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 A laptop for poor children
The prototype of a wind-up laptop, which costs US$100 at most, has been unveiled; it will be distributed towards the end of this year and it is geared for children in developing countries.
The highest-ranking expert of an institute of technology, Nicholas Negroponte, showed the low-cost, colorful laptops for the first time. Their aim is to facilitate the education of millions of children in poor countries. The robust laptops have low-power consumption and are the backbone of an education project which foresees free Internet connection.
"This large-scale distribution holds the promise of major advances in economic and social development, but perhaps most important is the true meaning of one laptop per child," Annan said. "Studies and experience have shown repeatedly that kids take to computers much more readily, not just in the comfort of warm, well-lit rich country living rooms, but also in the slums and remote rural areas of the developing world."
The product, still under development, will be distributed towards the end of 2006, said Negroponte, a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) of the US, in the hope that several thousands of these laptops would be produced in the meantime till the number reaches more than 100 million by the end of 2007. The device will not even need electricity. Users will be able to crank the handle for about a minute to get 10 minutes of computer time in a worst-case scenario or can use batteries.
Just hours before the official unveiling, its promoter made a sales pitch to participants of a Vatican-sponsored conference. Negroponte, founder of Wired magazine, professor of media technology at the MIT and chairman of the Institute Media Lab, was one of a dozen experts invited by the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences to speak at its seminar focusing on school education in an increasingly globalized world.
Negroponte, who has also launched the research initiative, remarked at the Vatican seminar that just as "every child should have a pencil, (laptops) have become our pencils" of today. To fight what has been called "a digital divide" between rich and poor countries in getting access to new information technologies, children in developing countries should not be denied the new educational tools that are out there.
Learning about learning
"We need children to be more actively engaged in learning," Negroponte added. Education should not just be concerned with teaching facts; it should also include helping children learn how to discover the answers to their questions. "We're not interested in learning about something; we're interested in learning about learning," said the MIT professor.
It would be up to the teachers, the schools and the governments to guide how the laptops would be used in class curricula. The goal is to get one laptop for every child who could then take it back and forth from home to school. The computer would become the student's personal property. The laptop will not be available for retail sale to the general public. The cost is low largely because the product will be sold in bulk directly to governments, which would then distribute them to the schools and the students.
While some participants at the Vatican workshop praised the initiative, others expressed some ethical and practical concerns, such as how governments of poor countries would raise the money for what would cost, at a minimum, $100 million. Negroponte said international loaning institutes like the World Bank are "fully prepared to finance" a project such as this, interest-free. "Kids in the United States and Italy," he added, "could help pay for a laptop for a kid in the Third World."
Re-start official negotiations
A conference participant from France asked what sort of impact a more computer-oriented classroom would have on social and personal relationships. "What would happen to the prestige of the teacher, who will know less than the machine?," asked physics professor emeritus Yves Quere of Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. "Won't there be a loss of social interaction, less contact with nature while kids already spend three hours a day in front of the television watching stupid stuff?" he asked. "Would Internet use be any better?"
Negroponte said he did not know of any studies on the laptop′s social impact but he admitted there was concern for a child's increased access to pornography, "not because the child would seek it out," but because it could pop up accidentally while a student was searching the Internet.
In response to concerns about who would offer help with technical glitches or repairs, Negroponte said people had a tendency to treat something with greater care if they owned it. He gave the example of Cambodia which received free laptops and took great care of them, "even taking them to bed at night." He said parents also were enamored with the new technology because, for many poor families, a running laptop is "the brightest source of light in the house."
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