I largely disagree with the critics about the project. I was a kid in school when the government of my country (Brazil) actually made a deal with OLPC initiative and got some of these devices. I was very curious but poor, couldn't afford a computer and such thing actually helped a lot of kids like me then. I speak english thanks to computers and internet. Later we (brazilians, not the kids) started producing our own cheap computers in Brazil and the thing got interesting. It's 2023 and I recently discovered that some of the schools in here used these laptops in classes during the COVID pandemic. Even the OLPC XO-1. I ended up studying computer engineering and despite this whole project not achieving it's goals, I really think it pushed some bounderies when we see computer technology nowadays.
I remember seeing this as a teenager when it was being developed and thinking that in a matter of weeks after distribution each of these laptops would be jammed full of games, porn and malware to the point of being completely unusable. Going by the comments on other videos on the subject, looks like I was right about the games at least.
The OLPC is a single brick in a larger problem... Without the distribution channels, the curriculum, the content and/or the trained teachers, there's little a child can do with the laptop. The laptop would have worked great in places like India or Pakistan for example where the US government made and encouraged very large investments in infrastructure development and the government had a goal to become an IT powerhouse (the outcome might be debatable). It's introduction there would have given EVERYONE a chance to learn and use technology. However, in Africa, where the US, Europe, Russia or China have very little incentive to educate but rather need low wage workers to strip mine the continent's resources, no one really wants to solve the problems surrounding the deployment and use of the technology... No power... no telco... no teachers... This is why the "rich" people are involved here... no government wants to do it. The only path forward for OLPC is to switch to ChromeOS and partner with Alphabet. Together with its initiatives for renewal energy and Project Loon, both can plug some of the gaps to make OLPC a success.
Computers can never replace good teachers and books. I figured including laptops in class would, if nothing else, make kids a little bit more excited about school.
Few things to point out. First of all kids are the best when it comes to picking up a new piece of technology since their brain is still developing so giving a kid a computer is not a bad idea. I learned so much more exploring my Windows 98 system as a child than I ever did in class. 2nd the computer is build so that a child can read the python programming to understand how it is built. A child that knows how to code can bring his entire family out of poverty. May or may not need an instructor.
I'm from Uruguay, the first country in Latam that gave them. We have an excellent public healthcare sytem like SNIS and FONASA. Our education is public too. This program gives a laptop to every kid that studies. This encourages the kid to study and prepares them to this always evolving tec word
I learned more on youtube than on my high school , I can quickly search want I want and I got nice explanatory video , better than from teacher , I can do it anytime,,,,that is why I like the idea of OLPC
Jan Hrobar wow, really? I have a friend who is illiterate, can you point in the direction which videos you watched to learn this? Oh and mathmatics too... Thank you...
I highly recommend you set aside 60 mins , and watch the following videos..... Google Chromebooks have sold in the numbers that One Computer per Child intended, indeed they are now used in the usa for K-12 upwards,, however they Lack the flexibility of the SQUEAK language the OPC machine used.
Technology can and should be used in education. BUT that doesn't mean we should get poor governments to use hundreds of millions of their own dollars for unproven techniques. Years later the evidence is overwhelming that the results of OLPC are negligible. A waste of money... Let's use technology but let's not be naive about how we go about telling poor people and governments how to do it.
@@jamescrawford1478 you were right several years ago but today was starlink becoming a reality and laptops for 50 bucks or less it is a realityafter a child learns the three hours on their laptop or tablet they should be allowed to study anything they want probably from youtube with guidance from a teacher or other facilitator but teaching that crap word teaching making kids sit down shut up do this do that ok and inform that is over turn those schools in the community centers where technical and vocational and a little academics can be learned also
The problem whit the OLPC is that it is an OLPC. The companies do not have an interest in investing in a project that can decrease their revenues, that's why solar projects or other self-sufficient projects do not grow up. You can see it nowadays from those tesla cars costing so expensive even though they are called "green" alternatives.
Randomly stumbled on this video...OLPC came out when I was a senior in high school. I remember seeing the creepy OLPC John Lennon commercial and thinking it was a noble if poorly thought out (and even worse executed) idea. I'm actually surprised it still exists, it seemed like such a flash in the pan 2000s thing.
I think the marketing could have been better. Olpc sounds like a poor person's laptop, yet if it was given a name like a green alien laptop, that is cooler. It is setup in a way that makes kids want to use it like a more modern laptop but if they had stripped the os down a bit more, not too much but maybe make it boot a slimmer os not Linux like an 8bit computer instantly. Have the networking and browser there and have BASIC immediately available. Make it a simple computer for children to use computers.
