The plan to develop a 100-dollar laptop for distribution to millions of schoolchildren in developing countries has caught the interest of many governments and the attention of computer-industry heavyweights but not that of India. It would come as a major disappointment to the people behind the ‘One Laptop per Child’ initiative. India being one of the major markets targeted by the group has rejected the idea completely. Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has detailed specifications for a 100-dollar windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.
India’s Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said in a statement that this product would not benefit the kids in India where they can do better with the funds being spent on more classrooms and teachers. Among the objections are concerns about the effect of extensive laptop use on children's health, "It may actually be detrimental to the growth of creative and analytical abilities of the child," the secretary added. There are other pressing matters to be dealt with in the educational realm rather than 'fancy tools’; the Education Secretary went on to say.
The project developers need confirmed orders for around five to ten million of the machines before manufacturing begins and this rejection from the Indian government would be a big setback for their short-term aims. Nigeria, on the other hand, has welcomed this move as they have ordered one million of the 100-dollar laptops. Negroponte and other backers say they have held discussions with at least two-dozen countries about purchasing the laptops and that Brazil and Thailand have expressed the most interest so far.
Negroponte said one of the goals of the project is to make the low-cost PC idea a grassroots movement that will spread in popularity, like the Linux operating system or the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. "This is open-source education. It's a big issue." Negroponte said the idea is that governments will pay roughly 100 dollar for the laptops and will distribute them for free to students.
The 100-dollar laptop will include a 7.5-inch screen, a 500-megahertz processor, 500 megabytes of Flash memory, and wireless broadband for forming impromptu networks with other laptops. It will also be a multimedia workstation, supporting the playing and composing of music.
Power for the new systems will be provided through either conventional electric current, batteries, or by a windup crank attached to the side of the notebooks, since many countries targeted by the plan do not have power in remote areas, Negroponte said. For connectivity, the systems will be Wi-Fi- and cell phone-enabled, and will include four USB ports, along with built-in 'mesh networking' -- a peer-to-peer concept that allows machines to share a single Internet connection. The laptop features a new generator that is quiet, one of the key design requirements. Typical generators work best at high revolutions per minute, requiring noisy gears to step up the speed. The developers have done away with gears by custom-designing a generator that runs efficiently at lower RPMs, a move that also makes possible a smaller device.
Five companies -- Google, Advanced Micro Devices, Red Hat, News Corp. and Brightstar Corp. have each provided USD 2 million to fund the project. Mr. Negroponte remains eager to place the laptop in the hands of 100 to 150 million students. He says he has learned in educational projects in Cambodia and other developing countries that computers spur children to learn and explore outside the boundaries of a classroom, and share their discoveries with their families. "I do not think of them only in classrooms, but part of an integrated and seamless experience for kids and their families," he says.
Still, the project would require governments in the developing world to come up with USD 15 billion to supply 150 million laptops, and it isn't yet clear how many countries can afford even a USD 100 machine. Technical hurdles also remain.
The foldable lime green laptop made its debut at the World Summit on the Information Society, which is looking at ways of narrowing the technology gap between rich and poor. "The idea is that it fulfils many roles. It is the whole theory that learning is seamless," said Professor Negroponte.
"Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education," said Professor Negroponte. "So when we make this available, it is an education project, not a laptop project. The digital divide is a learning divide -- digital is the means through which children learn leaning. This is, we believe, the way to do it."
Most insightful however is the observation that not one industrial country has so far implemented a similar program for its children, which casts doubt as to what the pedagogical use for notebooks in class really is.
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