[OLPC-Asia] One Laptop Per Child still not changing the world enough for Silicon Valley bloggers

[lite li]

When Nicholas Negroponte first articulated the concept of One Laptop Per
Child, there was almost nothing to hate about it. A bold vision of
spreading computing to the farest corners of the world, while also making
huge technological strides in creating cheap, rugged laptops.

But as usually happens with startups, that lofty vision has been harder to
pull off in the real world. There have been supply problems, implementation
problems, cost problems, delivery problems — all the things any hardware
startup would have to grapple with. Square has, Fitbit has, Jawbone has.

But the bizarre thing is the tech press tends to forgive those companies
such hiccups. But when it comes to OLPC, they pounce. The Economist and the
Associated Press<http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/7217599/Why-laptops-aren-t-beating-poverty-in-Peru>
has
trashed it, and now ReadWrite has declared the organization on
DeathWatch<http://readwrite.com/2012/10/23/readwriteweb-deathwatch-one-laptop-per-child-olpc>
last
week.

To me, a “DeathWatch” implies a company is running out of money or in some
financial trouble, but there was precious little financial analysis in
ReadWrite’s post. It was more of the same old harping: Not enough teachers
get it, laptops sit unused, and spotty Internet connections make them
useless. One problem: There was zero original reporting in making these
claims. It was mostly a rehash of the Economist’s examination of a failed
roll out in just *one* country, Peru. It was called a poor return on the
investment, but it was also the largest spending on OLPC. In many
countries, more modest, carefully planned roll outs have gone far better
and made a huge difference. But don’t let that stop a story you can
dramatically slug “DeathWatch.”

Journalists love to be right, so it’d be easy for me to pile on to OLPC,
perhaps by pointing to my article from earlier this week, stating that
US-based companies that set out to help the poor rarely
succeed.<http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/22/why-bono-is-almost-right-about-the-healing-powers-of-capitalism/>
But
that would be disingenuous, at best. Because I’ve actually seen OLPC
laptops being used on the ground in countries like Colombia and Rwanda —
and when you see lives so dramatically changed by something, it’s pretty
hard to dismiss it as not world-changing *enough*.

But, hey, I’ve been cozy in Silicon Valley for a while. It’s possible the
devices have become less effective or the organization problems have grown.
So I decided to ask someone who is actually *buying* the laptops *putting
them in the hands of children* in poor areas of the world what her
experience has been.

That someone is my friend and all-around badass role model Maureen Orth.
When she isn’t writing
blistering<http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/09/tom-cruise-scientology-marriage-katie-holmes>
Vanity
Fair covers about Scientology, she is working tirelessly on the Marina Orth
Foundation, which builds schools in rural parts of Latin America. It’s a
commitment and passion that goes back to her younger days in the Peace Corp.

The first time I met her — on the ground in Medellin, Colombia — I asked
her about all the Silicon Valley criticisms of the devices kids were
tapping away at all around me. She looked at me like I was crazy. She
didn’t particularly know or care that a bunch of eggheads didn’t find the
devices awesome enough. She was too busy putting affordable computers in
kids’ hands for the first time and watching their math, science, and
language skills explode.

This is the disconnect with OLPC. For people on the ground watching the
devices change lives, they don’t care that parts of the original vision
have been sacrificed in the name of delivering a product. Or that it hasn’t
somehow changed the world *more*. For the people in the Valley… Well, I’m
not totally sure why they get so up in arms about it, when they routinely
cut slack to other startups with much less lofty visions.

Orth has never seen a pile of laptops sitting unused because of a lack of
teacher buy-in or Internet access. She described what she has seen to me
instead: Fourth and fifth graders are reading “Tom Sawyer” and “Voyage to
the Center of the Earth” on their computers, who never would have had
access to the physical books any other way. Kindergarteners learning their
numbers, colors, and letters on the computer, and first graders using them
to design machines and later build robots. In her team’s experience, the
computers not only get more out of class, they motivate kids to keep coming
to class in the first place because they view the exercises as games.

