One Laptop Per Child Talks

On Christopher Lydon's Radio Open Source program for Public Radio International, Walter Bender, Ethan Zuckerman and Wayan Vota speak about One Laptop Per Child's Children's Machine XO.

The full audio program is here and the transcript of Radio Open Source: "One Laptop Per Child" is below.

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Christopher Lydon: From Public Radio International. I am Christopher Lydon this is Open Source.

In our laps at last, the "$100 Laptop" is here for inspection. Built for kids to take home from school in scuff-proof heavy plastic. It opens up like a lunch box with swiveling full color screen and keyboard. It’s got a pull cord for power and cute little bunny ears with radios that will network instantly with other laptops and other kids even in far corners of the third world and will link of course into the online world wide web. The point in this is not the price after all. The One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, as they call it. Is a children’s laptop not a cheap laptop and it’s not about the original systems inside; the revolution is in learning more than computing. It’s about kids everywhere, a billion of them, teaching themselves how to learn on a global platform of knowledge. First of many quibbles, what if kids would rather have cell phones? Laptops for children are next on Open Source.

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Christopher: I am Christopher Lydon, this is Open Source. The radios out of the web’s online gab fast, free, open, and global at radioopensource.org. We are holding in our hands and second-guessing this hour the digital dream of No Child Left Offline. What was conceived as a "$100 Laptop" to bridge the digital divide to give a billion school kids from Maine to Mali a transformative key into the age of information. These are called OLPC’s now for One Laptop Per Child or the "Children’s Machine XO". Argentina, Brazil, Libya, and Nigeria are ordering them up in lots of a million. So why are they still controversial? Is it the non-Microsoft innards of the machine? Is it the learning theory behind them? Is it the many questions that are still open about the classroom connection? Put your $100 theory down on our thread at www.radioopensource.org.

We begin with Walter Bender who is the president for software and content of One Laptop Per Child. On leave from MIT’s media lab.

Walter Bender, congratulations on your baby. We are looking at this green and white prototype, compact little marvel of technology, with learning theory, maybe of cultural and political transformation. We will get to all that. How to inspect the many dimensions of this thing?

Walter Bender: How are you Chris?

Christopher: Good. Welcome.

Walter: Thank you. Thank you. It’s good to be here. So where do you want to begin?

Christopher: I want to see where you begin. What is the triumph we are supposed to be noticing here? First of all you did it and congratulations.

Walter: Well so far we built a laptop, what we haven’t done yet is gotten the laptops to the children. Once we have done that then you can congratulate me because then we will have done something. To build a laptop is sort of an engineering feat and getting laptops into the hands of children is the real change. That’s the real challenge.

Christopher: Talk about it. We will come back to the machine but there is the notion around that it is about... It’s not even about the software. It’s about the kids and the leverage that they will find in it. Spell that out.

Walter: Well there are about one billion school aged children of the developing world and most of those children are lacking an opportunity for learning and there are a lot of ways of trying to give them that opportunity. Build schools. Hire teachers. Loads of things that are already happening. Those are things that take time. Take money. And what we are trying to do is accelerate the process by giving the children connected laptop computers. And we think that those laptop computers will give them first of all access to books. second of all a communication infrastructure so they have access to each other, their teachers, their parents, their community. And third we think that computation itself is a powerful thing to think with. It’s a wonderful way to learn learning. So we are trying to combine all those different ideas together into One Laptop Per Child.

Christopher: Is it your theory that the kids can figure out how to use this? I had a little trouble opening it the first time, Walter. But I take it you think that a kid can find his own way here?

Walter: Well I think there’s forty years of evidence that kids take to laptops, or kids take to computing, like ducks to water. I don’t think we have to worry too much about whether or not kids can figure out how to use the computer. I think the real challenge is using the computer for learning. So that is really where we are trying to put our effort.

Christopher: Ethan Zuckerman, in our studio. You have the little beast right in front of you. I wish you would just walk us through the showroom. Kick it. Nobody in life has kicked the wheels of this thing as carefully and respectfully as you have. You have been writing about it for almost two years on your marvelous website. What do you see here?

Ethan Zuckerman: Well one of the reasons I have had the chance to kick it is that Walter and everyone else with the project has been very, very generous with allowing me to play with early prototypes of it. So I am sitting here with the latest iteration of the machine and it gets better every time I look at it.

What is interesting is that the first time I saw the machine, that was an earlier version that was a little orange box, what was unbelievable was that they had managed to sort of compact so many laptop features into such a small form factor and to such a small scale.

