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 question and answer session with Moderator Irene Klinger, Director, Department of External Relations and Coordinator of the Lecture Series:

Modertor: Thank you. Thank you very much Mr. Negroponte for a very interesting and thought provoking presentation to bring information and communication technologies to our children in the Americas and also in the World. I would now like to open the floor to questions from here and from our audience around the Americas. I know there is interest already.

I was told by Antigua and Barbuda, the minister of information is gathering with the chamber of commerce and some authorities there and they will post a question pretty soon. I also received a question from Chile already and I see ambassador Alvarez already with his hand up. Ambassador Alverarez, and we will take a few questions from the field and also from the audience here.

Question: Mr. Negroponte thank you so much for your presentation. A question, how do you teach teachers to teach thinking in developing countries through a medium that is absolutely foreign to them? That is one and two: what can an organization such as the OAS do to participate in your project? Thank you.

Answer: We find that in the case of teaching teachers the most important thing to do is to give them sufficient self confidence to allow themselves to be taught by the children. That is the key.

Many people think you have to train teachers to teach the children which is wrong, you don’t. You can take a Nintendo gameboy in its box and drop it in the center of Africa, the first thing a child will do in a remote rural area who has never seen one of these is open the box and throw away the instruction manual and then start using it. That is, I won’t claim it is genetic, but trust me, there is all the evidence in the world that he children don’t need to be taught how to use it. The guidance they need is the guidance that teachers can provide in terms of what to learn and how to do it.

In terms of actually running the machine, what we found is that the kids were always teaching the teachers. Now that may be harder in some places. If it happens more globally I think they are going to compete with each other a little a bit. If you see it happening well in Brazil, you don’t want it to fail in Argentina. And I think there will be whole movements to get this to work better. I don’t know how the OAS can participate but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it could and we will have to figure out over the next six months because we are certainly doing stuff in the region.

Question: Thank you.

Moderator: Thank you, thank you very much Mr. Negroponte. I have a question that just came in from Chile and I am wondering whether I read it in Spanish and I get the interpreter to put it in the right way because there is some technical language here, maybe that is the best.

In Spanish it says: Estimado Nicolas, me parece [sp] tu propuesta. Soy especialista en información y tecnología y me parece que la maquina es un elemento con el que se puede repetir iterar muchas veces un contenido no aprendido pero a mi me interesa como educador como generar un proceso comunicacional problematizador donde el emisor, computador, pueda cambiar su rol con el receptor aprendiz de manera que ambos interactuen y cambien sus roles. Le pregunto, qual es su propuesta para que se produzca ese intercambio de roles.

Maybe you can get it interpreted.

Answer: This question is similar to the previous one. I believe that you make things by making things. Now there is some things you have to learn by sitting down and memorizing or you need to be told, but all of the learning that we did, every body in this room, for the first five years you learn how to walk, you learn how to talk, by interacting with the environment.

It was convenient to talk because if you learned how to talk you could get something, if you could walk you could reach something, there was constant motivation and the environment, a combination of people and family, in a typical environment you learned, you did a not of learning, and suddenly about the age of six we were all told to stop learning that way, and that for the next twelve years, if you are lucky, all of your learning would be through being told. I come and tell you, or a book, or a teacher, whatever, is you are going to be told.

And that is fine, I am not against being told, but I think the role reversal isn’t so much that the student becomes the teacher or the peer-to-peer teaching that my colleagues teach me and the role of the teacher changes. I think it is the role of learning by interacting with the environment, interacting with the machines, interacting with the internet is what is going to change so that the learning by doing is going to be more seamless and there won’t be the sharp change at the age of six or whenever first grade happens to occur and I think that is the big change and that is the big role reversal and in this.

As an aside, even though this wasn’t the question, children will have a new role, children will become much more important, children suddenly will be doing things for parents, children will get a whole different fathom [sp] just because of this. In Cambodia, the parents get them to look up the price of rice, they get them to do things for them. There is a real interesting change that I don’t want to go too deeply because it is a huge topic but I think you will see role reversals in terms of the place of children in our society, very young children.