There's precious little information online about current status of the OLPC project; and this screed against Prof. N.'s bogus opinions adds little to the general notion that it 'failed'. It would be really nice if someone with deep knowledge of recent history would update its Wikipedia page -- many years out of date. Laptop.org web site persists, even has some recent blog posts, but nothing really informative about last 5 years of (in)activity, objective studies of outcomes, current hard/software they are offering (if any), analysis of reasons for failure .... And what, if anything, has taken the place of OLPC's effort? Has the availability of low-end laptops (Chromebooks et.al.) had any better outcome ? Is OLPC's failure really conclusive evidence that this isn't a good investment for poor countries after all? Or were peripheral factors, poor project design and management, cultural naivete, downstream corruption, etc. the actual causes for failure?
You didn't answer the question you raise. Was the money wasted? The laptop is there to enable two things. Connectivity and access to all kinds of media. You could, as you so eloquently put it, pay a lot of teachers and kindergarten teachers with that money, but raising their wages without bettering their infrastructure and access to further education alone is useless, too. The problem you point out is that the initiative concentrated on one single aspect, and didn't "save the world" in its entirety in one fell swoop. That is a bit much to ask as well as a bit low a budget for that. There is a difference between asking "how can we make that better?" and "Any effort that doesn't work perfectly is to be lauded and don't you dare even try." The first leads to errors you can learn from, the second just keeps the status quo.
One more thing. Negroponte "sells" the program to the people financing it, not so much the people receiving any form of help by it. He has to use associations privileged first worlders understand.
Your last point is the core of the issue. The people receiving the benefit of the laptops are not the people paying for them. This is the principle agent problem that runs rampant in development because huge sums on money are spent on idealism before we actually see if the program is working. I have no problem with people like Negroponte trying new ideas. The world is better off for people like him. I genuinely think he wants to help. BUT when those people don't surround themselves with the people they are helping or people who understand the context in developing countries and go full charge raising hundreds of millions of dollars that the brightest minds in development think could be used better elsewhere. I think we can fairly criticize it. Encouraging new ideas and criticizing bad ideas are not the two binary options. We can do both.
I largely disagree with the critics about the project. I was a kid in school when the government of my country (Brazil) actually made a deal with OLPC initiative and got some of these devices. I was very curious but poor, couldn't afford a computer and such thing actually helped a lot of kids like me then. I speak english thanks to computers and internet. Later we (brazilians, not the kids) started producing our own cheap computers in Brazil and the thing got interesting. It's 2023 and I recently discovered that some of the schools in here used these laptops in classes during the COVID pandemic. Even the OLPC XO-1. I ended up studying computer engineering and despite this whole project not achieving it's goals, I really think it pushed some bounderies when we see computer technology nowadays.
I remember seeing this as a teenager when it was being developed and thinking that in a matter of weeks after distribution each of these laptops would be jammed full of games, porn and malware to the point of being completely unusable. Going by the comments on other videos on the subject, looks like I was right about the games at least.
i remember these ads
The OLPC is a single brick in a larger problem... Without the distribution channels, the curriculum, the content and/or the trained teachers, there's little a child can do with the laptop. The laptop would have worked great in places like India or Pakistan for example where the US government made and encouraged very large investments in infrastructure development and the government had a goal to become an IT powerhouse (the outcome might be debatable). It's introduction there would have given EVERYONE a chance to learn and use technology.
However, in Africa, where the US, Europe, Russia or China have very little incentive to educate but rather need low wage workers to strip mine the continent's resources, no one really wants to solve the problems surrounding the deployment and use of the technology... No power... no telco... no teachers... This is why the "rich" people are involved here... no government wants to do it.
The only path forward for OLPC is to switch to ChromeOS and partner with Alphabet. Together with its initiatives for renewal energy and Project Loon, both can plug some of the gaps to make OLPC a success.
Computers can never replace good teachers and books. I figured including laptops in class would, if nothing else, make kids a little bit more excited about school.
Few things to point out. First of all kids are the best when it comes to picking up a new piece of technology since their brain is still developing so giving a kid a computer is not a bad idea. I learned so much more exploring my Windows 98 system as a child than I ever did in class. 2nd the computer is build so that a child can read the python programming to understand how it is built. A child that knows how to code can bring his entire family out of poverty. May or may not need an instructor.
I'm from Uruguay, the first country in Latam that gave them. We have an excellent public healthcare sytem like SNIS and FONASA. Our education is public too. This program gives a laptop to every kid that studies. This encourages the kid to study and prepares them to this always evolving tec word
I learned more on youtube than on my high school , I can quickly search want I want and I got nice explanatory video , better than from teacher , I can do it anytime,,,,that is why I like the idea of OLPC
You are assuming what works in your life will work in the lives of others. That is where we go wrong all too often in the developing world.
