The One Laptop Per Child project is an exciting one; I’ve written about it before; that November 3rd post garnered a remarkable level of traffic. On Christmas eve, another story appeared. Here’s how it starts:
Laptop Project Enlivens Peruvian Hamlet Dec 24, By Frank Bajak [this is also an AP photo]
ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) – Doubts about
whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the
morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children
got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.
These offspring of peasant families
whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops – people who can ill afford pencil
and paper much less books – can’t get enough of their "XO" laptops.
At breakfast, they’re already powering
up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At
night, they’re dozing off in front of them – if they’ve managed to keep older
siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.
"It’s really the kind of
conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian
backwater up a precarious dirt road.
You can read the rest here. It’s popping up all over the place. The state of Maine has had wonderful results in its efforts to distribute laptops to junior high kids, too. You don’t have to go into the developing world to see the value of universal access, even in places where it may seem far-fetched unless you know the machine and its capacity. Here’s more.
More resources:
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) http://laptop.org/
OLPC Wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
Nicholas Negroponte at TED http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41
60 Minutes piece http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/69/one_laptop_per_child