What is remarkable now and what I now find myself concentrating on is the software, which is evolving very, very quickly. One of the things One Laptop Per Child has chosen to do, which has been quite controversial, is to develop, really their own system. It’s running Linux. It’s running basically Red Hat Linux. But it looks very, very different from anything anyone has ever seen before because this Sugar Desktop environment is really very, very different. I would say, had you asked me the question two months ago, I would have told you that it was a terrible idea. Now I am starting to discover that it is pretty intuitive and pretty revolutionary and that is quite exciting.

Christopher: Walter, why did you choose not to go the Microsoft way? Or the closed source proprietary software?

Walter: Well, just like you, we believe in open source. There are two different issues. One of them is we are designing laptops for children for learning, not for office workers. So we really have a very different set of motivations and goals. And the other is more of an epistemological reason, in that, with the transparency and the access that open source gives you, we think is really important to learning. We want the children to be able to reach inside the machine. We want the teachers to be able to reach inside the machine; and touch it, and transform it, and explore it as deeply as they want to. And a closed system does not allow that.

Christopher: Spell that out. You are not training office workers, you say. You are not training kids for the computer industry. You are training them how to think.

Walter: Well we are interested in kids learning and being productive members of all aspects of society. So that has nothing to do with word processing or spreadsheets. It’s got to do with becoming literate and understanding things like scientific method. Really understanding how to explore, challenge, critique, discuss the world around them.

Christopher: But Colonel Gadhaffi in Libya, for example, is thought to be looking at lots of other places and saying, "I want the next generation to be in on information technology". Is that going to be a further leap for kids trained on the XO?

Walter: I don’t think so. In the XO there is a word processor. In the XO there is a web browser. In the XO there are all the kinds of tools that you associate with computing. There is email. There is chat there is VoIP. There are also five different programming environments that are built into the machine for the kids. So in terms of IT, it’s all there. But we want more than that for the children. We want then to not just to be IT workers. We want them to really be learners.

Christopher: Who else is buying them, Walter Bender, and what does that tell you?

Walter: We have had interest from practically every head of state on the planet in the program.

Christopher: Really?

Walter: And there is interest because when you talk to a head of state, it is very different then when you talk to a minister of education because the head of state has a very different mandate. A head of state is looking at more broadly at all the aspects of his or her country and what’s needed for development. Whereas a minister of education is really looking at the mandate of what happens in schools.

Christopher: So why did India say no, Walter?

Walter: India said no, I think, for political reasons. And, ironically, shortly after India said no, they announced their own laptop program.

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Walter: So I am not quite sure they are there yet, but if they can do it that would be great.

Christopher: What would be the politics in a country that is already roaring, rushing online. To say no to what you have done?

Walter: Well, again, I think it’s a little bit not invented here and again if our goal is one laptop per child, lower case, our goal is not to sell little green laptops to the world. We are doing that because we needed to get the ball rolling. We are doing that because the rest of the industry and, frankly, ministers of education weren’t thinking in this way and so we had to prime the pump. We had to fight to get the ball rolling but certainly in many parts of the world they want to do it themselves and if they want to learn from what we have done, copy what we have done, as long as they are getting the laptops into the hands of the kids, that is all that we care about.

Christopher: The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed your laptop as, in their words, pedagogically suspect and the Education Secretary said, "We can not visualize a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than we need fancy tools." What does Walter Bender say?

Walter: Well, I say two things. One, is that two weeks later the same ministry again indorsed the program that was native to India. So something is suspect about the whole thing there, but the other thing is that I don’t think that in either or. We are not advocating that you don’t invest in teachers, that you don’t invest in schools. We are advocating that you make this investment in laptops because we think that it is going to enhance the whole ecosystem of learning in a country.

Christopher: The investment is huge when you are talking multimillions of children, we will come back to that, but I wanted to ask what is the Brazil plan for this machine? What is the Nigeria plan?

Walter: Let me start with Libya for a second because Libya is a relatively small country and Gadhaffi decided to just do every child that wants; that is only 1.2 million children. In Brazil a million laptops is only... There are 50 million children in Brazil so it’s really only 2% of the children. So you have to build up to this in a more incremental fashion. A million does not sound very incremental but in a country of 50 million children it is quite incremental. So their plan is to start with what they call "integrated schools", which are schools that are not in the urban centers, and not in the most rural areas, but in small towns and it turns out there are about a million Brazilian school children in integrated schools.

