Bringing laptops to the village: Experiment a hit in the hills of Peru (OLPC)

[Barrett808]

Source: Associated Press

Bringing laptops to the village: Experiment a hit in the hills of Peru
By FRANK BAJAK
AP Technology Writer

ARAHUAY, Peru — Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper, much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them — if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.

"It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a pr ecarious dirt road.

OLPC sites:

http://laptop.org

http://olpc.com



Read more: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2004090224_weblaptops24.html

[Occulus]

1. Very cool

I wonder if there's any possibility of making them internet capable, if they aren't already. Such access would really open the kids' eyes (I would think) to the rest of the world in ways they would never have had access to prior to this.

[Barrett808]

2. They are internet capable, but not many villages have access

The story says only 4,000 schools have internet access, and Negroponte is committed to increasing that number.

[kirby]

3. The way they work...

Is that each laptop is a 'repeater'. So each laptop can pass along internet data to other laptops in the vicinity. This creates an in expensive network that grows. Thus a larger area can be providing Internet to the smaller villages. Its a neat concept.

[MetaTrope]

5. Can't wait to see what use Negroponte's brother makes of that network...

[drm604]

4. K&R

:kick:

[TalkingDog]

6. Aren't chat boards odd?

I posted information on this yesterday and was practically accused of being both stupid and cruel for sending a laptop instead of food.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2516109

Given, I freely cop to the stupid.....


My Favorite Master Artist: Karen Parker GhostWoman Studios

[AndyTiedye]

8. If They Have Laptops With Net Access, They Can Make Their Plight Visible to the Outside World

Which I also pointed out in that thread.

[L. Coyote]

11. Or, the plight of the world is visible to them now. Is "their plight" our viewpoint?

Why is it a "plight" to live in the mountains of Peru in a village?
I've done that. It's an improvement on the larger world!

[OhioChick]

7. Training Them Young

to be the next outsourcing destination, since India is getting quite costly. The execs are thinking ahead....

[Shanti Mama]

9. Please check out the curricula creation

at http://www.ole.org OLE Library - a project to build open and free basic whole-course educational curricula appropriate for the elementary and secondary school teachers and students of that particular location

The socially responsible outsourcing company I own here in Nepal (they need jobs here, too) is leading the charge in developing curricula for this and the other laptops being developed for kids. http://nepal.ole.org/home /

That school in Peru looks pretty upscale compared to where we're testing.

[rayofreason]

10. Good thing..

..access to information is power.

[David__77]

12. Ugh...

I'd really rather be hearing the Peruvian government is finally implementing policies to end to semi-feudal conditions of that country's rural areas. Not that laptops are bad.

[WittyUsername]

13. Has anyone played with these things?

I managed to get a hold of a vmware image of the OS... I gotta say, I found it rather odd and hard to use. It was awhile ago, so maybe it has been improved since then...