Moderator: Thank you, thank you very much Dr. Negroponte. I have ambassador general [sp] may Lowell [sp] from Antigua and Barbuda. Please ambassador.

Question: Thank you very much, Dr. Negroponte for your expose’, and if I may see, good afternoon to the Antigua and Barbuda people listening to us in St. John.. The question that we propose is the following. How do small countries get on board with this project? We are reminded of the question of scale. Thank you very much.

Answer: It is not a self serving question at all. It is a very, a very important question and for me there is a contradiction, which I have created for ourselves and that is small countries can move fast, you probably can make a decision in two days and probably could do something very very quickly.

Big countries, particularly China and India, takes them two years to makes a decision just because they are so big. And on the one hand we have big for the numbers and we want small for the speed. And so we are talking, we are talking right this moment we are talking with the Inter American Development Bank to put together a financing instrument that would be available to all countries to come to group together what is basically the smaller countries and we are also talking to the World bank about doing that on a global scale so that we can engage the smaller countries and maybe in some cases have sort of on intermediary.

We think of it as interacting directly with one entity like the Inter-American Development Bank and they deal with fifteen to twenty-four to twenty-six, whatever the number is in terms of people who want to respond. So right now we are talking to small, we will talk to small countries through some kind of entity that sort of agglomerates them because if you think of one laptop per child as having a sales and marketing organization, you are looking at it. I am the total sales and marketing organization for one laptop per child, so I just can’t go to all these countries.

And if we built up a sales and marketing department, our price changes. 50% of the cost of a laptop is sales, marketing distribution and profit. And one of the reasons we have come down and we can get close to the one hundred dollars is that we don’t have sales, marketing, distribution or profit, and so we have to deal with the smaller countries through some other mechanism.

Moderator: Thank you very much. Rodrigo Sotelo from Costa Rica please, you have the floor.

Question: Thank you Mr. Negroponte. Thank you very much for being with us this morning. It is very exciting and very interesting all that you have shared with us. I want to make a comment and a couple of questions. We know that educational expenditure in Latin America and the Caribbeann is somehow unequal, some countries do a lot more than others.

That set of conditions, the whole infrastructure for development in the different countries. Given that situation how do you visualize the success of your program in the hemisphere. You mentioned that you were going to tell us where you were. I would like to ask you where you are in a scale from one to ten in this sense.

Lastly, I understand that the system of integration of Central America is already doing something in this project of one laptop per child. Somebody mentioned that the OAS could in fact contribute to this effort in getting involved and perhaps the OAS could reinforce what SICA is doing in Central America. Thank you sir.

Answer: Let me talk about the first question because the disparity of spending is quite extreme. I mean you have countries that spend worldwide around 100 per child and usually that one hundred dollars is spent more on the secondary school than the primary school and other countries that are spending 8000 dollars. Very big difference. No matter where you are on that spectrum if you ask me how to change education, what is the most economical way to do it, if you want to train teachers, build schools, do that. No matter what you think about the one hundred dollar lap top it is by far the least expensive way to do it.

Not even, it is so off the charts in terms of being economic. If you want to train teachers and build schools it is going to take years and a lot of money this really lends itself to jumpstarting education when it is really at the lower end of the scale, which sounds totally counterintuitive. People say why would we want laptops if we don’t even have school buildings, half our schools are under a tree, half of them cant happen when there is rain because there are holes in the roof and you want to put in laptops? The answer is yes, that is exactly where you want to do it because it is the most cost effective way to do it.

So there is a bit of an irony in that because it seems that laptops should be for rich kids and countries that spend a lot on education, but I think you can make a very good case for exactly the opposite. When you asked me how the OAS become involved, people are very lucky that have that kind of problem. I would love to have the OAS involved. I have no idea what it means, I don’t know how to leverage it but I certainly want to and will do everything necessary to make that happen. As we do it you’ll have to realize that it is built on the economic assumption, in answer to your first part, is that you can’t just train the teachers. You have to leverage children, and until the children. Kofi Anan give this speech in Tunis and the speech writer sent it to him in advance, said would you like to make edits.