Christopher: Walter Bender, stand by, we are looking at and talking about this green and white fabulous little, droppable, kid-friendly computer called the "Children’s Machine XO." Finally the $100 Laptop. This is Open Source. We will be right back.

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David Miller: This is Dave Miller, Open Source Senior Producer. A number of you have written to us in the last two weeks about our wonky podcast feed. It’s finally been fixed and the good news, beyond the fact that you can hear us right now, is that all of our recent shows have been added to the feed. So if you missed Groundhog Day (Day 2), or Jonathan Lethem on plagiarism or What to Do in Space? or six other gems, you can download them now. Catch up at radioopensource.org.

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Christopher: I am Christopher Lydon. This is Open Source. We are talking about and looking at this $100 Laptop. A little machine of fantastic implications with Walter Bender who is running this software and content side of this adventure out of the MIT media laboratory and with Ethan Zuckerman in our studio. Ethan the founder of maybe our favorite blog the register of all the worlds thinking called Global Voices Online. The most traveled man we know and maybe the smartest and most visionary, Ethan. I wish you would kick the wheels, the tires, of the education theory here. And lets be real about the global politics of a machine that could link the next five billion.

Ethan: Well I think this is one of the critical things to understand about the machine, much of the press about the machine has questioned whether it’s going to be possible to build a laptop that is at the right cost point and performs in these sorts of environments. There are a few open questions but not many.

One of the interesting things is that Walter and his team have come up with a pretty remarkable device. The questions now have to do with how does this roll out in the schools. And Walter alluded before to a slight difference in reactions between heads of states and from ministers of education. Every head of state thinks the notion of having every children in their country have a laptop is a brilliant idea. No one wants to be left behind. Everybody wants to be India; everybody wants to be a cyber-nation going forward, whether you are Rwanda or Ghana. But once you actually think about putting this device in the hands of every student you have real questions about what the classroom is going to look like.

This device has some really interesting pedagogical theory built into it. These devices are very much designed to be aware of each other, to chat with one another, they are very social machines. So a teacher who is freaked out by the notion of all their students chatting and passing notes back and forth, you worry about scenarios when teachers essentially ban the laptop from the classroom and we end up in a situation where the nightmare scenario is that everyone has a laptop and it still doesn’t change education at all. At least education in the classroom.

Christopher: Let’s talk about the...

Walter: Yeah we should talk about that because the worse thing that happens in Ethan’s nightmare scenario is that the kids have their laptops the 22 hours a day they are not in school doing wonderful things. And the initial impact is going to be outside of school because school doesn’t know how to do this yet. School... It is going to take time for school to really absorb all of the potential of laptops but there will be points of intervention in the classroom right away just simply things like distribution of textbooks.

Christopher: But let me ask, Walter, is this the end run around the teacher or is it also a substitute for classrooms in countries that aren’t going to have them any time soon?

Walter: Well, there is nothing as wonderful as a wonderful teacher. And if we could provide a great teacher to every child we would do it. But we don’t know who to do that and certainly one of the things we are working on is how to enhance the experience in the classroom with the laptop. And really revolutionalize that experience. The program is called One Laptop Per Child and Teacher but we shortened it to One Laptop Per Child. That said, there are a lot of places, unfortunately, in the developing world where there aren’t teachers, or maybe the teacher only show up occasionally, or the teacher is trying to teach a subject matter they have no training in. And in those situations then maybe it really is an opportunity for the teacher and the child to learn together and to learn better.

Christopher: So spell out, Walter Bender, the theory that is imbedded in this machine that is often referred to as constructivism or constructionism, very broadly on the notion that kids will find their own way on the computer. And what is the doctrine here and do we want to argue about it, Ethan?

Walter: Well we could certainly argue about it but I think there certainly has been a lot of evidence that a lot of learning happens through doing. Even go back to people like Dewey, Piaget, Paula Freire, there are a number of people who have studied this and espouse learning through doing. And then you can take it and say, "Well if you want more learning you want more doing." And it turns out that the laptop is a wonderful vehicle for doing. And so therefore there will be more learning.

Now there is another piece to it. And let me use an example that Seymour Papert brought to my attention from the school we visited in Beijing. Now in China they teach the Chinese characters in a very strict order. Every child learns the same sequence everywhere in China but in one school that did an experiment where they decided to let the children learn based on their interest in literature and those children learned three times faster. What does that tell you? That tells you that love is a better master than duty. And so one of the things, one of the opportunities, that the laptop gives the children and the teachers, is an opportunity to pursue the things they love. And that in and of itself is going to be an enormous catalyst among learning.

