One Laptop Per Child Talks

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

So there's only one question on the table and that's how to afford it? That's the only question. There is no other question - it's just the economics. When One Laptop Per Child started, I'd didn't have the picture quite as clear as that, but we did focus on trying to get the price down. We did focus on those things.

But I have to tell you that I thought in this journey - I notice Walter Bender is in the back - when Walter and I started this - I can't speak for him - but I believe we both had the same image that our problems would be corruption; our problems would be logistics; our problems would be...

It turns out that the problems are not that. The problems are swimming against normal commercial forces; our problems are swimming against very naïve views of education, which mostly come from marketing departments. That our problems are in fact not the ones we expected. I would suggest that everybody in this room try - and I'm going to get a lot of pushback on this - to do two things today. One: stop using the term ICT.

[applause]

Nicholas: There is not a child on the planet who uses a cell phone or a Gameboy and says "Mummy, I'm using ICT." OK

[laughter]

Nicholas: It's not ICT, it's about life. It is pervasive. ICT is what CIOs do in companies. Once you use the word ICT you are polluting - deeply polluting - the mission. Children aren't a market, they're a mission, and the purpose of the mission is learning. It is not teaching, it's learning. One way you learn is from teachers but there are other ways to learn.

The second thing I hope everybody will do in this room when they leave today is in fact understand - and I'm very sorry that this meeting used the word classroom in its name - and we've got to understand that school is a subset. In the best of all possible conditions in the developing world, school represents 14 hours a week of a child. So if the child has perfect environment, a perfect teacher, a perfect classroom, a perfect everything, and you're focused on school, you're focusing on the wrong subset of time.

The most important thing isn't just that the kids have the laptops and take them home and hence have expanded school, but they also then - I'll use the word infiltrate - they infiltrate society. They actually changed things.

In Peru a large number - and this turns out to be because we're in the rural villages - of the children are teaching their parents how to read and write. If that doesn't put goosebumps on your goosebumps, I've nothing else to tell you, because what's happening in that, is the child is learning, the child gets an awful lot of self-esteem, and the parents are benefiting a great deal. Society is benefiting.

You can put a computer in a classroom, you can build a computer lab, but that's infinitesimal, that is just a minor change. That is not a deep fundamental change. Maybe if we can leave this room, dropping ICT, please, and realizing that school is just one piece of it.

Now what I'm going to do is show you some slides and talk a little bit about what we've done, but from a different point of view. I used to talk about the laptop, describing the laptop and so on. Well, you know, the laptop doesn't matter any more because so many people are making them and the price has come down. Now while I agree with Anoop, the netbook is wonderful, I'm very happy to take credit for me, you can send me thank-you notes.

[laughter]

Nicholas: But the truth is almost no netbooks are in the hands of kids. They're going to rich kids in this country, and they're going to you for your second computer, or your bathroom computer, or your travel computer.

[laughter]

Nicholas: They're not going to kids in Rwanda, in Nigeria, in Pakistan, and so on. Partly because - I don't know if somebody has one of our laptops, throw it in the air. I love going to meetings...

[thump]

Nicholas: Yes. And let it hit the ground. I love going to meetings with Craig Barrett - I'm sorry he's not chairman of Intel any more - and I would throw the laptop, and it bounces down the floor, and I would say "You throw yours."

[laughter]

Nicholas: Netbooks wouldn't survive. But the point being that they have come down. I saw a recent Magellan one - it's a beautiful machine, it's fantastic. So that part, in some sense, the mission is accomplished. Now One Laptop Per Child is lower case, not upper case. The little green machine is the best one that exists. Hands down. For all sorts of reasons. You can clap this.

[laughter]

Nicholas: It is hands down. [?] But also doesn't matter if you have something else, it's better than nothing.

What I'm going to do... I guess I have control over the slides. I'm just going to bring them up on my screen so I don't have to turn around every time I click. OK, OK.

