Nicholas Negroponte has been a practicing visionary / zealot for years now, with a strong track record building the fabled MIT Media Lab (very different than the Media X group at Stanford, but that's another story). His most recent enthusiasm has been to promote a $100 computer for every child on the globe, a laudable goal that has been decried by Intel management as "wrongheaded" because it "cheapens" the quality and degrades the features, etc.
Progress though has been great, and today Intel offers a $250 machine, while the OLPC group, using AMD chips, now produces a machine for $186. They've been promoting the idea of Americans buying two for $400, using one for their own grandchildren (or whatever) and one for an emerging nation child. We've got family members who have done this, for which everyone is grateful.
But... a few weeks ago, we had a guest speaker at the Media X lecture series, Dr. Kentara Toyama who runs the Microsoft Bangalore research group. He told a most interesting story. They decided to give a number of computers to children in schools in Bangalore, to see how well it works if you can presume they've gotten the machines.
The first discovery, just like in America, when the computer comes home, the parents are threatened by it, and by what the kid is learning. The next discovery was a bit different -- the father may well take the machine and sell it on the black market -- since $100 is about six months of discretionary income for the average family.
The next discovery, just like in America, is that the teacher is threatened by the computer, and the kids are often well ahead of them. But, and this is significant, if every student has their own computer, there is a lot of time waiting on the teacher to help you when you're stuck since the classes are larger even than here.
The variant that Microsoft researchers tried was to give each child a mouse (for $1.50 rather than $186), that they could paint any color they like (personalizing it), take it home where it is not worth stealing and it is not threatening, and they could even write their own name on it without affecting how it works.
Then, in class, they had multiple cursors (each with their own color so you can find your own cursor) and when a child is stuck, the other students help out. The findings were that learning was about 300% faster, and more importantly, collaboration skills were enhanced.
Howze that for a slick set of findings. Not everyone I've talked to, likes these findings. How do they strike you?
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5 comments:
Chuck, OK, this is my second attempt at cracking Google's security which for some reason requires me to try to remember what I already wrote. I strongly agree with your post. Not all cultures are as individualistic as our mainstream US culture. One of the first papers I ever published with my advisor John Gumperz was about group learning among African American kids in multi-grade classrooms. The one laptop concept is culturally biased and also very hardware focused. Many cultures throughout the world share work, learning and credit among groups. I love the one cursor per child concept! Of course the laptop will needs some processing power to keep up with those cursors...
NCast (a company that you have nurtured for many years) recently was invited to capture Prof. Negroponte's latest thoughts on OLPC. You can see the recording here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7700286119958093158&hl=en
or in much higher quality here:
http://www.vimeo.com/2242920
John Gumperz is one of the legends in the sociolinguistics field. Long at Berkeley, he "retired" to UCSB. I never really got to know him there. Wish I had!
Nicholas remains one of the most inspired speakers / raconteurs the tech world has ever seen. This is a classic talk, including the "gall" he describes for raising money and naming the Weisner Building at MIT.
I would strongly recommend this tape, from an MIT alumni club meeting in the Bay, to this group!
Doug Carmichael and I were classmates with Rodrico Halaby 25 years ago at WBSI. Rodrico was Nicholas' roommate Senior Year at MIT, and wrote a paper on Economic Dislocation about the deregulation of natural gas coincident with the advent of the DC-9 jet fleet replacing the propeller-driven DC-6 and DC-7. He used the thinking to create an agricultural (Floral) industry in Colombia, breaking the carnation cartel in Colorado (with which I had some association). Halaby today is CEO of the OLPC for the Caribbean and South America (see http://laptop.org/en/utility/people/rodrigo-arboleda-h.html)
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