Christopher: Walter Bender, stand by. Earlier today we spoke with Dr. Sugata Mitra who is a big believer in kids abilities to teach themselves. He put his theory to the test with his hole in the wall experiment nearly ten years ago.

Dr. Sugata Mitra: I took a computer and imbedded it into a wall in a slum in New Dehli and just left it there to see what would happen. It was running normal Windows in English and about eight hours later we noticed that eight and six to ten year old were actually surfing on the web. In a couple of days they were downloading games, usually from Disney.com, which they seemed to have stumbled across. Then I started a whole series of experiments to verify if this would be always true and found in the next six years across 23 very remote places in India that groups of children can learn to use a computer and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were and what they knew or didn’t know about computers. They seem to be able to discover computing by themselves. Most children in India actually are quite familiar with television and what interested them about the computer when they first see it is the fact that they can do things to it in the sense that when you move your figures on the touch pad or on the mouse or in whatever format exists, the cursor moves on the screen. And when the internet explorer changes pages they often refer to those different pages as channels, using the television analogy. The interesting thing is that they are not actually supposed to know much English and the presence of the computer seems to have sparked off their interest to an extent that at the end of six months or eight months, hundreds of them would actually be familiar enough with the language to make sense of what they were seeing on the screen.

If we look at the statistics of how many children there are in the world and where they live, its quite clear that we are not going to be able to give them schools, give all of them schools in the near future. What the hole in the wall seems to do is to do a part of that on its own. It also changes their aspirations of what they wish to become. For example, there is a little girl in Dehli, well she is no longer little, but she was little at that time, who I had asked "What would you like to be when you grow up?" And she said "Oh I don’t know I will grow up and get married and then have children." This was when she was about six or seven years old, five years down the line she wants to become a computer teacher because she is very good with the computer and she indeed does teach all of the other little children how to use it. This sort of aspirational change would probably have cause in big changes in their lives. It is hard to measure but I am trying to track it down to see how many children view of what they can be has changed because of the hole in the wall. And certainly to those children in the world who do not have anything and to whom we cannot give anything because they are so remote this seems to be a solution.

Christopher: Dr. Sugata Mitra is a physicist living now in New Castle upon Tyne in the U.K. Ethan Zuckerman, deal with that rather astonishing argument that kids don’t only learn the internet, they learn to maneuver on the computer, they learn English in less than a year.

Ethan: Well hole in the wall has become an experiment that gets talked about in enormous of the digital divide field and it is basically a field of thought that’s referred to as minimally invasive education. If you give kids the tools to play with in many cases they will teach themselves. And the answer is they certainly will, they will teach themselves certain things. As Dr. Mitra was pointing out, in many cases they teach themselves how to get online, how to get access to the games. What they may not teach themselves how to do is how to pass the secondary school exams and the university entrance exams. And this is sort of where the tension, I think comes up around OLPC. I think for a lot of kids, maybe not a majority kids, but certainly for a whole lot of kids, this is going to be a revolutionary educational tool. It’s really going to expand their horizons; it’s going to give them a chance to create in other ways. But it is also going to be quite revolutionary in what is going to happen in the classroom. What I am worried about, in some ways, is I’m not sure the schools in the nations buying in the project understand just what a revolution this is likely to be. And in some ways I think that my friends working on OLPC have been a little sneaky about this. This is in some ways a Trojan Horse. Governments are buying into this because this looks like a terrific way of creating a computer savvy workforce, fighting brain drain, essentially bursting into the 21st century. But what it also is is a backdoor into overhauling the entire education system of a lot of the countries that we are talking about.

Christopher: Our Blogger In Chief Brendan Greeley, conducts his own hole in the wall experiment every day on this program. Brendan, what are you learning?

Brendan Greeley: And they show up and amazingly they know what to use the blog.

Christopher: Most of them speak English now.

Brendan: Bobo wrote this afternoon, "Slum culture is the future of the world and a huge part of that is being far more ingenious than your colonial masters. We are giving these laptops to kids hoping they will learn those great western standards of reading, writing and arithmetic. What they will learn instead is how to strip a motherboard in under a minute, which circuit boards can be tinkered with best and how to build some truly kick-ass new machines out of scrap computer parts." So Ethan, do we even know what they are going to learn when we put these laptops into their hands?