My first point is really to go back in time. A lot of people are new to this world and the only reason I show a 1982 slide - which was 14 years after Seymour Papert started his work on children and learning, at least at MIT, he had done it long before that - is that in that early work - and this happens to be in Senegal, outside of Dakar - we learned very quickly that children in developing world who have not even experienced electricity in any serious way would take to these laptops - or computers in this case - like fish to water.

When somebody tells me "Who's going to teach the teachers to teach the children how to use the laptops?" I wonder what planet they're from. It's unbelievable. Because everybody - and I'll speak for myself - asks their children, or their grandchildren, how to use technology. The issue of training - that's not a word I use very often because training is what you do for dogs not people...

[laughter]

Nicholas: The issue about is really to bring the teachers to a level of comfort, so they have enough self-confidence to let the kids show them how to use the laptops. That's what - in my mind - preparation is for. This child was using Wolof actually - didn't speak French or English.

The next slide fast-forwards almost 20 years - not quite - and to me was a very important image in my mind and very important experience, where these children in Cambodia lived in a village that didn't have any of the things - didn't have electricity, didn't have telephone/television, didn't have any... in fact still today doesn't have those things - but has connected laptops with Wi-Fi running through the village.

The first English word of every word in that picture - many of you have seen it before, heard this before - is Google.

[laughter]

Nicholas: Those laptops illuminated the homes, all the things. I looked at the picture and I asked myself "What is not going to happen in this picture if we don't intervene?" The reason I mention that is that I wake up in the morning and ask myself one question - only one, every morning - and that is "Am I doing something that normal market forces will do anyway?" If the answer is "Yes," then Nicholas, stop doing it. If normal market forces will do it, you don't need me.

Our job - OLPC's job - as a non-profit, is to do things that are orthogonal to and will push normal market forces in a different direction. When I looked at this picture, I picked the laptop because it didn't seem - certainly in 2001 - that normal market forces would bring the cost down. Because Microsoft and Intel were having like a nuclear war - one would build a faster processor and the other would use more of it. The other would build a faster processor and...

At the end of the time, we really don't have a noticeable increase of performance, we just have basically an SUV, where more fuel is used to move the car than the person.

[laughter]

Nicholas: Every laptop was an SUV. These kids are holding SUVs. OK. The question was "Could we break that spell?" Could we put it on a diet? Could we take stuff out of it? Could we make it inexpensive? Could we make it drop-proof, waterproof? Hand-crankable? Important, so the power is so low you can crank it by hand. Those became the objectives - very much from this experience.

The image I had is really in this picture. This is what I thought would happen throughout OLPC and the kids - this happens to be a picture from India - this was image in my mind. What I hadn't completely anticipated are the next four images. This image I hadn't anticipated because this child is teaching his - I believe - grandparents, but they may be parents, how as I said, in this case, not just how to use the laptop but about reading and writing.

When we heard this morning that there are 400,000 in Uruguay who have laptops, think of it this way: there are 400,000 teachers in Uruguay. There is a lot of peer-to-peer teaching, they take it home - if there are three kids in one family, there will be three laptops in the family. It's a very different point of view than what I had, at least, imagined.

Then I can't say I didn't think about this, but a lot of collaboration - we've all the Hole-in-the-Wall and projects where kids work with each other - there's a lot of that going on. That's very important because we advocate, we don't advocate, we insist, the kids take it home. But that doesn't mean we're against collaborative learning.

In a country like Afghanistan - just so that you know, 20% of the teachers in Afghanistan are illiterate, 20% are only one grade ahead of the children. So if they are teaching third grade, they've had a fourth grade education. 50% of children don't go to school and 75% of little girls don't go to school.

When you look at picture, can you really just build more schools and train teachers? No, you've got to leverage the children. You've got to do something different, and that is why we focus on not just augmenting the classroom, but being able to do things that, as I say, leverage the children.

This is a classroom - perhaps the closest we get to it. There is an interesting result - this happens to be Ethiopia - their connections are not good. They don't have great internet connections. Guess what happened. Most of the kids learned how to write programs in Squeak. This is a pretty sophisticated language and they became pretty good programmers, and as time passes, more and more would be connected.

