It’s easy to take education for granted, especially when you consider that every child in the UK has access to a computer, whether it’s at home or at school. But what most people forget is that 1 billion children in the developing world have little access to education, and no access to computers, which is where a burgeoning non-profit organisation called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) comes in.
Nigerian school children get their hands on the XO and immediately start learning how to use it.
The organisation hit the headlines in 2007 when it developed a low cost laptop called the XO, which was designed to be bought cheaply by governments of developing countries and distributed among school children. The XO was originally dubbed the $100 laptop, and although three years on it still hasn’t achieved its target price, it has been purchased by 21 developing countries and distributed to 1,284,500 children across the world. However, while the organisation has helped so many children around the world, it has courted controversy, created rifts with the world’s biggest technology companies, and spearheaded the biggest consumer technology trend in the last decade.
One Laptop per Child was the realisation of an altruistic dream by a MIT director and professor Nicholas Negroponte. In 2005 he unveiled his plan to see a laptop given to every child in the developing world, to aid their education, and offer them the similar advantages in the digital age as children in the developed world. The idea was based on the creation of something completely unique: A laptop which was durable enough to withstand the stresses and strains of life in a developing world, cope with the challenges of intermittent power and internet availability, and cost just $100.
The design of the XO PC was outstanding, and should be regarded as a feat of computer engineering. Against the back drop of the prices of technology in 2005, before low cost and low power components were prevalent, Negroponte designed a laptop with a 433MHz processor, 256MB RAM, a 7.5” LCD display and wireless networking. This may not sound impressive, but its base cost of £199 was unheard of at the time, it had enough power to drive its bespoke Linux operating system dubbed Sugar, it could function as a laptop, ebook reader, had a screen which was clearly visible outside in direct sunlight, had 12 hours of battery life and was completely shock-proof, waterproof and dust-proof.
While the XO preceded the market in terms of design, its biggest challenges were to overcome the rigours of a life in the hands of children in developing countries. Availability and reliance on power was a problem for Negroponte, and the XO could not succeed if it was too power hungry. They also had to iron out the biggest failing point on consumer laptops: Hard disc crashes. The XO introduced flash drives, which eliminated the mechanical wear and tear of traditional spinning disc drives. What’s more, the XO featured a revolutionary new screen, which used a dynamic LED backlight, which reduced operating wattage down to 3W under normal conditions. This put battery life at 12 hours, far beyond that of normal consumer laptops, and made the XO a force to be reckoned with.
A new kind of PC
The XO laptop caused such a stir, that it’s credited with spearheading the resulting netbook craze, which is still the only PC sub-market which is growing. Once OLPC had mastered the low power components, screen and size, it started selling them in the US. They retailed the laptop as part of the Give One Get One campaign, where a US consumer would purchas a laptop for $400, and donate one to a child in a developing country at the same time. It’s this that Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News, an independent community of OLPC supporters, believes caught the eye of companies such as Asus and Acer.
The XO PC is waterproof and dustproof, making it ideal for children in the developing world.
“The real threat of OLPC introducing a “$100 laptop” was enough to spur technology companies into action. And they had to act fast. OLPC sold 160,000 XO laptops at $400 for two- and you didn’t even get both. That had Asus rightly excited when they launched the EeePC line to amazing success,” he said.
Once ASUS made a commercial success of their EeePC, the whole market had to catch up, and within six months, every laptop manufacturer was shipping its own netbook version. In 2009 there were 33.3 million netbooks sold globally, and the sector achieved a 72% growth in sales, compared to a 13% decline in amount of notebooks sold. If its supporters are correct, One Laptop per Child caused one of the biggest technology sensations of the decade.
“The creation of the netbook market is largely, and appropriately credited to OLPC,” says Ed McNierney, Chief Technical Officer of OLPC. “We wouldn’t have $300 netbooks in the consumer market if that push from OLPC hadn’t happened.
Consumer product companies in the technology world are not known, in general, for their risk-taking behaviour,” he told PC Plus.
When asked for a comment, an ASUS spokesman told PC Plus that the XO had no bearing or effect on the creation of the EeePC 701 which launched in 2008, and that the company would have come to market with a similar product even if the XO hadn’t been invented.
Competition
It’s not often that a non-profit organisation courts competition and controversy, but the technology industry can be an unpredictable world, and it wasn’t long before OLPC found itself embroiled in a war of words with Intel. The world’s biggest chip maker had seen the market potential of the developing world and built its own low cost laptop, the Classmate PC, soon after the announcement of the OLPC XO- a move which incensed Negroponte. He called Intel ‘predatory’ in a lecture at MIT, accused the company of “hurting the [OLPC] mission” on the CBS news show 60 minutes, back in 2007. If this wasn’t enough, Negroponte then accused Intel of selling its Classmate PC to the same governments he was trying to persuade to take up orders of the XO, but “dumping” them at a loss making sum, scuppering his project.
Children in Nigeria recieve a traditional lesson from their teacher, but use the OLPC XO laptop to support their learning.
In the face of widespread criticism, Intel joined forces with OLPC in December 2007, in an uneasy alliance, which caused public disconcertion from AMD, who was a founding partner of the OLPC project. While the Intel – OLPC partnership promised a new beginning, the reality was very different. Less than six months later Negroponte dropped Intel representatives from OLPC’s board of directors, demanding that Intel dumped its Classmate project if the two companies continued to work together. With the money Intel has invested in its own project it was never going to can the Classmate PC project, and the relationship ended.
