going off to the Internet, but a lot of what's going to happen is going to happen in the community; teacher to teacher, teacher to child, child to child, really engaging and building things and exploring.

In Uruguay, the kids take their laptops outside into the village, use a video cameras, [document while they're down], and then make presentations. In Thailand, they're using it to do a biology survey of their community, and then they go out and take pictures of plants, and then they come back and sort and engage in mathematics around these things. All that richness which is not so much going and retrieving, but it's got to do with being very active in the learning process. And again, the teachers to the teachers, this is learning to the teachers. This is an opportunity to really invigorate them selves and invigorate their classrooms. One of the comments from a teacher in Abuja is the kids aren't falling asleep anymore. The kids are actually there, they're engaged.

Ruth Kagia: Thank you Walter. We've got five minutes more. I'll just take one final round of quick questions. Diane, and then Felix; wasn't there someone in the back there? Okay, next to Diane.

Man: I'm Xiaonan Cao. I have one quick comment because [each of us] to calculate the per-child in a developing country per rate not less than $100 per year. I'll just remind you that most of the education project actually goes to teacher salary, and there's not a whole lot of money left to buy extra things. So that's just a quick reminder.

I have a couple questions. Have you thought about the transition issue, meaning, okay, you gave these laptops to primary school kids, and in a few years when they move to secondary school what will happen? That's one thing , and related is the [longevity] of such machines because I noticed that the power you have, the running power I mean, RAM, those things, and in a few years, the hardware will be slower and the whole Internet will move faster. The way things work is we'll have more volume, and it will take more speed and power to get fast download, particularly in the errors we are receiving. The condition is not that great, so have you thought through all of those things? And lastly, very important to educators, is contextualizing the materials to serve the education but also to preserve local culture. So, now, you're pushing them using more English, and studies have shown that if English is not modern tongue language and that creates a barrier for students' learning.

So have you thought about a strategy in terms of contextualizing materials? That's first. And second, in the supply channel for your materials, what's your strategy? It would be nice to get those answers. Thank you.

Man: Thank you very much for the presentation. I have a very quick question. You almost answered this when you spoke just a minute ago, but if I walk into a classroom equipped with these computers, what would I see? What are teachers doing; what are students doing? Or you might walk through the school, not classroom, but school, so what would I see? What is going on? What activities are going on in terms of learning? Maybe you say that most of the learning is happening beyond the school walls. Thank you.

Ruth Kagia: Okay, and the last one.

Woman: Hi. Thanks for the presentation. I have just a quick question. I'm interested in learning more how children are actually involved in the process of designing the laptop. How you guys did that and further, how you'll use children to further design prototypes for models. Thanks.

Walter: Let me jump in with the, first of all, issue of English-centric and creating materials. I'm not quite sure where you got the impression that the laptop is English-centric and the content is English-centric. One common denominator of ministries of education is they want their children to learn English, but the laptop is in the native language. The laptop content is in the native language. That's certainly the place to start. We've designed the laptop so that it's very readily localizable. The keyboard is localizable. Nicholas is playing Sesame Street in Urdu that was done in Pakistan, not in New York. So it's very much geared towards starting with the local language, but, again, while the goals of every ministry of education is learning English. In fact, on the Internet, as an example, less than 50% of the Internet content is in English today, and that is changing, and this project will change that dramatically as the children create content in their own languages.

One of the very first projects we typically do is to have the children engage in a project where they go and document their community, and they make a magazine or a story about their community. One of the nice things about that is it immediately engages the parents, and it immediately engages the whole community in seeing what this thing's about and understanding that it's about them and about their culture, not about something outside of their culture. It starts here and goes out, as opposed to starts out there and comes in.

And again, even in terms of the Internet, and so your question about the Internet, we're providing within the community very high speed Internet access, Ethernet access. So within the community itself we're providing a very, very high-speed, very rich communication channel. And that comes for free and that doesn't change, irregardless of whatever connection they have out to the rest of the world.

Certainly things will change over time and children will grow with the laptop. My answer in terms of the question of what happens when they go on from elementary to secondary education: it's very simple. They're going to come into secondary education with a very different set of skills, a very different attitude about learning, they're going to be much more prepared to take on a much more challenging future. So I don't understand the contradiction applied in your question. Why would they not learn from the mental math skills?

Nicholas: I think you'll find that the kids who sue these will have much, much better fundamental math skills and fundamental reading skills. In fact, it's just the opposite, and this has been proved over years and years of experiments, twenty-five years of this stuff.

What you may be implying which isn't incorrect is that some of these kids will not test as well as you anticipate. We get people who say, "Well, we've been running a laptop program in the state of Maine and there's no major difference in their testing scores." No, but they're a far more creative bunch of kids who are doing much more innovative work. The testing scores is an artifact of the past, it's a way of dealing with large numbers and evaluating in a very, very damaging way. Test scores are killers and most education systems are set up to kids…you agree or disagree? I think most people agree. Now, unfortunately, there's no other way to really do evaluation, and one of the things earlier, the lady from Greece and somebody else asked about evaluation; I don't want to insult evaluation as a process, because I think it's very important.

But people are constantly saying how do we know this is going to work? How are we sure that this is the right thing to do? And yet, there's not a person who's asked me that question who hasn't given their own child a laptop. Every parent in the developed world who can afford a laptop or a computer, I'm not going to argue, provides it for their children, probably including every single person in this room. You didn't go around and ask people, "Is this the right thing to do? Is this going to help my child?" You just did it because you knew it was the right thing to do, just like making them libraries and other things. So, to run around and have to persuade people that you should also be doing the same for the poor children in the world just doesn't make sense to me.

What really, actually, irritates me is when people think they should set up control groups. That's perverse. We give some laptops and we don't give it to others, and we're going to see the difference at the end? No, we're beyond that. This is like immunization, and immunization is the right analogy. This is immunization against ignorance, and you don't just immunize a control group and expect it to work. You have to immunize everybody. Okay, we know the vaccine works, we have the vaccine, and to hold it back is just not correct. Now, yes there are economic questions, but should you do this? You're damn right you should do it. And should you be spending the first dollars there? You're damn right you should. And it's to me not even a question anymore. So, we can hold back the vaccine, but the time has come, and I think we really should do it.

Walter: Let me make one final point about the learning, and I want to use an example from China, and it's an example of something we believe deeply, and that is that love is a better master than duty. And my example, unfortunately, is not mathematics, but its reading. So I apologize, and maybe it's not true in mathematics, but I see no evidence that it's not true, I see lots of evidence that it is true.

So there's one school in Shanghai that's breaking the trend in terms of how they teach the Chinese characters. Rather than teaching them in a strict order, they let the children learn the characters based on their interests in literature, letting glove be the driver of what they learn. Those children learn three times faster. Not 30% faster, not 3% faster, 300% faster than their peers. So giving the children the opportunity to explore reading, mathematics, these very basic th