The next photograph is important to me only because I know what the photograph looked before it. I'm sorry I don't have the "before and after". This teacher had never ever used computers - ever - and taught a class, all eyes forward, the kids lined up in perfect rows sitting on these long linear towels in perfect alignment. This is how he now teaches. It's a very different style of teaching. The kids run to school. The parents are involved in school.

When people say to me "What kind of measures?" I say truancy has dropped to zero in all of these projects. When truancy goes to zero, that's a big deal, because these are countries where truancy averages 40%. In the case of Afghanistan, it's not necessarily truancy - they may not have schools.

These kinds of changes are the ones that I think are absolutely crucial. An image that I wanted to show, which to me is - I never thought somebody would put the laptop on postage stamp.

[laughter]

Nicholas: But when Uruguay did that, it was for us just another indicator that it's about life. It's not about getting into schools and just teaching as we know it.

I'm going to end a little early to give my time to Q&A, and I'm going to jump to - because I've said some of the things - I'm going to jump to this slide.

I want to say something about why laptops. Because I don't mean cell phones, I don't mean computer labs, I don't mean cloud computing - we can argue about that. There are no clouds over Ethiopia.

[laughter]

Nicholas: I don't mean refurbished computers, and so on. This is very important because technology isn't just a basket - that we're going to use technology. There is something very important and different about the laptop. The laptop is different because of not just its general-purpose nature - which is absolutely fundamental and innate to computers in general - but is its book-like nature. That it is portable, and so on.

One of the things I remind is that we can put a hundred books, without even touching the memory of the laptop, on a laptop. So you have a hundred books on a laptop. People say "That's interesting." But if you ship a hundred laptops into a village where people don't necessarily consider - which is absolutely crucial - each laptop can a hundred different books. That means the village has 10,000 books.

If there is somebody in this room who had 10,000 books at primary school, please raise your hand. I doubt you did. Maybe there was 10,000 books in some big library nearby. But suddenly these kids have...

Even if we said - and I'm not going to - even if we said "Forget interactive computing, forget exploring the internet, forget all this other stuff," but it's 10,000 books. By the way, the kids at night can come out - it's like the Trojan Horse - and use it as a laptop, and that's a kind of fringe benefit. It still works, it still makes economic sense, it still makes development sense.

I want to end with just a remark - I can talk about "Why not cell phones, computer labs and clouds?" later if the questions go in that direction.

I told President Tabaré Vázquez this morning - first of all I said thank you - and I said "One of the things you've done is you've moved the argument from the equivalent to arguing Christianity in the 10th Century." Nobody argued about Christianity in the 10th Century - the Byzantine had it all...

Two or three years ago, it was like arguing for Christianity in the First Century when there were lions and tigers, and people were killed for it. Those days are over. It's time for everybody to realize that those days are over, and it's not a matter of impact, it's a matter of moving. There is no question about the impact, we just have to move.

In all due respect to my friends at this bank and the World Bank, OLPC has done almost $300 millions' worth of laptops. We're not proud [?], it doesn't matter, we don't have shareholders. But of that about one million have been the combined purchase of the World Bank and the Inter-American Bank. Where were you guys? OK.

Where were you? OK. I'll tell you where you were. We were in evaluation mode. We were in the mode "Our clients have to ask us." Well, you know, it's time that we changed that, and that people around the room who are clients, ask them. OK, it's time you asked them. People who are in the seat to give grants and to make loans, it's time you give them.

When - I'm sorry, you said NGOs and private sector are leading the way. That has not been our experience. Not at all. Uruguay is the public sector - Miguel Brechner is a civil servant. His counterpart in Peru, who have almost a million computers at the end of this year, is a part of the public sector. Our next biggest country is Rwanda, and it's all the public sector.

Very little private sector. Almost no NGOs. It's outside of the NGOs - it's too big. They can't deal with that. People used to ask me "Why don't you go to foundations?" Because the money is too big - $300 millions is a big piece of change.

I'll end and in my Q&A, I'll be more provocative.

[laughter and applause]