The $100 laptop: Nestlé’s baby formula redux? Bad news for local culture, not just education, unless OLPC shows proper sensitivity?
The $100 laptop—perhaps the $170 laptop for now—will put smiles on many faces.
But do you remember how Nestlé’s baby formula ended up a killer in the Third World? Could the OLPC laptop hurt local people in different ways? I rejoice over the technological wizardry of the machine and its educational potential. But I also hope that OLPC will pay very close attention to the concerns of Eduardo Villanueva Mansilla, writing in OLPC News and elsewhere:
…the purpose of promoting this very specific tool as a ways to achieve objectives of self-learning and discovery does disregard the notion that there are plenty of ways to do that with less expensive, locally produced tools, and also forgets that a computer can be a wonderful way to waste time.
Just one example: replacing books with the sub-hundred dollar computer could mean the end for local publishing houses, and that is certainly a very unfortunate unintended consequence.
Another example: exploring and discovering could mean just to pass the day IMing your friends instead of properly discovering mathematical reasoning, and googling your way out of school work, specially with poorly trained teachers without the needed skills for differentiating a real school paper from a downloaded one.
Here’s my own take on the above. As you can see, children are supposed to use the machine to discover knowledge for themselves, but there are different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of curiosity, and the ex-child in me says I would not have fared well with the hyper-constructivism that Negroponte and friend are trying to promote in a technocentric way. Some constructivism? Yes, of course. But I’d hate to see neglect of basic skills and of mastery of established culture, American style–just as I believe that OLPC culture shouldn’t supersede Libyan culture or Burmese culture.
Illustration of the problem: OLPC’s experimental library
In a related vein, the experimental OLPC library illustrates the challenges of globalization of learning. The interface is attractive, and I realize this is far, far from the finished library. Still, I wonder about the future. Will the library end up with just a smattering of this, a smattering of that? Public domain content is easy to get, and via wikis, educators and librarians and academics and children themselves can theoretically help fill in gaps, aided by the laptop’s laudable ability to capture video and audio—but that’s still no substitute for the breadth and depth of traditional libraries, whether on paper or (we hope) on the Net. And remember the Ten Greatest Books Issue. What’s great to me in Alexandria, Virginia, may not be so great in Lagos, Nigeria.
Here’s one way in which the OLPC library could be promising—if the software and humans of OLPC can help local peoples establish their own libraries, too. I’d like to think that OLPC will truly try.
If the OLPC people can enable local students, librarians, educators, artists and writers to be more like themselves, rather than being homogenized into Nicholas Negroponte’s visions for them—then the OLPC project will indeed be a world-improver rather than Nestlé’s II.
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:55 am
The criticism of the OLPC typically revolves around: books are much cheaper and not as overly fancy, and a school-lab with a couple of outdated 486s would do the same tricks as the OLPC at a fraction of the cost.
This neglects some extremely important points:
1. There is a wealth of free digital text-books out there, and with the OLPC, this is going to multiply. In many countries, distributing cheap and up-to-date textbooks is a major issue, and the OLPC will help.
2. The OLPC does not only allow the consumption of knowledge, but active participation and creation. Without access to computers, you remain below the tabletop of technology, collecting its scraps. Bringing children on-line allows the most gifted individuals among them to participate in our world-wide community of geeks, and this may create a cultural and technological leap in the local environments.
3. School labs with just a few PCs are just not doing the trick. Even here in Germany, they are usually under the supervision of teachers of the pre-Internet generations. Just as geeks here, those in the developing countries will have to empowered to learn and create on their own. Besides, continued software development, writing and so on cannot happen on machines that are to be used in class, by dozens of people subsequently, or by several at a time.
I suspect that critics and OLPC enthusiast are reflecting their own disagreement about the role of personal computing in today’s society. Personally, I think that it cannot be overemphasized. Without computers, there is no access to world-wide knowledge, no cheap world-wide communication and no adequate participation in contemporary art, economy and culture.
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Agree with your excellent points on the need for digitization, Joscha. Heck, I’ve been pushing the concept of well-stocked national digital libraries since the early ’90s. My concern is that there be the proper balance between the global and the local; we need both! Ideally OLPC-related activities will nurture local publishers, etc., not supersede them. I remain a supporter of the project but want to make sure it goes in the right direction, rather than top-down. Thanks. David
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Perhaps eBooks will not be about publishers, but about authors. After all, what do we have publishers for?
In the past, publishing houses have served an important task (and will continue to do so for the traditional pBook-chain): They brought authors, production, quality control, printers, distributors and advertisers together.
For digital content, these tasks can often be done (albeit in a much different way) through online-platforms, and everybody could go and create one at relatively little cost. Is this going to globalize eBook-production? – Of course! And is this going to kill a lot of publishers? – You bet!
Nonetheless, the whole thing is pretty much inevitable. And it is not going to kill literature and writing, instead, we are even going to see entirely new formats and genres.