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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective OLPC: one bad idea per child
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective OLPC: one bad idea per child | OLPC: one bad idea per child |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 22 February 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 Gettys's talk at the Linux conference in Melbourne in January is one of the few for which video is not available on the web. I wonder why. There are slides - with the standard heart-rending pictures of poor children from various countries who apparently will be the beneficiaries of this munificence. (His talk clashed with one delivered by Dirk Hohndel of Intel and I attended the latter). Related storiesExactly what kind of insight one develops into problems specific to an area by spending a week - or even a month or two - in a remote village anywhere in an underdeveloped country is open to speculation. But having seen first-hand the way development schemes are drafted for villages in India, one is extremely doubtful if any local input was sought before this wonderful plan was hatched. But then I don't know - this is one of the many questions which I had planned to ask the elusive Gettys. It is common for people to suspend disbelief when confronted with a project like this. Yet before anyone decides to take up the offer of buying two of these laptops - one for the buyer and one to be sent to a child in one of the countries which are participating in the project - one should take a good, hard look and decide whether the solution has been designed after taking into account the problem. Else, one would be adding to the problem, not helping in any way to solve it. Not every country which has been approached to join the project has looked favourably on Negroponte's advances. Way back in 2006, India categorically rejected the project. The Times of India quoted the ministry of human resources development as saying it was intrigued that no developed country had been chosen to be part of the project "given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group". The ministry added that the physical and psychological effects of intensive exposure to computers implicit in OLPC were a cause for worry. And it put the boot in by saying that there was a conceptual vacuum in which the scheme was being propagated. Technology can only do so much to eradicate deep-rooted cultural and social problems in developing and under-developed countries. You need political action to solve these problems, a laptop will do nothing to help. It may actually do more damage than good by creating wants which people then seek to satisfy by stealing. Not for nothing is this called a ground-breaking project. They'll have to break a lot of ground in a great many countries to bury all the waste that is left behind as the project's legacy.
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