One Laptop Per Rich Child only
As a follow up to Ray’s post, the actual laptop in the one laptop per child program (olpc) is supposed to only cost $100 and funding is to be provided for by the governments that purchase the laptop. However, News.com is reporting in an article titled, “A $100 laptop prototype for $150” that the cost is actually much higher.
Why should we care about the OLPC program? As people working in IT, many of us believe that technology can have a positive impact on development. We want projects like the OLPC program to succeed and believe that the costs will come down quickly. We hope that governments will adopt the innovative technologies and use them to help bridge one of the many digital/educational divides.
But as Jonathan Zittrain said in a recent lecture on the program, more challenging will be to create free or near free context specific educational and business software that will make this technology meaningful. Simply exporting software that we use in our offices or homes in the west to villages in Africa will not work. What is needed is sociologists and technologists working together to understand what software makes sense. And ideally speaking, those people should be from Africa itself.
