Page 153 - Education in a Digital World

140 ‘One Laptop per Child’

This lack of empirical ‘evidence’ stems, in part, from the OLPC programme’s
dismissive stance against the need for evaluations and pilot studies to be conducted.
As Nicholas Negroponte reasoned in a 2009 speech entitled ‘Lessons Learned and
Future Challenges’:

I’d like you to imagine that I told you ‘I have a technology that is going to
change the quality of life’. And then I tell you, ‘Really the right thing to do is
to set up a pilot project to test my technology. And then the second thing to
do is, once the pilot has been running for some period of time, is to go and
measure very carefully the benefits of that technology’. And then I am to tell
you what we are going to do is very scientifically evaluate this technology,
with control groups – giving it to some, giving it to others. This all is very
reasonable until I tell you the technology is electricity, and you say ‘Wait,
you don’t have to do that’. But you don’t have to do that with laptops and
learning either. The fact that somebody in the room would say the impact is
unclear is to me amazing – unbelievably amazing.

It could be argued that Negroponte’sbullishnessreflects an imperviousness to criticism
that leaders of large-scale global projects undoubtedly require to succeed. Indeed, a
strong conviction and sense of righteousness pervades much of the commentary that
surrounds OLPC. Yet as even its most ardent supporters acknowledge, the enormity
of the project has left the OLPC programme falling short of its much publicised
ambitions. For example, while the initial stated target of the Australian OLPC
programme was the provision of 400,000 laptops to children in remote regions, the
actual delivery achieved since January 2008 has been closer to 5,000 machines.
Through instances such as this, OLPC has begun to attract growing criticism in
contrast to the initial wave of positive support and enthusiasm. Indeed, the XO
laptop itself was reported by the New York Times to be regarded now by some
sectors of the NGO community as “the emblem of the failure of technology to
achieve change for the better” (Strom 2010). The suggestion can be made, there-
fore, that the OLPC initiative has been thwarted by a set of mitigating issues that
face any large-scale educational technology programme. These issues are therefore
worth considering in more detail if we are to extend the example of OLPC to
other examples of educational technology around the world.
First is the contention that the XO devices and the wider ambitions of the OLPC
programme are simply inappropriate for the contexts in which they are being
implemented. In particular it is argued that the XO machines have been “designed
in a lab-centric rather than need-oriented paradigm”, therefore failing to fit with
the realities of the developing countries and poor regions where they are being
implemented (Pal et al. 2009, p.61). It certainly could be argued that the OLPC
initiative is founded upon exaggerated expectations of the vitality of laptop com-
puting outside the developed world. As John Naughton (2005, p.6) has argued,
distribution of XO devices to communities in sub-Saharan Africa raises significant