Ethan: We don’t but by the way part of the beauty of the machine is that it is designed to be stripped down and taken apart. It’s one of the most wonderful things about it. The machine can be pulled apart with a screwdriver and in fact there is a lot of components that would be fun to use for other things. I think Walter would probably agree that that is actually a very positive outcome to come out of the machine, having people learn how to take these things apart and put them back together into different configurations.

Christopher: Walter Bender, do you agree?

Walter: I absolutely agree, that is one of the beauties of making the machine be as open as possible.

Christopher: A hacker’s paradise, a real open source playing field.

Walter: In fact we are taking it so far that on the keyboard you will notice there is a little key that looks like a gear and if you hit that key that is called the View Source key and that takes you right into the source code of anything that you are doing.

Christopher: I was looking, Walter, and I can’t find it this time for the fingerprint security device so that if Brendan tries to stale mine he is going to have to figure out my fingerprint before he can make it work.

Walter: We actually have taken security very seriously on this machine but we haven’t taken biometrics in part because I don’t want to make a market for people to steal my finger. Instead what we are trying to do is first of all we are trying to make the machine so that it will look and feel like a machine for children. So that there will be even somewhat of a social stigma associated with not being a child and having one of these machines. We are having on the machine a number of different features that actually the community as a whole has wanted to do for a long time but because of legacy associated with computing systems they haven’t been able to do. One of the things we are doing is we are building in a releasing mechanism so that if the computer is away from school for long periods one thing that might happen if it was stolen then the release will not get renewed and it will shut down. It will have to be returned to school to be turned on again. We are building a number of different mechanisms like that to try to slow down or desensitize the thief and at the same time leave the machine as open as possible for the children.

Christopher: Walter Bender, stand by for yet another critical perspective on all of this. Wayan Vota, who joins us by phone, he was the director of Geek Core, he is now the editor of something called One Laptop Per Child News and he writes a lot about this stuff, often very critically. Wayan, where do you want to begin in your list on the $100 Laptop?

Wayan Vota; Well actually, I can begin with it’s the $150 Laptop as OLPC and everyone else finally acknowledges it is not $100, though that is the goal.

Christopher: And if Nigeria buys a million of them it is the $150 million laptop.

Wayan: Essentially yes. And once you start thinking about support, maintenance, even distribution, the costs start growing and there is always the one server per school and all these other costs including internet costs. So there are a lot of costs that are hidden and not spoken about that I think are going to be a shock to countries that are looking at this.

Walter: I won’t argue with the cost. But I will argue with the assertion that they are hidden or not spoken about.

Wayan: Okay well.

Walter: We have been very up front about all these costs and all these things.

Wayan: Well it is still called the $100 Laptop, strangely. But really, one thing that I would love to expand on is the technology is amazing. Ethan and Walter, I hope will agree, it is clock-stopping hot technology. And I really hope the security program does work, because if you can take it apart with a screwdriver and the technology is amazing, that I hear. I think kids are going to have a great time taking it apart and reselling it, which is good and bad depending on your viewpoint.

Christopher: What does it have that I don’t have on my Powerbook.

Wayan: Well you can start with; there is a dual mode screen that is a screen that you can actually read in daylight because it is reflective not just transmitting light and at the same time it is reflective it decreases the power used for the laptop. So you are looking at a laptop you can charge once a day or once every few days. Instead of right now you get three or four hours if you are lucky. And on top of this the mesh networking is amazing. It is the concept where a computer can connect with another computer and then to the actual internet router instead of directly to the router so you can have a very quick and efficient connection to the internet through whoever is the closest, not necessarily you.

Christopher: Who gets credit for that?

Wayan: Oh that is defiantly OLPC. They are doing some amazing work on the technology side. I can’t wait to grab one myself.

Christopher: Have you not?

Wayan: I haven’t. Right now they are going to people who are specifically testing parts of it and hopefully as they roll out these will actually be bought by governments for economic use as well as an educational use.

Christopher: Wayan, what do you make of the constructivist learning theory that kids find their own way, that you learn by doing.

Wayan: Well interestingly enough I do not weigh in too much on the educational construction side. I am not an expert in that. I have had friends tell me who are experts in it that it’s an interesting theory; they haven’t seen any large-scale use of it. Things like the hole in the wall are great and wonderful as a small-scale pilot but no one is betting their entire education department on it. And I guess that is the only angle that I am worried about is they are asking governments to spend millions of dollars that a lot of times they are going to have to look to the World Bank and others to borrow for because they don’t have it themselves; on an idea that we haven’t seen large scale testing and usage, that I know of.