Since 2007, both laptops have seen their share of success and failure, with Intel shipping 1 million Classmate PCs to Venezuela and 150,000 to Libya. OLPC has saturated Uruguay and Peru with approximately 1 million XO laptops, as well as completing smaller orders from Colombia, Rwanda and Mexico. Whether Intel’s Classmate PC project hurt the OLPC effort is still the subject of debate, but Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News, an independent community of OLPC supporters, doesn’t think so. He believes that the enthusiasm created by the XO and Classmate PC made Negroponte’s dream a reality: “I’ve heard from Intel insiders that the XO laptop moved the netbook revolution forward by a few years. Intel would’ve come out with a Classmate-like device, but not as soon as they had to with OLPC’s pressure. For this, both organizations should be thankful because netbooks are the only bright spot in the laptop business,” he told PC Plus.
However, the bright spot of technology might not look so good for OLPC. It’s not been able to get its cost down to the desired $100, and orders have been far from overwhelming. What’s more, the consumer market has caught up, and it’s possible to buy standard netbooks at cost as cheaply as an XO. While they’re not built as ruggedly with the developing world in mind, they do feature fully functional operating systems, such as Windows, which some say would better prepare children for a connected future.
An ‘irresponsible strategy”
Despite its rocky road to success, OLPC still has a long way to go before it can claim any kind of success. Its intention to deliver PCs into the hands of the world’s poorest children is admirable, but experts have called its methods in question, warning that the charity risks wasting the hard work and achievements by equipping communities with laptops and then leaving them to work out how to use them for themselves- a criticism which Walter de Brouwer, European CEO of One Laptop per Child flatly rejects. “The charge is false,” he told PC Plus in an exclusive interview. “Typically, teachers and schools receive a two-week introduction not only to the machine and its technical features and operation, but more critically on how to integrate it into the learning experiences,” he said. De Brouwer continued: “OLPC works with the country to develop a team that works with the schools. The team supports the schools, technically and pedagogically. This team also works to develop capacity at the schools and locally in the communities.”
In the UK schools require entire departments to keep their networks and PCs in running order, and the use of IT in classrooms as a key part of teacher’s training. Wayan Vota, an outspoken supporter of the OLPC project, has questioned the level of support provided by OLPC called their deployment strategy “irresponsible.”
“OLPC has always maintained distance from actual implementation, claiming it was the country’s responsibility to integrate XO laptop into their educational system. That might work for Uruguay, a stable, advanced country. But it’s irresponsible in lesser developed countries. OLPC has the responsibility to educate countries on what they are buying – an XO laptop should be one small part of a whole educational system change,” he said. “Just handing off the XO laptop, like it’s a self-installing app, leads to Ethiopian teachers banning them from classrooms as a plague on education.”
Last year, teachers and parents in Ethiopia criticised the deployment of the XO, claiming that it was a distracting toy for the children, and could not be a worthwhile tool in their education system built around memorising from a blackBoard and then passing the national test. Without teacher training to implement the laptops, the XO couldn’t fulfil its function. While self-learning is an important part of the XO’s purpose, it’s clear that there’s a serious risk that the laptops will either not be used effectively, or fall into disrepair.
One has to admire what Negroponte and OLPC has achieved in the last three years, battling adversity which would have overcome many other organisations. OLPC claims that attendance in schools improves with the introduction of the XO. OLPC is currently working on a new version of its laptop, the XO-1.5, which it hopes to start deploying later this year, and has released concepts of a $75 tablet PC which it aims to make a reality by 2012. No-one can argue that getting an internet connected laptop into the hands of children in the developing world is essential for those countries to grow and prosper. However, unless OLPC ask difficult questions of the XO’s recipients, it risks wasting an opportunity to really make a difference.
Concept of success
No-one can accuse Negroponte of not being ambitious and if his mission to put an internet connected PC into the hands of every child in the developing world wasn’t challenging enough, he wants to build a paper thin touchscreen tablet PC which will retail at under $100. This concept design is the OLPC XO-3 (pictured) and is the latest dream of OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte. It’s to be based on the XO 1.75 spec, which will feature an ARM mobile processor, which will provide twice the speed of the XO-1 and operate at 25% of the power. However, the main difference is the form. Negroponte wants to move away from a standard laptop form, and go for a purely touchscreen device.
A vision of the future: Negroponte wants to launch a handheld tablet similar to this concept, costing less than $100, in 2012.
Whether or not the XO-3 can actually be achieved is another matter. Producing something similar to the iPad in form, in just two years and dropping the cost to under $100 seems ludicrous, and whether such a device could power an OS capable of supporting a child’s education is another matter. What’s more, whether this form factor is suited to education is another matter. It seems that Negroponte has learned a few things about the nature of the technology industry, in the last three years promoting the XO. While the threat of releasing a sub-$100 netbook spurred the rest of the industry to react is a seismic way, he’s hoping that the design of a low-cost tablet could have the same effect. He told Forbes: “We don’t necessarily need to build it, we just need to threaten to build it.”
If OLPC can use the industry to its advantage this time, rather than do all the leg work while the consumer market reaps the benefits, then the dream of getting tablet PCs into developing countries could become a reality.
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