Some of her schools have only had the computers for two years, and yet the
difference has been remarkable. The kids have made four robots in their
robotics clubs, and kids even write their own blogs. At her Medellin
school, over 200 families are on Facebook, thanks to the kids evangelizing
the technology in their homes and parental computer classes taught at the
school.

Orth says there is plenty to do on the XO that has nothing to do with
connectivity, so the argument that lack of Internet makes these machines
useless is an argument that sounds great sitting from the cozy confines of
the Western world, but is silly for anyone who has seen them in action.

This is not to say there aren’t challenges. You are sending sophisticated
hardware into very poor and remote areas. Of course there are challenges.
But, for Orth, the biggest one is that the school frequently only goes to
sixth grade, and there is nowhere for them to graduate to with all of their
skills. But that’s hardly the fault of OLPC. (To support her organization
and help solve more of these problems go
here<http://www.marinaorthfoundation.org/news/>
.)

Orth acknowledged that critics have a point about the importance of teacher
buy-in for the devices to be used to their full potential. She just didn’t
acknowledge it was all that insightful of a point:

Teachers are very hard to get to change–we know that. We now have 1200 kids
in three schools using the computers and the level of progress is tied to
the teachers–duh.

I cannot imagine spending vast sums of money without proper training… It’s
not unlike the billions of dollars the Air Force wasted constructing jets
that were too sophisticated for pilots to fly. Deathwatch is not the
answer. XOs can be great tools

OLPC gets this and has begun to focus more on the education process not
just distributing devices. It now organizes networks of teachers that get
together once a week with specialists to learn how to teach with the
computers better. Something ReadWrite might know if it had asked.

The challenges around maintenance, on the other hand, have provided a
silver lining for Orth’s schools. Select kids become part of the Monitors
Club, where they repair and maintain the computers themselves. “At age 11
or 12, some of the kids can totally take apart and put the computer back
together, screw by screw,” Orth says via email.

That’s one of Orth’s little AV experts doing repairs above. His name is
Daniel Felipe Sanchez, and he’s nine years old. After learning to repair
OLPC computers, this little boy got a (paid) side job repairing them at his
dad’s factory.

Here’s the problem with the hate on OLPC: Rich people in the West just
can’t judge what’s a right and what’s a luxury. The world is a diverse
place and you can’t calculate how a computer — or a teacher for that matter
— will effect every single person.

I’ve read numerous stories written by Western news organizations that say
that aid groups should focus on getting rural Indians jobs, water, and
access to sanitation services, while they laugh off the idea that they
might need technology. Meanwhile, on the actual ground in Indian villages,
I’ve seen lives saved by basic mobile phones and the content delivered over
them.

In lieu of hard numbers, one of ReadWrite’s most “damning” statements on
OLPC was that Negroponte once said you could give children laptops and then
walk away. That might not be ideal, but it’s also not insane. India’s Hole
in the Wall project pretty much proved you
could<http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/15/how-to-profit-off-the-poor%E2%80%A6-and-keep-your-soul/>
.

The most disingenuous part of people hating on OLPC is the way they do it:
There are few real facts. There is almost no on-the-ground experience.
Instead, they bring up all of the original, lofty visions set out by
Negroponte and point out where reality didn’t measure up as some sort of
gotcha.

As Orth might say: *Duh*.

Far less ambitious startups don’t come close to measuring up to the
original vision. No startup does. Everything is harder and takes longer to
build in practice. Particularly a dirt cheap, rugged laptop that promises
to change the world for every poor person in every developing country.

OLPC has certainly had some disappointments. It has come nowhere close to
fulfilling the original vision it evangelized. But it’s changed many, many
lives. I’ve seen it. The Economist may deem that the effort hasn’t been
worth the ROI, but those children and their parents may beg to differ.

If a startup leaves the world better than they found it, I say they’ve won.
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