$100 Laptops? Ultimately, It Is Not About Machines!
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.
And it effects the budget - one of the ways they can afford to charge so little
is they will be working with assured, large pre-purchases and can scale up to
manufacture big. They've got the cost-per-unit down to $130 now, and are continuing
to slash fat. The MIT team calls today's laptops "obese" - with two thirds of
their software being used to manage the other third. Some of the cost is cut
by using Linux and free software.
I really like the way they've worked on this project. It would have been so
much fun to be along for the ride. For example, one thing they looked at is
how to make the laptop work in places that are far from the power grid. Judging
from the images they've decided that crank power is the way to go. But another
thing that they looked at, they call "parasitic power," that would use the impact
of typing on the keys to generate electricity.
Sigh. That brings back memories of only one of the ways in which I could now
be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams if I never procrastinated. I didn't call
it parasitic power, but when the first kids' sh'es came out with flickering
lights in the heels, I was kind of disgusted to learn that there were nasty
chemicals, destined for landfills, in the little batteries charging up those
lights. It occurred to me that the fantastic power of what locomotion experts
call the "heel strike," when your foot hits the ground while walking, could
be used to charge up, say, AA-cell batteries slid into the heels of your sh'es
to power a Personal Area Network. Sad to say, I did nothing about it, and the
idea was patented a couple of years ago by someone from France.
And you can see from the images that this laptop can be used with the keyboard
for typing, with the keyboard tucked away for just viewing, or with the keyboard
further tucked away and the screen turned sideways as a digital book reader.
One criticism of the project is that the end users, say kids in Liberia, may
live far away from any Internet connectivity or wireless network. No problem,
says the MIT team, when you pop these little laptops out of the box and turn
them on they will find each other and connect automatically in a LAM, Local
Area Mesh. (I just coined that term, they don't use it.)
In the end, the development team says that the only thing that these $100 laptops
will not do that $1,000 ones will, is store large amounts of data. That's probably
because for durability, they've opted for flash memory instead of drives, and
the capacity there is currently limited. Finally, the OLCP initiative says to
notice the cost savings, as well as the reduced price of the units themselves.
For example, if, and that's a big if, the students who end up getting these
laptops were provided with paper textbooks, the cost of printing and distribution
would be huge. These tiny machines can be the libraries that do not exist in,
say, Borneo. Me, I wonder what's going to keep them out of the parents' hands.
I guess nothing will, and that's part of the plan, too. In many children's homes,
at night, off the power grid, the laptops will be the brightest source of light
for the entire family. And a bright source of hope for their futures. Ultimately,
it's about the learning.
(All photos courtesy Design Continuum)
