[Olpc-open] Let them have laptops

[Sameer Verma]

John Kintree wrote:
> On Friday 01 February 2008 11:46 am, Sameer Verma wrote:
>   
>> A short writeup from the Indian Express today.
>> http://www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/267511.html
>>     
>
> Thanks for sharing that, Sameer.  The article says, "A full 
> implementation of the XO project for India would involve the 
> purchase of 100 million laptops and would cost around Rs 50,000 
> crore every year. That is obviously impossible but even if it were 
> possible, the benefits of a laptop for every child have to be 
> weighed against the benefits from spending the same amount 
> in schools, teachers, nutrition and healthcare for those children."
>
> According to 
> http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/india/budget.htm 
> the actual annual expenditure for the military of India in 
> 2004-2005 was Rs 75,835 crore.  I guess the thinking there is, 
> "If they don't have bread, let them eat bullets."  
>
>   
Hi John,

Sadly though, the story isn't very different here in the US of A. We
have schools in San Francisco and Palo Alto (that I know of personally)
that don't have money for text books. The few books that they can afford
to buy come in around February or so. How much does the US spend on its
military budget? I'm not even going to bother looking it up. I think its
a problem of priorities, intent and distribution.

> With respect to education about technology, how much of a 
> computer would $200 have bought ten years ago?  Not even a 
> computer; maybe a monitor for $200 in 1998.  How much of a 
> computer will $200 buy in 2018?  Maybe ten years from now, 
> $50 will buy a computer that is vastly superior than the XO 
> laptop of today.  How do we educate children for that kind of future?
>
>   

More important than the cost of the laptop is what a child will do with
it. If it will simply sit and collect dust, then its not really solving
problems. The laptop needs to be a cog in a bigger plan, where the
laptop is used to bolster the curiosity of children.

> The author of the article was right when saying it's, "a matter of 
> political will."  If each of 100 million children in India took their XO 
> laptops home, and showed their families and neighbors how they 
> work, we might be looking at close to a billion people directly 
> impacted by this project.  With the right software, those billion 
> people might then use that kind of technology to express their 
> political will.  If that happened, I think there would be fewer hungry 
> people in the world.
>   

I still think people in any given nation need to be an integral part of
the solution. Instead of giving them a bunch of XOs, we have to figure
out how education will be sustainable beyond the life cycle of those XOs
or the next batch of technology that becomes available. Keep in mind
that a good proportion of the billion plus people in India (the target
of the article) are quite well fed. Many of them just don't care about
the rest.

Sameer

-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/