LCA2009: Sugar Labs tries to pick up the pieces

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 January 2009 08:30

Opinion and Analysis

Like Negroponte, Bender still evades answering one basic question about the whole business of trying to use software developed by white Western developers to teach children in poorer parts of the world.

When Martin Krafft, a senior Debian developer, asked him, "have you asked the kids whether they want to learn this way?" Bender danced around the question. When I reminded him that he had not answered Krafft, he ducked once again. A third attempt to ask him was nipped in the bud by the conference organisers who announced that the time limit for his talk had been reached.

Outside the venue, Bender told iTWire that he had left OLPC because he did not agree with Negroponte that the only way to provide educational software to children was on laptops; he said it could be provided on any computing device.

Asked whether he was a purist and insisted that Sugar should only be loaded on free and open source operating systems for teaching children, he said he was not particular about it. In this respect, he and Negroponte are in the same room.

However, he insisted that computers were a way of educating children, despite numerous studies showing that there is no finality about this.

The OLPC appears to be have an emphasis on pushing its laptops to poorer countries, conveniently forgetting that charity begins at home. I asked Bender how many laptops were being used by children in the US - which a great American intellectual, Gore Vidal, has described as the least educated of all Western countries - and he replied that about 50,000 children were using them.

He mentioned the area of Birmingham, Alabama, and the slums of New York City as being locations where Sugar was being used.

But there is still an air of unreality about the whole project and this is bolstered by the way pictures of poor children in Africa and South American are used during presentations like Bender's - these are a favourite of aid organisations who try to raise funds for projects in the Third World.

This impression is driven home by the fact that nobody from any of the countries which has adopted the scheme has yet been drafted to decide the learning environment which is on offer. It looks, once again, like Western dog food being doled out elsewhere and not being used at home.