And I read the speech and I got goose bumps and threw it back at him and said don’t change one word, not one. If you go look up this speech, it was unbelievable, it was about leveraging the children and letting their imagination take and I couldn’t have written a better speech. I think that if you buy in to that premise then this is the kind of partnership we would like to be in. It is not the normal premise, if you speak to my colleagues in industry, whether it is Cisco or Intel or something like that they will talk to you about teacher training and so on and I say well, training is for dogs. We train dogs, we don’t train children, ok. If the teachers need to be prepared, then it is teacher preparation and as I said earlier, it is more about self confidence than it is knowing some body of knowledge they can transmit to the children.

Moderator: Thank you very much. Ambassador Lisa Schuman [sp] from Belize, you have the floor.

Question: Thank you, Renee. First of all, to add my voice of thank you for coming here to talk about something which you may have not known at the time, just to assure the OAS is interest, and I will tell you why.

First of all ,we have done as an organization is also to be involved at the level of presidents and prime ministers in the topics of the Americas process and in 2002 we went through an entire agenda for the hemisphere on connectivity and having the political will to make sure that not just our children but all the people of the Americas have a right to information and technology as the secretary general mentioned we just finished a meeting, our general assembly in the Dominican republic in which we were looking at the knowledge based society.

And all of this really relates back to one simple reality. The digital divide will remain so long as it is not affordable to most of our children to be able to access information and technology. What you are offering is nothing less than the tools to be able to bridge that digital divide. About three years ago, Belize along with Mexico proposed a project to the OAS for us to offer connectivity, for us to offer broadband to our countries in the Americas to use mostly for education and health education applications. I could see no better fit that to use for instance our numbers as a hemisphere to be able to tap into the one laptop per child because we have already given the political will to be able to do this. And in fact, I believe, as you well know as an expression of our inter-american commitment to deal with these issues so the commitment is already there .

It is simply for us to translate the kind of projects that we have in a way that offers you the wherewithal to connect those laptops so that you are just not talking about laptops in one village, one district one country talking to each other, we are talking about the children from Canada to Tierra del Fuego talking to each other in this hemisphere and not just bettering the lives of the children but bettering the lives of the community because what a lot of us have done is starting in our own limited ways to be able to have computer labs in schools for children that the children can use which can also be used for adult education in the evening, which the community can talk to people in the ministry of health, the hospitals to be able to access advanced healthcare, these types of things.

What you are really talking about is not just information technology and one laptop per child what you are talking about is a revolution in the lives of people not because they are better educated but because there is a wealth of information and knowledge available to the entire community and I think this is something that resonates with each and everyone of my colleagues here.

I think I can assure that your visit here has not just generated much interest and excitement but as that we will find a way to work with you and your foundation to be able to translate this into a reality so that the smaller countries of Central America of which Belize is a part, the smaller countries of the Caribbean, of which Belize is a part will be able to all of a sudden create that critical mass that is needed for us to be able to access this for all of the children of the Americas as we should. Thank you.

Moderator: Muchas gracias embajadora Schuman. Hemos agotado nuestro tiempo. I don’t know if Mr. Negroponte wants to make a very short comment, unfortunately the time is wrapping and we will to immediately after close. Mr. Negroponte, you want to say a few words.

Answer: That is such a nice remark. I have no answer except to first say thank you and to make a slight plea that you don’t limit even your own thinking to the kids in northern Canada speaking to the kids in southern Chile and Argentina but to African and Asia. One of the things I told you we need the minimum numbers to launch, we are also making a criterion that we don’t launch unless we are in three continents.

That we are in Asia, Africa and South America in at least one country because adults have really screwed up the world. I mean it is really a big mess for a lot of reasons and kids just aren’t, they don’t have a nationalistic bone in them in their bodies and when they start talking to each other they will grow up global, they will grow up understanding what we don’t understand and so.