$100 Laptops? Ultimately, It Is Not About Machines!

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$100 Laptops? Ultimately, It Is Not About Machines!

11/16/2005

By Terry Calhoun

I'm in the process, with my counterpart at the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers, Steve Glazner, of interviewing EDUCAUSE vice presidents Richard Katz and Diana Oblinger about their view of the next 10 years in higher education. Our article will be published in several places in support of 2006's Campus of the Future Conference in Honolulu.

One early statement by Oblinger struck me hard the first time I read it yesterday: "The stakes will simply be too high in 2015 for us to not work very hard to ensure each student has a successful learning experience." That was resonating in my head this morning as I glanced at a news story titled "A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child," which is about the MIT-related initiative to create a $100 laptop for children in developing countries, the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child.

Put that together with Thomas Friedman's "Flat Earth" perspective that we have "entered Globalization 3.0. And it's shrinking the world from size small to size tiny, and flattening the global economic playing field at the same time" and you get: "The stakes will simply be too high in 2015 for us to not work very hard to ensure each student [in the world] has a successful learning experience." Now, that sends chills up and down my spine. I definitely want to live in that world. Can we get there? Anthony D. Cortese of Second Nature likes to go on about environmental problems being mislabeled. He'll say, perhaps about various unnatural parts of the Mississippi delta, "What we have here is not an environmental problem. What we have is a design problem."

We view health, social, economic, political, security, population, environmental, and other major societal issues as separate, competing, and hierarchical when they are really systemic and interdependent. We don't have environmental and health problems, per se. We have negative environmental and health consequences of the way we have organized [designed] society from a cultural, social, economic, and technological perspective.
--From We Rise to Play a Greater Part

In this broader sense of sustainability, helping the world's children to get better educations would be a major move forward. And the OLPC group, like all good planners do, worked very hard at the early design stages of this $100 laptop project. The laptop itself, as it nears production and then distribution in 2006-2007, is a design marvel, and I'll get to that. But as Seymour Papert, a childhood learning expert who works with Negroponte says, ultimately "this is not about machines. [I]t is the next big step toward a vision of learning being transformed as radically as medicine, communications, and entertainment."

They've had to think about distribution. One early conclusion was that there would be no individual sales, and no sales in anything but huge quantities. They're only going to sell to organizations like national ministries of education, which will distribute the laptops, although the governor of Maine is interested. Believe me, those are "design" considerations, because design has a lot more to do with how thick or thin some material thing is.