Can one laptop per child save the world's poor?

• Author: Warschauer, Mark

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program is one of the most ambitious educational reform initiatives the world has ever seen. The program has developed a radically new low-cost laptop computer and aggressively promoted its plans to put the computer in the hands of hundreds of millions of children around the world, including in the most impoverished nations. Though fewer than 2 million Of OLPC's XO computers have been distributed as of this writing, the initiative has caught the attention of world leaders, influenced developments in the global computer industry and sparked controversy and debate about the best way to improve the lot of the world's poor. With six years having passed since Nicholas Negroponte first unveiled the idea, this paper appraises the program's progress and impact and, in so doing, takes afresh look at OLPC's assumptions. The paper reviews the theoretical underpinnings Of OLPC, analyzes the program's development and summarizes the current state of OLPC deployments around the world. The analysis reveals that provision of individual laptops is a utopian vision for the children in the poorest countries, whose educational and social futures could be more effectively improved if the same investments were instead made on more sustainable and proven interventions. Middle- and high-income countries may have a stronger rationale for providing individual laptops to children, but will still want to eschew OLPC's technocentric vision. In summary, OLPC represents the latest in a long line of technologically utopian development schemes that have unsuccessfully attempted to solve complex social problems with overly simplistic solutions.

**********

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC)program is one of the most ambitious educational reform initiatives to date. The program has developed a radically new low-cost laptop computer and aggressively promoted its plans to put laptops in the hands of millions of children around the world, including those in the most impoverished nations. The program's founder and chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, has argued that children can use this new computer to not only teach themselves, but also their family members. (1)

This paper argues that the premises and approach of OLPC articulated by Negroponte are fundamentally flawed. The poorest countries targeted by OLPC cannot afford laptop computers for all their children and would be better off building schools, training teachers, developing curricula, providing books and subsidizing attendance. Middle- and high-income countries may benefit from educational use of laptops. However, this can only happen if they devote substantial effort and funding to the kinds of infrastructure development, teacher training, curriculum development, assessment reform and formative evaluation necessary for school laptop programs to work. Unlike Negroponte's approach of simply handing computers to children and walking away, there needs to be large-scale integrated education improvement efforts. (2)

OLPC's VISION

OCPC's vision is strongly shaped by Negroponte's background and views. Having been the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab and an initial investor in Wired magazine, he is not bashful about asserting his idealistic views on the transformative power of new technologies. As he wrote in an influential 1995 book, "like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped." (3)

The OLPC program represents a marriage of Negroponte's digital utopianism and the constructionist learning theory of Seymour Papert, Negroponte's longtime colleague at MIT. Papert views learning as highly dependent on students constructing ideas and individual laptop computers as essential for carrying out such construction in today's world. He argues that having several students share a computer is as inadvisable as having multiple students share a single pencil. (4) In the OLPC program, Negroponte, Papert and others sought to develop and distribute a low-cost "children's machine" that would empower youth to learn without, or in spite of, their schools and teachers.

Prior to the emergence of OLPC, a number of one-to-one (one computer per student) laptop programs were launched in the United States and other countries, including a well-regarded program in the state of Maine. In most of these programs, laptops are owned and maintained by schools and deployed to students for individual use and at home, starting at upper elementary grades or higher. Laptops are viewed as one component of an overall educational reform based on broader technological infrastructure, provision of technical support, professional development, curriculum development, assessment reform and a carefully planned implementation process that involves staged distribution and ongoing evaluation. Research suggests that such programs result in improved student writing, increased student engagement, improved information literacy and, in many cases, higher student test scores. (5)

Unlike these programs, which typically use computers available to the general public, OLPC developed its own laptop called the XO and its own software interface and package called Sugar. OLPC also chose a different implementation model than that used in previous one-to-one programs. OLPC stipulates that laptops be owned by children over the age of six rather than by schools. Efforts to reform curricula and assessment are viewed as too slow or expensive and teacher training as of limited value due to teacher absenteeism and incompetence, so laptop implementation must proceed without them. As Negroponte explained, "[PC]hen you go to these rural schools, the teacher can be very well meaning, but the teacher might only have a sixth grade education. In some countries, which I'll leave unnamed, as many as one-third of the teachers never show up at school." (6)

Papert went further, explaining that children will teach themselves. "In the end, [students] will teach themselves [how to use the laptop]. They'll teach one another. There are many millions, tens of millions of people in the world who bought computers and learned how to use them without anybody teaching them. I have confidence in kids' ability to learn." (7)

Based on the urgency of getting laptops in the hands of children, Negroponte has suggested that pilot programs, staged implementation, monitoring and formal evaluation should be shunned as well, since they can only slow down this vitally needed reform. As he explains,

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. (8) RESULTS OF OLPC's IMPLEMENTATION

To achieve a rapid saturation without pilot programs or evaluation, OLPC initially set a policy of only taking orders in lots of 1 million. With no takers, they then lowered the amount to 250,000. (9) Finding few buyers at this level, they eventually allowed some smaller programs, but still forbade general sales to either the public or individual schools.

When Negroponte launched the program in 2005, he predicted the initial distribution of 100 to 150 million laptops by 2008 to targeted developing countries, (10) As of August 2010, about 1.5 million XO laptops had actually been delivered or ordered. More than 80 percent of these have gone to countries categorized by the World Bank as high or upper-middle income. Only two countries have implemented nationwide use of XOs in primary schools: Uruguay and the small Pacific Island nation of Nieu (with a total school-age population of 500). In Peru, after a first phase in which some 290,000 children in rural schools were given laptops, the program will reportedly be extended to the rest of the country on a per-school rather than per-child basis. In Rwanda, where only 7 percent of homes have electricity, the government has joined the OLPC program as a way to spur development, but has only purchased or had donated enough computers for fewer than 5 percent of primary school children in the country, and only a fraction of those have been distributed). (11) The U.S. government bought 8,080 XOs for donation to Iraq, but they never reached children's hands; half were auctioned off to a businessman in Basra for $10.88 each and half are unaccounted for. (12) In most other countries, there are either small pilot programs implemented by NGOs or OLPC programs in local areas or regions that have not yet spread elsewhere.

Each OLPC program around the world is implemented with a large degree of autonomy, so results vary. Nevertheless, from evaluation studies published by OLPC programs or outside agencies, investigations by journalists and our own case study research on OLPC programs in Uruguay, Paraguay, Mexico and the United States, a number of common trends have emerged. Below we will discuss four salient trends regarding OLPC to date: the affordability of a laptop program for the countries targeted, flawed expectations about the effects of implementation, problems with the design of the XO and the realities of student use.

AFFORDAB1LITY

There are many possible explanations for OLPC's failure to meet its distribution goals, but one likely factor is affordability. Though Negroponte's initial goal was to sell the XO laptop for $100 or...