Christopher: Is the World Bank on for it?

Wayan: You would have to ask them. They are significantly quiet on the matter.

Christopher: Walter, is there a quick answer, before the break about who is going to help Nigeria pay for a $150 million worth of laptops?

Walter: Well, Nigeria, as it turns out, is the largest sub-Saharan oil producer.

Christopher: Yes.

Walter: So it is not a matter of is the money in Nigeria, It is a matter of is the money being allocated towards education in Nigeria. So I think Nigeria is an example where...

Christopher: But $150 million and Wayan put me, his writing put me up to this, is a very, very big piece of the social budget of the government of Nigeria and its going to have to be counted. I also want to know who... I mean there is a huge transfer of information and owned intellectual property here. I wonder who is making those claims. We are talking about the $100 computer.

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Christopher: I am Christopher Lydon. This is Open Source. We are talking about the so-called $100 Laptop or One Laptop Per Child. It may now be a $150 laptop but lets round it off. Wayan Vota, you were talking about the aggregated costs of all of this and the question of who is going to pay. You have done the numbers on these big countries that are buying them in large lots. Explain the financial burden here.

Wayan: Well when you look at... We have looked at the laptop in several different price points. We have worked with the $150 price point that OLPC says. We have also worked off of a $208 price point, which is the rough price point from their memorandum of understanding with Libya and taking the numbers of laptops they are giving to Libya and the cost. And using those numbers and multiplying it out to the total number of children in Nigeria we get actually a number that is slightly larger than $150 million. We actually get something around $9 billion, that is with a B, which comes out to be roughly 73%...

Christopher: How did you get from $150 million to $9 billion?

Wayan: Well $150 million is just for one million kids, Nigeria has slightly more kids than that. And you are talking about children coming online every year, right? So in the sense that you don’t just buy it once and walk away. Every year there is a new set of third graders that get the laptop or whatever age group they start at. So this cost is also reoccurring cost and we looked at this reoccurring cost and we looked at Argentina and this reoccurring cost is a good chunk of the non-teacher salary budget. And the non-teacher salary budget is everything outside of salary so that is books, that is schools, that is maintenance, that is support. And what we find is that we come up to one half of the non-salary education budget for Argentina will only go for 10% of the students per year. So that is a pretty big shift in money and resources from a traditional school infrastructure to just laptops. Now that is with numbers that we found publicly available. OLPC says they have numbers that they provide. Would love to see them. Because for us, the way I look at it, this is a huge debt burden that is going to countries that don’t have that much money to begin with and they are spending it on an idea that is still very much an experiment.

Christopher: Walter Bender, who is going to pay for these and what form will the burden take?

Walter: Well I think initially our launch process it the laptops get paid for top down through large government initiatives. Now is that the way it is always going to be? Ones that argue that governments have some responsibility towards educating the children in their countries. One could also argue that the world has a responsibility to educate children. It is large numbers. Education is a large budget item in any country. Including the United States. There are a lot of ways of looking at the numbers. Another way of looking at the numbers that make the numbers not look so big is to look at how much the United State is investing every day in Iraq. One year’s worth of the war in Iraq could provide a laptop for every single school aged child on the planet. So when you look at it that way it is a little bit different. We are looking at lots of different mechanisms from NGO’s to regional development banks to foundations to help ease the burden of providing opportunities for children for learning. Governments are certainly always going to play an important role in that but not the only role in that.

Christopher: Wayan Vota, certainly parents and grandparents, in this society, in ours, would go into debt for this sort of thing. It is regarded, computer literacy, is now commonplace, language of our lives. Would we deny it to anyone in the third world on the basis of short-term cost?

Wayan: Well definitely if you want to say short-term cost turns long terms goals. That is wonderful. Sell it to a politician. They are going to look at short-term costs and have a serious problem with it. At the same time I think that a model where, if the OLPC talks about a two for one model where you buy two laptops and one goes to a developing country and one stays in the U.S. and they have talked about other ways in which we can do more small scale person to person transfers and purchases and I think these are all great. It is the concept, this top down, the government buys it in a block, that gives me great pause. One way I think that would be very interesting is having people in the countries themselves purchase the laptops through a payment plan and this would actually come together in both making sure that the parents actually believe and invest in the laptop physically but also mentally and financially. And that would also make sure that the burden, or the cost, is actually with the people who would get the greatest reward from it.

