One Laptop Per Child News is a blog about the OLPC project that I have blogged about before. Reading this well-written, critical, and thorough “independent source for news, information, commentary and discussion” makes me worry about the project. The price keeps creeping higher (somewhere between $180 and $205 now), governments aren’t ordering, the software is non-standard, it looks like a kids toy, and production slips. What if it eventually costs $400 a laptop and feels like a kid’s toy? Why not buy PC laptops in bulk then? Will this be another ICON – a custom educational computer that can’t compete, at the end of the day, with commodity computers.
What is more interesting to me are the presuppositions behind the OLPC. The project is based on the hope that networked laptops would allow poor children to leapfrog their educational limits. There is a belief is the power of the Internet over schools in the project. There is a Western belief in technological fixes – a belief in the magical saving power of computers, behind the project. Why not start with something like TCOT (Twenty Kids One Teacher) for $100 a kid? (Because you couldn’t get people to donate to that.)
But, to be fair, at least the project is trying to help on an ambitious scale and in a way computer folk can contribute. And … there undoubtedly will be children touched by this even if it isn’t cost-effective for the 3rd world.