OLPC Australia trying to burnish its image

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 09 August 2009 07:32

Opinion and Analysis

Srikhantha talks at length about the aims of the project in Australia. He is sincere and earnest. But then it is possible, like the nurse who replaced a patient's oxygen cylinder with one containing carbon dioxide, to be sincerely wrong.

He tells me of how the laptops are used to engage children in activities where formerly they could not be bothered to participate. I respond by asking how long this will last.

"The focus is on kids being involved in education," is his quote. He seems unaware that one of the project's former main actors, Ivan Ksrtic, wrote in May last year: "I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn't want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward."

Srikhanta is quick to try and counter what he considers negative impressions of the project. He tells me that there is a mountain of positive coverage.

Maybe he should read Ksrtic a bit more. The latter is indeed a gold mine of information . He writes that in the 1980s, Negroponte and Seymour Papert carried out an experiment placing Apple II laptops in a suburban computing centre in Dakar, Senegal, for a constructionist-based computer leaning project. It was a glorious failure due to bad management and personality clashes.

"Fast forward almost two decades, to around 2000. Former Newsweek foreign correspondent turned philanthropist, Bernie 'one-man United Nations' Krisher convinced Nicholas and his wife Elaine to join Bernie's program of building schools in Cambodia. Nicholas bought used Panasonic Toughbooks for one school, and his son Dimitri taught there for a time," Ksrtic continues in a wonderful entry that needs much wider publicity than it has received.

He says that there must have been some thought on how to scale this. "The rest of the story is familiar: Nicholas wooed Mary Lou Jepsen while she was interviewing for a faculty position at the Lab, and told her about his crazy idea for an organization called One Laptop per Child. She came on board as CTO. Towards the end of 2005, the organization left stealth mode with a bang: Nicholas announced it with Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize winner and then-Secretary-General of the United Nations, at a global summit in Tunis.

"The part that bears repeating is that Nicholas' constructionism-based computer learning project in Senegal was a complete disaster: modulo commentary on the personalities and egos involved, it demonstrated nothing about anything. And Krisher's Cambodia project, the one evidently successful enough to motivate Nicholas to actually start OLPC, used off-the-shelf laptops running Windows without any constructivist customizations of the OS whatsoever. (They did have some constructionist tools installed as regular applications.)."

Not that this will have any impact on OLPC. In Australia, we will, no doubt, continue to see the organisation try to make inroads into its target areas as long as the money is available. What good this will do is open to question.