Christopher: Let’s ask Ethan Zuckerman to lead us through this cost and value question. Ethan you spend tremendous amount of time in the developing world. What might a laptop mean for a child or a group of villagers, say in Ghana or Brazil or Libya or Nigeria, and how would its value compare, or its fascination or charm to cell phone or a better trained teacher or library.

Ethan: Well there is a lot of questions in there Chris. I think one of the important things to look at with the laptop is that it has the potential to not just be a classroom device; it also has the potential to be essentially a universal library. One of the projects that in fact Wayan has worked on is a project called Moulin, which works on building offline versions of Wikipedia. And certainly a lot of people who work on Wikipedia are also involved with the One Laptop Per Child project. So that idea of putting a lot of knowledge onto a box and having it accessible is certainly one possibility. It is capable of being a movie theater. It is capable of being, as we were showing off in the studio before, a camera and potentially a video studio. So there is a lot of things that it can be. One of the things that gives some people who have done a lot of work in the developing world a little bit of pause is that while we have seen a great deal of willingness of people in the developing world to make major investments in mobile phones we have not seen the same willingness in the same invest in low-cost computing solutions.

Christopher: I wonder why.

Ethan: OLPC is not the first low-cost computing device to be out there. We have seen a project in India called Simputer. AMD which actually makes the processor behind the OLPC machine had a device called the personal internet communicator. These low-cost devices so far have not had the same sort of explosive growth that mobile phones have. And in many cases, it’s because a mobile phone has an immediate transformation on an economy. If you’re a farmer and you’ve got a mobile phone, suddenly you can call a market and get a different price for your crops. The computer is a much longer-term investment and I think as the question is raised "Are parents going to be making the investment in this?" It’s going to be really interesting to see whether parents are willing and able to make that sort of long-term investment in their children’s futures.

Christopher: So how does the value play out in a village in Mali?

Ethan: I think there is a reason Mali is not the first country that this is rolling out in. The OLPC team is rolling this out in middle-income countries first because part of the advantage of this is the laptop starts taking on a whole new dimension if you roll it out at a whole school.

Christopher: But let’s say village Nigeria.

Ethan: I think the value proposition of this is suddenly you have a radically different educational experience for the people in that village. You have the opportunity to essentially replace the village library by putting in a server and then having everyone within their homes be a mesh network, be capable of looking at that library, which could include media as well as text. And that is an awfully big investment. It’s really sort of, the Carnegie Endowment for Nigeria, at this point. That could potentially be tremendously transformative. Whether or not it is sufficiently transformative for very poor people to put money on the table is another question and that’s one that is going to be very hard to answer until this is out there in the field.

Christopher: Maybe our Blogger in Chief Brendan Greeley will answer it. Brendan, what’s new?

Brendan: We have a quote from DancingMan, he offers us, "I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. It is possible to touch every branch of human knowledge through the motion picture" Thomas Edison 1922. So we have the talking motion pictures in every town now in America but we still use textbooks. Have we always idealized technology? Does it always end up being adopted for entertainment and then we are stuck with books to teach us things?

Christopher: And we haven’t even mentioned pornography.

Walter: Well let me talk about that...

Christopher: Walter Bender.

Walter:...for a second. In Abuja which is the capital of Nigeria, a model city, a typical classroom, 80 children in the room, two or three textbooks for the whole classroom. So this textbook thing isn’t reaching these children right now. They don’t have that opportunity and these textbooks themselves tend to be out of date. They tend to be out moded. So again, even if the only thing that happens in the school with these laptops is the kids have access to more. Just that in and of itself has value.

Christopher: Can I just ask you to, everybody to go, very, very big picture here. We are talking about a little machine that is a hinge of an epical scale of information empowerment expression. If is works, Walter, if you end up distributing a billion to three billion of these devices you are talking about putting the rest of the world into the conversation. I mean this is a watershed in all of human history. Who is watching for the big implications? And not that ownership of the information is the biggest of the implications. But who does claim the information online as property and what do we do about that?

Walter: Well it is interesting, because in the laptop we are not using digital rights management. We are using what Larry Lessig refers to as "digital rights expression". One of the challenges is to introduce to these kids, what does intellectual property actually mean.

Christopher: And what are the implications?

Walter: What are the implications? Well I think to the traditional publishing community in the west there aren’t any implications initially because they do not have a market there anyways. They are not making money there. It’s not something that really matters to them. It’s more of a matter of, do we believe that educating the world’s children, bringing powerful ideas to all the world, every corner of the world, give an opportunity for learning to every child. Is that going to make the world better? Is that going to make the world more prosperous or not?

