By Jo Best, 27 July 2006 12:25
NEWS
India has declared it won't be buying any $100 laptops, saying it prefers to spend the money on teachers and more traditional teaching tools.
The Indian government rejected proposals by the country's Planning Commission to buy the $100 hardware from Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
According to local newspaper Kaumudi, India's education secretary Sudeep Banerjee said the project was "pedagogically suspect" and giving the country's schoolchildren a laptop each could harm their creative thinking and analytical abilities.
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He is quoted as telling the Planning Commission: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."
The OLPC project is "not mature enough to be taken seriously at this stage," Banerjee added.
The first working prototype of the laptop was shown in May and the OLPC has already received its first order from Nigeria. The African country placed an order of one million of the Linux laptops, although the devices won't go into production until orders for at least five million have been received.
Comments
There are 9 comments. Join the discussion
1. Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
India already has an indigenous manufacturer - in HCL - that is producing very low cost PC equipment, almost as cheap as the MIT laptop. The laptop is a great idea, but as mentioned, if you don't have classrooms, teachers, or books then laptops are not that useful...
2. anonymous
How amazingly sensible! About time someone realised that technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself..
Would Sudeep Banerjee like to take over as Education Secretary here?
3. Muyiwa Taiwo
The argument against the OLPC laptop fails to recognize that the children in developing countries will grow up in a globalized world, one in which they will have to compete for jobs with the children growing up in developed countries. If it is right to give the children in developed countries access to computers, why is it wrong to provide the same access to children in developing countries?
And those who argue that children in developing countries need classrooms more than they need computers fail to recognize that children in Africa and other developing countries have for centuries held classes under the shade of trees, and the fact that they now use laptops does not change that. In any case, classrooms are gradually becoming less relevant in the delivery of learning, even in the developed world, where all manner of on-line, distant learning takes place.
Finally, the critics of the OLPC project should realize that today's medium for creativity, today's pencil and sketchpad, is the computer. Arguing against the provision of cheap laptops to children in developing countries is like arguing against the provision of exercise books and pencils to children. Just as the use of paper and pencil does not get in the way of children's learning and creativity, the use of laptops is not likely to be a hindrance. Pushing that line of argument should be seen for what it is - an attempt to keep the digital divide as wide as ever, and indeed widen it.
Nicholas Negroponte and his team deserve all the support and encouragement they can possibly get.
4. Fred Wagner
This makes perfect sense ! India, the source of many brilliant technical minds, knows that education fundamentals are what are important.
Nigeria, the home of an infinite number of computer related scams, knows that computer knowledge is a great tool for lazy criminal minds who want to make money by bamboozling others.
I like India's approach myself!
5. Muyiwa Taiwo
It is clear that Fred Wagner knows nothing about Nigeria or India, nor about Nigerians or Indians. Otherwise, he would know that just as there are "brilliant technical minds" in India, there are millions of brilliant technical minds in Nigeria as well. He would also know that just as there are "lazy criminal minds" in Nigeria, there are lazy criminal minds in India as well.
6. anonymous
Muyiwa Taiwo has some valid points, but what concerns me about OLPC is the following: 'The machines, which will run a version of the Linux operating system, will also include other applications, some developed by MIT researchers, as well as country-specific software. "Software has gotten too fat and unreliable, so we started with Linux," he said.' This sounds suspiciously anti-Microsoft, and I would be concerned that in the race to replace a sound education that enables its recipients to tackle ANY problem with a pseudo-Western technology, recipients of the benefice (technology being the new religion) will actually be disadvantaged.
7. Dr Mark Hosey
Brilliant minds or crimal minds, makes no difference. The fact is computers, like abaci and books, are merely tools for learning with. They cannot teach, demonstrate, empathise, analogise, sense the need for alternative teaching methods and treat every students according to their special needs. Teachers are paramount.
As for computers replacing books..... possibly but publishers will never subscribe to it, not if they think their CD book is going to get ripped! Books are here for a long time yet.
The internet as a resource? Who's kidding who? Do a search on any damned school topic you want and I'll bet you get hundreds, if not thousands of hits on sites with no relevant information, plus a few references to completely unsuitable material offering various sexual services. The internet has turned into an advertising dustbin through whose rubbish you must now search for any useful nuggets of information. So as a research tool it's becoming less relevant to schools by the day.
Teachers and books come first, the fancy stuff can wait!
8. Dr M Hosey
Computers, like abaci and books, are merely tools for learning. They cannot teach, demonstrate, empathise, analogise, sense the need for alternative teaching methods and treat each student according to their special needs. Teachers are paramount.
Perhaps some believe computers can replace text books..... possibly but publishers will never subscribe to it, not if they think their CD book is going to get ripped! Books are here for a long time yet.
The internet as a resource? Who's kidding who? Do a search on any damned school topic you want and I'll bet you get hundreds, if not thousands of hits on sites with no relevant information, plus a few references to completely unsuitable material offering various sexual services. The internet has turned into an advertising dustbin through whose rubbish we must now search for any useful nuggets of information. So as a research tool it's becoming less relevant to schools by the day.
Teachers and books come first, the fancy stuff can wait!
9. Muyiwa Taiwo
The OLPC does not propose to use the Internet as the source of information for the children, but rather as a means of transporting the information to their laptops. Indeed, with the OLPC laptops being mesh-network enabled, it's not inconceivable that a participating country may decide to completely bypass the Internet and use it's own purpose-built network to access appropriate information which would be stored centrally.
And arguing that book publishers will not allow the OLPC to succeed fails to recognise the vast amount of domain-specific information that's now being published on-line. The IEEE and the ACM are prime examples. Even the legendary MIT makes much of its learning material available on-line through its opencourseware program.
Anybody arguing in favour of traditional teacher-led learning in today's world has lost connection with the increasing speed and volume of knowledge creation. Teachers are not what is needed, rather it is the people who will create and assemble content in an easily-accessible way for these children.
On the issue of classrooms, why must an African child travel 10km across the savannah to attend a traditional classroom-based school, if she can access the same knowledge from her village, perhaps while watching over the family cattle herd. Sometimes I get the feeling that many who argue "for" Africa don't have the foggiest notion under what conditions some Africans live.
On the matter of OLPC being anti-Microsoft, what would you rather have? A system that reveals to you how your data is stored so you can get at it if you have a falling-out with the manufacturer of the software with which it was created, or one in which you're locked in. Sensible governments all over the world are making policies to protect themselves from the bloat, closed-ness, confusion and insecurity of Microsoft's software. There's no reason why an Afro-centric project should be different.
Which leads me to the biggest threat against the success of the OLPC project – governments. The success of the OLPC project will depend to a great extent on how connected governments in the participating countries are to emerging realities in knowledge delivery, and how sincere they are about empowering the next generation of their citizens.