Jan Hrobar wow, really? I have a friend who is illiterate, can you point in the direction which videos you watched to learn this? Oh and mathmatics too...
Thank you...
I highly recommend you set aside 60 mins , and watch the following videos.....
Google Chromebooks have sold in the numbers that One Computer per Child intended, indeed they are now used in the usa for K-12 upwards,, however they Lack the flexibility of the SQUEAK language the OPC machine used.
Technology can and should be used in education. BUT that doesn't mean we should get poor governments to use hundreds of millions of their own dollars for unproven techniques. Years later the evidence is overwhelming that the results of OLPC are negligible. A waste of money... Let's use technology but let's not be naive about how we go about telling poor people and governments how to do it.
@@jamescrawford1478 you were right several years ago but today was starlink becoming a reality and laptops for 50 bucks or less it is a realityafter a child learns the three hours on their laptop or tablet they should be allowed to study anything they want probably from youtube with guidance from a teacher or other facilitator but teaching that crap word teaching making kids sit down shut up do this do that ok and inform that is over turn those schools in the community centers where technical and vocational and a little academics can be learned also
The problem whit the OLPC is that it is an OLPC. The companies do not have an interest in investing in a project that can decrease their revenues, that's why solar projects or other self-sufficient projects do not grow up.
You can see it nowadays from those tesla cars costing so expensive even though they are called "green" alternatives.
Randomly stumbled on this video...OLPC came out when I was a senior in high school. I remember seeing the creepy OLPC John Lennon commercial and thinking it was a noble if poorly thought out (and even worse executed) idea. I'm actually surprised it still exists, it seemed like such a flash in the pan 2000s thing.
Millions wasted? Not sure, but definately some minutes wasted by watching (part of) this video
Brilliant Analysis !!! The program was flowed and siphoned off millions of dollars from countries which can not afford that !
I think the marketing could have been better. Olpc sounds like a poor person's laptop, yet if it was given a name like a green alien laptop, that is cooler. It is setup in a way that makes kids want to use it like a more modern laptop but if they had stripped the os down a bit more, not too much but maybe make it boot a slimmer os not Linux like an 8bit computer instantly. Have the networking and browser there and have BASIC immediately available. Make it a simple computer for children to use computers.
There's precious little information online about current status of the OLPC project; and this screed against Prof. N.'s bogus opinions adds little to the general notion that it 'failed'. It would be really nice if someone with deep knowledge of recent history would update its Wikipedia page -- many years out of date. Laptop.org web site persists, even has some recent blog posts, but nothing really informative about last 5 years of (in)activity, objective studies of outcomes, current hard/software they are offering (if any), analysis of reasons for failure ....
And what, if anything, has taken the place of OLPC's effort? Has the availability of low-end laptops (Chromebooks et.al.) had any better outcome ? Is OLPC's failure really conclusive evidence that this isn't a good investment for poor countries after all? Or were peripheral factors, poor project design and management, cultural naivete, downstream corruption, etc. the actual causes for failure?
The fool narrating this thing ought to be set down and given a good talking-to. This could have been a useful video.
You didn't answer the question you raise. Was the money wasted? The laptop is there to enable two things. Connectivity and access to all kinds of media. You could, as you so eloquently put it, pay a lot of teachers and kindergarten teachers with that money, but raising their wages without bettering their infrastructure and access to further education alone is useless, too.
The problem you point out is that the initiative concentrated on one single aspect, and didn't "save the world" in its entirety in one fell swoop. That is a bit much to ask as well as a bit low a budget for that. There is a difference between asking "how can we make that better?" and "Any effort that doesn't work perfectly is to be lauded and don't you dare even try." The first leads to errors you can learn from, the second just keeps the status quo.
One more thing. Negroponte "sells" the program to the people financing it, not so much the people receiving any form of help by it. He has to use associations privileged first worlders understand.
Your last point is the core of the issue. The people receiving the benefit of the laptops are not the people paying for them. This is the principle agent problem that runs rampant in development because huge sums on money are spent on idealism before we actually see if the program is working.
I have no problem with people like Negroponte trying new ideas. The world is better off for people like him. I genuinely think he wants to help. BUT when those people don't surround themselves with the people they are helping or people who understand the context in developing countries and go full charge raising hundreds of millions of dollars that the brightest minds in development think could be used better elsewhere. I think we can fairly criticize it. Encouraging new ideas and criticizing bad ideas are not the two binary options. We can do both.
Just ignorant ranting.
Allot of work went into this , jerk!