Christopher: You could ask the same question though, would applying our pharmaceutical wisdom to AIDS sufferers around the world, make it a happier globe but we don’t exactly.

Walter: Well maybe we should. OLPC is not the answer to every question. OLPC is the answer to the question of how do we try to enhance opportunity for learning for children. It is not a fantasy for the world. I wish it was, but it isn’t. The world has to do a lot of things.

Christopher: Is it a world transformative machine that you are looking at there Ethan Zuckerman?

Ethan: I think what is more transformative, even than the specific, very cute green and white device that we are looking at here Chris, is that the idea that people who have this device get to participate in that global conversation. I think what is really important is to realize this isn’t just an electric book reader. This isn’t just a classroom tool. This is a content production tool. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg on the global voices project and we are seeing how different our picture of a country can be when we are actually hearing from someone in Saudi Arabia...

Christopher: That is why we love it Ethan!

Ethan: ...Telling us about Saudi society. What happens with this is that suddenly we now we have the potential for a million Libyan school kids to tell us what it is like to be in Libya, a country we tend not to know very much about in this country and we tend to have a great deal of suspicion about. So that’s revolutionary. Even more revolutionary than that, we tend, in America, to think of ourselves as idea producers and content producers. If we think about the underpinnings of the American economy right now they are really cultural production. They are our ability to make and share ideas whether they are entrepreneurial or artistic and sell it to a global audience. In the long run, putting that ability into the hands of children around the world changes everything. It changes the dynamics of how economics works. I think there is a sense in which five, ten, twenty years down the road, the impact of a movement like this, if it is successful, could be tremendously revolutionary.

Walter: Let me put it simply Chris.

Christopher: Okay.

Walter: Next year, if all goes according to plan, there will be tens of millions of new photojournalists in the world, sharing their pictures with the world.

Christopher: Yes.

Walter: Sharing their pictures with the world.

Christopher: This is important. We feel the impact already. Can I ask you, who wants to answer the Bill Gates question? Bill Gates gets great points for vision and generosity with respect to the developing world. And he is down on the $100 Laptop. Is it only because it is not a Microsoft system?

Ethan: I think it is important to realize that Microsoft has essentially built its business on being the newest. It has sort of had this synergistic relationship with Intel where the fastest, hottest, most exciting machine now runs the fastest, hottest software. And both companies have grown a great deal from it. This is not the fastest, hottest machine; it is a more sustainable, more usable, more power-conserving machine. And you can understand why someone like Bill Gates would look at this and say this is a very different direction for the technology. That said, some of the critiques who have dismissed this as a toy are really barking up the wrong tree. This is actually a very, very powerful machine; it’s just very different from what we chose to carry around as business machines.

Christopher: Last question for maybe you Walter Bender, Iran has a tremendously active blogosphere; thousands and thousands or people who write, lots of them in English too. But of course the government is nervous about it. What happens when Colonel Gadhaffi or his heirs decide they don’t want their school kids talking to the world or maybe not even listening or reading the world on their marvelous machines?

Walter: Well again, I think ironically, that doesn’t seem to be the case in Libya, that may be more the case in China right now if you look at some of the interactions between the Chinese government and Google. But it’s funny because Gadhaffi wrote the Little Green Book in 1993, I believe, and there is a short chapter on education in that book and it’s actually quite profound. And it really is about grassroots learning. Learning through doing. Learning in the community, as apposed to learning top-down. So I think actually this is very, very compatible with some of the notions and I think that it is going to bring a lot of good to Libya.

Christopher: Let’s hope. Let’s hope. Let’s hope it teaches it’s own sort of progressiveness. Walter Bender, congratulations on your toy. Ethan Zuckerman and Wayan Vota, thank you for joining us. You can keep talking about the $100 computer. You can help us work on the next shows. You can pitch us a show idea of your own at radioopensource.org. Open Source is produced in association with WGBH in Boston. The program is made possible by the Schooner Foundation whose contributing support the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, training practitioners in students for leadership in human rights. Radioopensource.org is hosted by contegix.com. Our show is produced by David Miller, Brendan Greeley, Katherine Bidwell, Chelsea Merz, Robin Amer, and Great Pemberton with help from Julia Reischel and Sam Gale Rosen. Robin More was our engineer. Mary McGrath is our executive producer. I am Christopher Lydon. Join us next time on Open Source.

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P.R.I. Public Radio International